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08 April, 2010

Saltown(not the real name): The Great Adventure

Last Saturday, Amber and I woke up early for an adventure. I stumbled out of bed, rushing through my morning routine (picking up/petting the cat to get him to stop meowing at me, feeding him, starting hot water and coffee, brushing my teeth, and washing my face), and then I quickly started mixing together a big batch of semolina cookie dough. When the dough was finished, Amber baked the cookies while I dressed and packed an overnight bag consisting mostly of water. As the cookies cooled, I threw together a quick snack to hold us over until lunch. We grabbed our backpacks, now laden with cookies, our helmets, and our bikes; and finally headed out the door around 11am.
About an hour later, we were walking our bikes up the last, steep, two kilometer hill to the beautiful mountain village of Saltown. At the top of the hill, there is a collection of adobe houses, a stone-walled animal pen, and two stand-alone schoolrooms. The first is bigger and newer, made of concrete. The second is made of a strange composite; thin concrete-foam panels, braced by intermittent boards of wood. I can tell how the room was constructed because its missing most of it’s front wall and ceiling. There are old rotted school desks piles on one side of the classroom. Staring at me from the back wall, through a gaping whole in the front, is a 10ft painting of Mickey Mouse smiling. I can see straight through this classroom. Behind Mickey is a bright green oasis blooming from the depths of a deep canyon ripped into mountains. One nonsensically tall and narrow kasbah pokes out of the green mass felting the canyon base. Other tightly clustered adobe structures dot the edges of the foliage and cling to the steep canyon sides. The crumbled classroom stands teetering at the edge of the canyon overlooking it all. The children have to hike up the steep canyon walls to get to school each day, and many have a long journey before that. Teachers usually choose to live in the houses up here near the school.
We whizzed by this view on our bikes. Nearing the steep road down the canyon, I passed an old women with a bag of harvested grass on her back. She carried it from the canyon bottom to feed her sheep. I smiled and said hello as I pass but didn't slow down. By the time Amber got to her, she suspected who we were and asked her "Where are you going?". "We're here to visit the new teacher at the school", she said. "Oh. Well she lives over here with me" the old women responded. I back-tracked to them and she walked us to her house. Inside, we were warmly greeted by our friend/neighbor/language-tutor. She recently got a job as a French and Math teacher in this town. She rents a room from the old woman who lives alone near the school. She calls the woman Xalti, which means “aunt on my mothers side”.
We are shown into our friends room, where we present her with the gift of cookies. Then she makes us tea and starts an egg-tagine cooking. Over tea, bread, and eggs, we discuss the news of our duwar. We mention that we saw a grey donkey running through our neighborhood, his owner desperately chasing him, the bottom end of an empty bright orange oil jug strapped around his snout. In other news, I mention that we randomly walked 45minutes down the road into the middle of a vast rock field with two of her sisters. There they met with two of her cousins to chat about secret matters. News trickles in our town.
When the tea and tagine were consumed, we had a language lesson consisting mostly of reviewing our answers on a test we did the week before. We are getting pretty good at reading and writing TashlHite. Its a shame that Tash isn't a written language, and that I don't have time to formulate each sentence in a conversation the way I do when I write. Next weeks homework will be to watch a TashlHite movie and practice listening (by far, the hardest thing about this language).
After the lesson, Xalti’s daughter arrives. She invites us to her house halfway down the canyon wall for tea We pass gaggles of women perched on the path, enjoying the cool afternoon air. When we get to her house, to young boys are chasing each other around giggling. We go into the living-room, which hangs over the path, with windows that expose beautiful views up the canyon. Along with tea and bread, our host offers fresh almonds and walnuts gathered from the tree groves below. We point out the beautiful table cover. Our host knit this herself, but modestly dismisses her skills as the result of boredom. She is soft-spoken, humble, and giving. On our way out, after tea, her husband comes home from work. Also humble, with a small stature and kind eyes, he works at the nearby salt mines. We express interest in the mines, which immediately prompts an invitation to accompany him to work the next morning. We agree to meet him on the road at 7am the next day.
On the way back up the hill, we run into a gentleman sitting outside his house with a few of his sisters. He speaks to us in French despite numerous attempts to explain that we don’t speak French and requests to please speak Tash. Finally we manage a short conversation in Tash (still dotted with French words) and I realize he’s slurring his speech. As we walk away, he calls up to our tutor, “I have a gift for those foreigners. I am an artist. I will bring it to you later tonight”. Our tutor skeptically agrees and passes the message on to us. I ask her if he was drunk and she says “Yes, he is an alcoholic. Everybody here knows it and his family worries about him.” She is surprised I could tell.
When we arrive back at her house, she begins some fried bread and tea as a late snack. Just as the bread hits the table, a knock is heard at the door. Our friend from the road has come with our gift. He presents me with a heavy slate of rock on which he has painted a colorful scene. Its beautiful and quintessentially Moroccan. He joins us at the tea table and spends the next two hours discussing heartfelt, complicated, ethereal matters in multiple languages, with me straining to finding new levels of concentration to try to understand. Shortly before leaving, he admits to me that he has a problem. He has a nice house in Marrakech, but he is here in the country with his family to try to “change his brain”; to find peace. As he leaves, I wish him luck on his journey and express a hope to meet him again happily in Marrakech some day.
It’s late and we have to be up early tomorrow. A quick dinner of pasta with milk and sugar is serve. (Surprisingly, this is the one meal I have discovered in Morocco that I simply cannot stomach. I can’t explain it in words, but I literally gag at the thought of it). Luckily I had already filled up on bread and tea so after choking down a few bites I go to bed satisfied.
The next morning, we wake up and prepare ourselves with the predawn air still chilling our bones. As promised, our guide for the day meets us on the road and takes the lead. We wander to the base of the canyon, through a series of passageways under adobe dwellings, through the fields, over a log spanning the river, up the other side of the canyon, and into the mountains to the north. After an hour of strenuous hiking, our trail begins to glisten. Piles of dark grey and pinkish salt crystal line the road to a large truck standing idle. Behind the truck wooden shacks have been built into the mountain. These are cave entrances. We enter one shack, where a crane hangs over an bottomless hole. Our guide explained that this is where the salt is brought up from the mine. Workers enter another cave to the south, wind down into the depths of the mountain, collect their salt, and bring it to the crane to be lifted out. We hang around the opening of the cave for twenty minutes waiting for the rest of the workers to arrive. A confident man with course speech and mannerisms shows up and offers to take us down into caves. “Is it dangerous“, we ask. Our guide replied, “I don’t go down there. It scares me”. This is the first time I’ve heard a Moroccan male express fear; which only amplified my curiosity. Another man says, “Just be careful. We’ll let you borrow some flashlights. You’ll be fine”. The course man lights a gas lantern, hands me a cheap plastic flashlight, and leads the way. We walk fifteen feet into another wood cabin before the true decent begins. Suddenly, the ground seems to fall way. The trail thins to no more than a foot wide and continues to get steeper. It hugs the chiseled wall on the left and drops into shear darkness on the right. I can see only a few feet of the narrow trail in front of me. With each step, my sandals slip on ground worn smooth from use, lubricated by a quarter inch of damp cave soot collected over decades. The trail levels and I breathe a sign of relief, but we turn a corner and the ground drops off again. When we finally reach the true bottom, my heart is in my throat. I shine my flashlight out into the darkness and a huge arching cave wall sparkles back at me from the distance. The cave narrows to the left where two perfectly square diverging passageways have been chiseled into a flat salt wall. Every surface is like staring at a crystal ocean from an airplane; millions of waves creating an intricate omnifaceted plane. Our new guide explains how to remove salt evenly. We take a few moments to marvel at the subterreanian sights, and head back up the perilous trail.
At the top, we thank the men for showing us their work and we start walking back the way we came. When the canyon town is again in sight, we stop at the top of the hill and eat a snack. We have been hauling bread, tea, and a can of sardines for this event. A couple of young girls are harvesting weeds nearby and we invite them over to nosh. When the food is gone, they accompany us to the bottom of the canyon and split off to the left. We continue on, up the other side, back to the house. My legs are exhausted from a combination of climbing steep mountains and clenching my thighs in fear.
We help our tutor prep vegetables for a tagine. When the tagine is prepped and cooking, she brings us into the TV room to relax until lunch. Xalti wanders in and turns on the TV to entertain us. A while later, she ushers in two strangers. They are also teachers. One works here in Saltown. The other works in a neighborhood near ours. He biked here this morning to spend the day with his friend. Amber is sitting closest to the portable propane tank, so she is put in charge of making tea. We chat and drink tea with the men until finally lunch is served. It is a colorful and delicious beef and vegetable tagine, topped with crisp golden fries. When we are all full, Amber makes more tea, and we explain that we should probably head home before its too late. The teacher who biked here suggests that we all go back together and asks that we wait about an hour so they can go pray first. Meanwhile we wander over to the canyon edge for a last look at the beautiful sight. We run into Xalti’s daughter and thank her again for her generosity. We ask her also to thank her husband for the exciting salt mine experience.
When we get back to the house, Xalti has a bag of walnuts for us to take home. Our tutor fills our empty cookie tupperware with local dried figs. We pack it all up including the rock artwork from the night before. Then the teacher reappears ready to leave. We say our final goodbyes and strap on our backpacks, heavy with gifts, and I think to myself, “Its a good thing the road from this magical place is mostly downhill.”