OCTOBER 11, TUESDAY

PRIVACY AND SHARING

In Taroudant. The ride down from Essaouira was bleak with rocky sand broken up with olive trees.

We stopped once to look down on surfers gathered at a cove and then again to eat at a seaside town, Taghazout, a westerner’s surfing town, where we evaded the street sellers and walked down to the water and found Panorama, a restaurant with the waves crashing on the brown rocks below.

We drove from there through the large, very modern town of Agadir with miles of brightly colored apartment buildings and large commercial buildings but no sign of a crowded inner city like Essaouira. Our beach side lunch was the high point of the day until Taroudant, a smaller walled town, where we were first baffled because Susie’s iPhone has stopped working for some reason so we couldn’t look up the Airbnb we were going to spend the night at. We stopped at a tea place filled with men having tea outside one of the wall gates and got wifi and our bearings. We got the directions and were able to circle the fort and then to come close to the Airbnb. We parked and wandered using GPS and were directed by two boys to push a button on a large gate. Finally the woman of the family let us in and we were there.

Not long after the husband led us out to the main square with the same kids wheeling around on bicycles and scooters and people out walking in tghe evening,where we ate supper and watched people walking until about 8:30, when with the call to prayer most of the people vanished, maybe going home for dinner.

But the overwhelming experience in Taroudant is the streets. As we were circling the city school let out and students on bicycles, like a flock of birds, wheeled into the street and surrounded us, in front and behind and on all sides, riding inches apart as they laughed and chattered. We drove very slowly. But later on as were led by the owner of Airbnb to the main square we noticed that every kind of vehicle from motorcycles to elegant horse drawn carriages to hundreds of bicyclists and people walking filled the streets, with the bicyclists and motor cycles zigzagging in and out at full speed with the slower cars nosing a long, the horse carriages weaving through and the heavy carts pulled along by men like islands in a stream with the traffic flowing around them. Nobody ran into anyone but everything missed everything else by a foot or two.

And all of this was a narrow streets without sidewalks with the brightly lit small shops open to the street and street vendors of fruit and popcorn and ice cream pushing their carts through.

And all of a sudden I remembered my irritation with American strip malls lined with box box stores or chain restaurants along the main streets in or out of any American city. And now the contrast suddenly seemed not only to be enormous but also very significant. Here in Morocco, at least in the towns we’ve visited everything is out in open and accessible. Wherever you are you are surrounded by people chattering and smiling with each other. And because the towns are so compact everyone is walking or riding on bicycles and every thing a person wants is accessible on foot. It is the car that determines the way Americans live. There is tremendous freedom in having your own vehicle and being able to connect directly wherever you want to go. But this freedom, along with the privacy that comes from owning a private house separated by a large lawn from other houses, a house that is larger and the lawn bigger if you live in the rich part of time such as Biltmore Forest in Asheville, with the ideal living in a country setting with a great view and no neighbors around at all.

And of course if you live like this you have to have a car or two which means that you are always encapsulated and private, either at home or on the road.

And Taroudant and Essaouira are just the opposite. Everyone is squeezed together in small apartments with the streets being your escape and connection to the flow of the world. Every ten feet there are people to see and the contents of a store fully displayed or an outdoor restaurant or open barber shop. The pulse of life everywhere is palpable and you are swept along by it as it brushes past you.

And suddenly I realize that with our desire for privacy and independence both in the way way live and how we get around that we, as Americans, are missing something that is very electric and alive. It is this sensuous bustle, shoulder to shoulder, with colors and smells everywhere, that is so alive here, a sensual bathing in experience that the Moroccans have and we don’t. We are proud of the American way of independence and freedom and privacy but don’t realize that we are also missing out on a great deal by shutting ourselves off from each other and the sensuality of open streets.