The Girl on the Train

The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train as it leaves a white station.

Imane, - Faith - sits on her haunches. Her bare feet dig soil, grip small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with her toes.

Her toes are her extended connection where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They wait below her. They prowl toward late winter light.

She is not on the red and brown train that zooms past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two year drought.

She is inside green the girl with her wild brown hair pulled tight. She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover.

She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in their orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a Red City in the desert.

Her history’s desert is full of potentates sharpening their swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam and navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, writing language.

She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur'an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca in the east.

She does not wear stereo earphones or listen to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where controlling time is their passion for being prompt and responsible citizens to give their lives meaning.

She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with her wild brown hair tied back with straw or leather or stems of wild flowers surrounding her with fragrances.

She is surrounded by orange blossom perfume beyond rolling hills, cut by wet canyons along yellow and green fields, where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in her blue sky.

In her open heart she hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift. Her toes caress soil and she is lighter than air, lighter than a feather of a wild bird in the High Atlas mountains far away.

She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for the festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below the stars.

It is cold outside. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes and someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people and she sways inside the gradual hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.

She is not on the train. She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She travels through fields where she danced as a child seeing red and yellow fire calling all the stars to her dance and she is not on the train.

Art of the Knives

September 1, 2001. Before sleeping dragons woke up in Truth Or Consequences to have a little fun at the poor human’s expense.

One thing he witnessed with clarity on the transatlantic flight was how a Spanish woman sitting across and up a row manipulated her knife to carve an apple. She used her thumb to measure thin red skin and gently worked the blade down the fruit near her thumb while maintaining slight pressure.

She was delicate and firm with the sharp tool. He’d observe many people using knives and he always remembered the Spanish woman’s fingers and blade.

On warm afternoons as winter sun sang past the Grand Penon dolomite mountains in the Sierras an old Spanish man labored up the hill on his cane with his brown and white terrier toward the gazebo. The gazebo overlooked Lacilbula.

“Ola,” exchanging pleasantries. The man pulled a folding blade and a pear wrapped in a white paper napkin from his brown sweater pocket.

He had the same precision as the woman on the plane. When he finished slicing a piece he kept it on the edge and ate off steel. Slice by slice. Done, he tossed the core to his barking mongrel, wiped off the blade, folded it, returned it to his pocket, took his cane, walked over to the potable water stone fountain, removed his upper teeth, washed them and put them back in his mouth.

The village butcher named Garcia had the art. Grazalema families butchering a pig on a plywood slab in their garage had it. A cafe barman displayed it with his long thin blade slicing thin strips of ham off a pig’s bone wedged between wood supports.

Friends had it butchering rams in Casablanca for Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice. The feast, a major Muslim holiday, commemorated the Qur’an’s account of God allowing the patriarch Ibraham to sacrifice a ram instead of his son Ishmael. It was sacrifice with a capital S. Ibraham dreamed he wanted to kill his son and God said, “No. I will send you a ram,” and this was their tradition.

Three rams were slaughtered, one for each married man in the family. The rams spent their last night in the wood factory attached to the warren of rooms constituting the family home in an industrial section of town.

They started at nine a.m., after a breakfast of crepes and tea. Ahmed, Tofer, Saad and their father secured wooden beams and ropes above the red and gray tiled floor.

They held the ram down and sliced it’s throat. Breath and blood flowed across checkerboard tile. It fought for it’s life, kicking and screaming. The head was severed and thrown to the side. They cut a hole in a back leg near a tendon and bone, ran a rope through it and hoisted the carcass into the air.

The wool coat was sliced off and thrown on a ladder where it dried in the sun. It’d be collected by a man pushing his rolling cart through the neighborhood and made into a prayer rug. The body was inflated with an air compressor to make skinning easier. Blood flowed over tiles.

Rex, the German shepherd drank his fill.

Sharp knives. They re-sharpened blades in the shop and worked fat off the skin of the poorest animal. Internal organs tumbled into plastic tubs. A wife carried them upstairs to the team of women preparing meals. Men washed the interior cavity with hot water.

Liver skewered with fat was grilled over red hot coals and served with tea, hot bread and olives at noon. Everyone gathered at a long shaded table under pink and red boginvillas flowers and clear blue sky.

At 3 p.m. they ate the stomach with lemon, olives and fresh hot bread. Fruit and water. Larger sections of the ram were dismembered with a band saw, placed in plastic bags and frozen. A third would be given to the poor.

Across the street itinerant men cooked rams heads on a makeshift grill and hacked off the horns.

Rare people say they experienced two sensations simultaneously: they saw colors when they heard sounds, or they heard sounds when they ate something. The condition is called synaesthesia.

The sound you hear is the smell of a ram’s head crying. The music of embers, wool and glazed eye calm. The edge you touch is the blade releasing blood, the feeling you see is the poorest skin, white intestines, black liver on red coals. A single piece of charcoal welcomes the skull, horns curve from blue sky into dark eyed knife slashing flesh.

All families made the sacrifice. Sacrifice, community, family energies within the spirit world and human hospitality. The feast lasted three days.

The art of the knives.

Leaving Casablanca

Slanting light wrapped its arms around someone gathering raw unfiltered and uncensored material on their journey.

Light cut the sky, severing the white village, stone paths, Moorish brown doors, idle men, shifty eyed one armed merchants, unemployed dissatisfied immigrants surviving with poverty and despair.

As a Wandering Ghost he traversed light, space, and time near vaulted arches. He kissed everyone on both sides of their extended faces while shaking hands with everyone confirming his flight. Your exile dream vision.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with this hesitancy, this delay, this boarding card question.

Their visa stamp bled through their indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses and delicate woven craft work designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa. They craved freshly cut sweet smelling green boiling tea to mix their life’s colors with dust.

They taxied down the runway as rainbows illuminated western clouds. The moon danced in cobalt blue sky. Above clouds thunderheads formed a white billowing future, all air and water,
an infinite dream machine.

Zooming over Canadian ice fields toward Seattle and heightened U.S. military airport security and stateside psychosis he wrote to Imane in Marrakech, the Red City.

“Dear Imane, - Faith in Arabic - my dearest friend in another earth orbit time zone, a Heart Space. Imagine meeting you on a train just by chance. We trust our instincts to experience the truth.

“I am flying over ice fields, Canadian white with blue water cracks, down below stretching to the northern horizon. We are above the clouds whispering winter’s knowing. Spring will find white ice melting.

“We are above frozen rivers looking for strength inside it all to flow.

“Orange and jasmine fragrances in a Marrakech courtyard welcome your eyes surrounding you with sensual delight. I am trapped inside a metal container above frozen white water. I need to jump into the cold water and scrub off old airport noise, dust, sound, people pushing their lives toward inarguable conclusions.

“Yes, I will jump down onto white ice floating to meet you on the other side of a reality where sand lies shimmering beneath the blue sky and a warrior’s life is strong.

“Spring is coming, you see small tight winter trees waiting to explode in Holland, such a pity, such a tragedy waiting to happen, this season shift as if someone put 2 and 2 together in some grand equation.

“Billy in the Spanish Sierras is 3 weeks older than before he was born which doesn’t have anything to do with this memory yet contains everything because he is a lovely boy and calm. He saved their relationship you know; Mo, the desperate English woman who cheated on her English husband after producing two lovely daughters in Graz, an old Roman village in Andalusia. She took up with Pedro, and yes, Billy’s conception and birth saved them forever.

“I will always remember watching Pedro, an old hippie turned anarchist turned leather worker, one morning when we shared breakfast. We were in his old white stone home along the back ridge of narrow tight Roman cobblestone streets below Penon Grande mountains.

“We enjoyed toast, cheese, olive oil, garlic and tomatoes. Pedro gently sliced red skin and spread each tomato seed on his brown bread.”

A defining moment. Each seed itself a small world of life and future. So small yet so significant. We never wasted anything. We weren’t poor mind you just paying attention to the details.

“Back to us. Our Marrakech train conversations were the magic of being still, hurtling past abandoned mud homes, villages where women ride donkeys miles to wells looking for blue water, children without education tend flocks, men hammer their sharp knives through mint tea while laughing with the sky.

“As we sat in Jemma space watching black hooded cobras dance you were beautiful with a fine laughter and our time together was sweeter than the smell of jasmine in the afternoon and now I see ice cracking into blue water falling from the blue sky and winter sleeps below us.

“Just as the Sahara sand blows south for the winter, ice retreats north to it’s spring and it’s austere, nothing at all, a blank white, perhaps like a huge, gigantic white blank page in an old black sketch book with a broken spine spilling watercolors, stories, poems, releasing old visions of butterflies in micro fauna extremes.

“I survived these adventures and I ramble onward and tell you now when I am in the air it’s good to be moving like standing still in the frozen river of dreams. We are a cloud of blue water dancing with white ice seeing this amazing world of ours. Specific images from these moments.

“To be precise when I grow a little weary of all the moving, all the standing silent inside the language of silence white clear and slow the smell of jasmine in the garden penetrates my heart.

“I would like to rest my head and heart there just now, just for the smell of knowing red dust, water bells, chimes, singing birds, oranges, lemons, your laughing eyes again and this is enough.”

Sidi Ifni, Morocco II

In an endless hazy future full of rocky hills, black shrouded women balancing large ceramic brown jugs rode side saddle on donkeys plodding miles to a shallow well inside circular stones.

The two lane road ran 40 kilometers south to Sidi Ifni, an old Spanish enclave on cliffs over the Atlantic.

Sidi Ifni, with 15,000 people, existed on rolling hills above the sea. In a lush valley beneath old Moorish castles stood two cinder block construction enterprises, wadi oasis palms, gardens and tributaries running to the sea.

He watched thin men sift sand and gravel through wire screens and run belching machines pressing out bricks. Another man driving a tractor hauled them to waiting trucks.

Belonging to Spain until 1969, the faded town’s facades suffered from emptiness, wind and water. Sharp white cubist building block homes lay scattered on hills breaking light and lines. It was an old art deco town full of dead decayed deserted buildings from an elegant forgotten history. Rumor had it that European expats were buying holiday apartments for $2-10 grand.

He found a room in a cheap hotel overlooking the Atlantic and rested for three days.

Mosque masters in Sidi Ifni called five times a day. Trick or treat. Sleep deprivation became the norm. Late to bed and early to rise makes a man crazy.

He walked on the beach with an unemployed internet worker from North Carolina. Bill had never been out of the states before. He was shocked and fascinated by Morocco.

“The poverty levels are really amazing,” he said.

“You get used to economic realities, touts and price gouging. It’s a poor cheap country. The people are kind and very hospitable.”

“Fez was amazing, then I got sick for three days in Meknez. Had to rest.”

“It’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth. Why did you pick Morocco?”

“My partner, Sam, a world traveler, had it in mind and then we were laid off. He asked me if I wanted to come along. I had three weeks to get it together; shots, pack and stuff. It was pretty crazy but I made it.”

Sam was a savvy cynical travel expert. He told people he was Australian, just in case. A well rehearsed diversion after 9/11.

“The Greek islands are cheap, specifically Santorini,” Sam said one night over a bad meal of fish and rice in the hotel restaurant. “Thailand and Laos are good bargains as well.”

The deserted beach at Sidi Ifni stretched for miles. Renegade surfers relishing excellent conditions camped to the north.

They walked along wild waves talking about writing down their experience and the vagaries of publishing.

“North Carolina is somewhere over there,” Bill said, pointing west. “Imagine that. I’ve never been away from home before.”

“You either get used to it or get back where you feel comfortable.”

They shared stories about writing habits, goals and efforts to get material published.

“You need a hook, a marketing platform, be willing to fail, rejections are part of the process, murder your darlings, overcome the fear of making it perfect and be passionate about your work. We’ve learned this through trial and error.”

“Publishing is a business. Consider these numbers. The bottom line for an agent is, can they make 15% on your book? A hard back book retails for $25. The author makes $3 per copy. It all goes to publishing marketing budgets. The shelf life of a book is maybe 6 months, tops.”

“I see. Yes,” said Bill, “the pitfalls, the joy of creating, writing for yourself and not worrying about the market. Keeping it real.”

“Yes. What’s real? Give your characters desire and conflict in the first five pages. Take them on some kind of journey with wants, obstacles, resolutions and character arc. It’s about contrasts and using all your senses. Have fun with it. Nobody in 200 years will want to read it.”

“Well, knowing that takes the pressure off."

“No fear. Finally, make your query letters human, don’t kill your query in the synopsis, reduce the synopsis to a single sentence for your pitch and establish your marketing platform.”

“Thanks. I’ll give it a shot when I get back.”

“My pleasure. Just publishing stuff I’ve learned. Enjoying your trip?”

“Yes, it’s been very interesting. I rode a camel out into the dunes south of Zamora. It was really the only thing I wanted to do on the trip.”

“He paid way too much,” Sam said. “They ripped him off. He went out at 4 p.m. They rode for an hour, camped overnight, had breakfast and returned to the hotel. It’s strictly for tourists. He could have found something cheaper.”

“It was really cold out there,” Bill said. “I couldn’t sleep and stayed awake almost all night. The stars were amazing! They were so close I just stayed awake staring at them until dawn.”

It was a place of clarity, insight and understanding for him.

Bill and Sam were nervous about returning to the states coping with terrorist siege mentalities. Their days in an old Moorish civilization were numbered as they faced the unknown. They had to get their stuff out of storage when they returned and find new jobs.

In their country of birth people loved storage facilities and, over history, had accumulated tons of stuff and needed a place for it because it was precious to them.

They were attached to it. They birthed it, married it, raised it and buried it in caves of their desire.

They had to put it someplace else because their palatial homes, caves, hovels and shopping carts were filled to the brim. They consigned it to cement storage facility rooms hidden behind a maze of security gates, security fences, and secure padlocked doors in run down industrial zones trapped in the bowels of cities showing their age where it collected dust.

Later, when he rested in The Red City he remembered the fine print about packing light. He surveyed his stuff.

He was ready, willing, able and well prepared for invasions and grounded special forces with the latest killing technology.

Exploring general theories of relativity he’d assembled his Zone II medical kit, dehydration packets, emergency space blanket, 20 year old Swiss climbing boots, Swiss army knife, short-wave radio, R-11 telephone jack, energy adapters, battery charger and a zip drive for backups.

He carried phrase books, geographical maps, a water purifier, modems, lip balm, chopsticks, dental and mental floss, sarong, harmonica, immunization record, watercolors, a resume containing 50 summers, ink cartridges, journals, a warm heart and cool mind.

“Pack everything and then cut it in half” was the admonition.

His reality was carry on. Reality was overrated.

Tangiers to Cadiz

After eight weeks in Morocco immediately after 9/11 he leaped onto a ferry across the Mediterranean from Tangiers to Algeciras.

He met a strawberry blond American widow from a lonely hearts club tour group.

“I have many questions for you,” Jean said as seagulls played in blue wind.

“Yes. That’s the answer to the first one. The one where you ask me if I am happy?”

“How did you know?”

“It’s obvious isn’t it. It’s the first question an American away from home for the first time in her life, and returning from a day trip to Tangiers to her four star Costa del Sol hotel after being assulted by poor unemployed people begging her to buy something - anything - would ask a traveler. You’re either sitting in deep meditation or you’re moving.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“What’s question number two?”

“Where are you going?”

“Cadiz. The oldest city in Europe. Going to sit down and write. We’ve been hunting and gathering material. Doing my work.”

“Wow, that’s exciting. I’m lucky to get a letter written. Takes me forever and then I just lose my train of thought.”

“Instead of the train maybe you should consider walking. Take bus #11. It’s a magic bus.”

“Really? What’s bus #11 mean?”

“It means use your legs, it means walk, slow down, engage your senses. It’s how poor people get around in Morocco. How poor people anywhere get somewhere.”

“How romantic.”

“Depends on your perspective and interpretation. Poverty is not romantic. It’s a daily struggle. Yes, by slowing down you observe everything in minute detail, befriend strangers, be anonymous. Like a wandering ghost or a memory. It’s the perfect way to explore your nature, test your spirit, contemplate your imaginary reflection in windows and live with pure intention.”

“Just by walking? What happens if I get attacked?”

“You worry too much. Worry is interest on a bill that will never come due. Your ego loves the circus of sensory entertainment. People suffer chronic health problems because they think to much about past failures and future fears. Try just sitting. Maybe you need to slow down, unless you love the fast lane? Most people don’t intend to harm you. Learn how to yell ‘FIRE’ in multiple languages if you need help.”

“Funny. Fire eh, never thought of that before.”

“Sure, people scatter and you escape.”

Passing Gibraltar they entered a harbor as Jean poured her endless book of questions into his ears about life as a nomad, how it worked, how one survives on the road.

They said goodbye and he didn’t have the heart to tell her about the pain, suffering and joy she’d experience on her journey. He knew she’d find out for herself because they were all in transit.

One door opens and one door closes but the hallways can be a bitch.