Sipping her hot mint tea Sophie smiled and remarked, “How
did all this become normal?” Normal became walking in dusty streets with
women in burkas while goats sifted through trash, cooking meals in tagines,
jogging on the beach beside camels, and surfing right point breaks.
As travelers, we threw ourselves into a world thousands of
miles from where we started, and a few days later found ourselves at home;
accustomed to new sights, tastes, and sounds.
After a 30 hour cross-continental journey, I met Sophie in a
small surfing village called Taghazout in Morocco. I stared out the window on the runway waiting
to take off on the final flight of the trip.
The crescent-shaped moon hung so low in the sky and glowed such an
intense yellow it looked fake, like it was from a movie set. I arrived in
Agadir around midnight, and as the young taxi driver sped down the middle of
the road he told me the names of surf spots, and pointed to a mass of blackness
that was the sea.
The sunrise brought an adrenaline rush stronger than ten
espressos, as the mysterious world around me came into focus. The windows in my room gave views of three
surf breaks, Anchor Point, Hash Point, and Panaramas. Plans of surfing each one dominated my
thoughts already.
Boiler’s was the first spot I surfed and was a twenty minute
ride up the coast. We drove through
gravelly, desolate, desert hillside. Herds of lambs and goats ambled
around the dusty land speckled with argan trees and bushes. Goats climbed high up in tree branches to
chew on argan fruit.
I was warned about the sketchy entry and exit to the break,
and it proved to be far from the soft sand and flat beach I was accustomed to
in Florida. I followed my new friends
into the afternoon high tide. I tucked my board under my right arm and
scaled down the jagged hillside using my left hand to grip the sturdiest
looking rocks. I stepped carefully on slippery black rocks and in between
black boulders bigger than me. I saw hundreds of urchins stuck to the
rocks just beneath the water. I realized
why the spot was called Boiler’s, as there was a big exposed boil from a sunken
ship the wave broke next to. I made it to the biggest boulder that
blocked the view of the waves, studied the other surfers, and then mimicked
their actions.
Just after a big splash exploded on the boulder from a
crashing wave, I tossed my board in the water and jumped on top of it. I
felt my fins hit a rock as I landed on my board, but paddled to the outside
first and then inspected it. My board was unscathed, and before long I
paddled into an overhead wave that walled up and peeled. An intense adrenaline
rush followed and pulled me back into the line-up, alert and ready for
more. When the emerald sets rolled in
they allowed me to fly free; to dance up and down the face of the wave.
This is why I left flat, beach break Florida. A
welcome session complete with offshore winds and six foot waves breaking in
picture-book perfection was any surfer’s dream come true, and I was lucky
enough to live it. After a few hours and many waves, the chill of cold
water crippled my paddling skills. I followed a local with dreads out of
the water. I felt victorious to exit
without getting slammed into any of the dark, serrated rocks as big as
people.
My first Moroccan surf was followed by my first tagine
dinner. The tagine consists of two
pieces, a terra cotta cone with a separate base. Being drawn to local
customs, Sophie already owned two and knew how to cook in them. When we went to the local market, the souk, I
got lost in the rich colors and aromas that created a maze of mandarins,
cilantro, olives, mint leaves, towers of carrots, tomatoes, onions, and much
more. I trailed behind Sophie as she negotiated using French words and
numbers. She knew the merchant with the best eggs, who tied them up
nicely making them easy to carry, and the one who gave cherry tomatoes when we
bought lettuce and green beans.
Sophie strategically stacked the food in the tagine; meats
and potatoes on the bottom, as they took more heat to cook, while food that
required less time and heat, like tomatoes, sat on the top. We made
marinades to steam the food in; a curry juice and a coconut Thai. My
favorite was a sweet tagine with a honey marinade filled with dates, prunes,
and figs. I loved the communal way we
ate from the same tagine using fresh bread to scoop up the cuisine. We
dined on our back porch serenaded by the lapping waves of the sea below us and
a ceiling of shimmering stars above.
The next night on a similar rooftop porch I met a Canadian
yoga instructor at a farewell party. She
fell in love with Morocco and a Moroccan, and shared a popular saying that she
had tattooed on her leg.
“Inshallah means accepting that God sometimes works in
mysterious ways; sort of an acknowledgment that He is in control of our
plans. It is like saying, ‘God willing’
when you make plans to do something.”
I agreed with the idea and liked the word. Inshallah is a prevalent idea in the Bible. Isaiah 41 is one example, “Who makes things
happen? Who controls human events? I do!
I am the Lord. I was there at the
beginning, and I will be there at the end.”
Proverbs 16:1 is another example, “Mortals make elaborate plans, but God
has the last word.”
While traveling and surfing almost everything was out of my
control. Planning a day or weeks
movements brought comfort as it gave the illusion I was in control. Inshallah reminded me of who was really in
control, and I knew the one in control had my best interest at heart. The simple phrase brought peace.
Earlier Sophie and I were plotting a road trip to surf in
some lesser known spots and to see more of the country. We even planned to sleep in a cave one
night. I already saw us snuggled around
a fire and being woken up by the first light of dawn, slipping on our wetsuits
and being the first in the water.
Inshallah.