Salat

I start walking up the valley, towards the high Atlas. One high peaks dominates the sky at the end of the valley.

I have rarely been so unprepared in my life, but this is mostly intentional.

I've chosen a tiny road I saw on google maps, extending back into the mountains from Amizmiz, dotted with Berber villages. My bag has some bread and water and two meager, short blankets.

I hike for miles, above green terraced farmland cut into the steep valley walls, every step a move towards a completely unknown destination. There certainly isn't a hostel down here. Piles of rock houses sit in a rhythm along the road, sheep and goats scattered across the hills, and a vibrant quietness I haven't heard since the silence of Connemara, Ireland. This valley is unbelievably beautiful -- bus tours would cart folks in from all over the world if they knew.

Old men kiss their hands before they shake mine. Children look in shock, run to gather friends, and peer out of windows and doorways with practiced calls of "Bonjour!" A teenage boy gets my american phone number after i buy a candy bar in the tiny store he works at. Conversations stop in the streets as I amble past, and I feel the eyes on me wherever I go. I don't speak any English nor see a white person for four days.

Where am I going? I guess it's the end of the road. I just want to see it. Where will I sleep? People motion me further along the path, someone speaks of a hotel. It turns out to be something more of a home-stay -- but my adopted family invite me to tea and meals, and rural life moves in it's slow rhythms.

This is one of the greatest adventures of my life.

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I am panting. Hard. The valley floor of yesterday looks thousands of feet below me. Kick-step. Breath. Kick-step. Breath. Is this seriously altitude? How the heck am I here at all?

I am trying so hard. Was not expecting this. Hardly even considered even trying to climb this thing until last night, really. This is harder than Mt Adams. Ballpark of Whitney. The eagerness of the chossy start gave way long ago to the calculated, pained, snowy endurance. Kick-step. Breath. Kick-step. Breath. This work magically lessens the divide between you and yourself.

I look up. The sun is too low. You idiot. It's late. I push harder through a section of ice and rock and gain the summit ridge, into easier snow, and now I am on the summit, the usual shock that it's somehow over after hours and hours of labor. There's no more "up", so I stare sideways in all directions over the high Atlas mountains.

Perhaps no one has been up here before. I feel remote, I feel first in the unknown. I can't imagine that's true, but I name it anyways. Salat Peak. It's Arabic for prayer. I see my effort as a kind of prayer, something quite personal as the whole valley Berber crowd regards my reported act with a general apathy.

I pray to have the wisdom to love myself, and the patience to love others.

 I am normally conceited to the point of requiring something I'd think a little more complex, something more elegant and high-minded to justify my attention -- but this is what comes out of me thousands of feet above the valley, staring into myself amidst all the straining effort.

On the way down I experience the most perfect silence as my body relaxes, and the light turns gold on the opposite ridge. I feel like I should be able to fly down to Fatima and the family in that tiny village at the bottom. Breath. My mind clears for once.

Salat.

Sunscreen?

So, Moroccans don't use sunscreen. Thus, it is absurdly expensive absolutely everywhere, even the far dirty corners of the makeshift marketplace of Ourir. Ourir is taghazout's poor cousin everyone travels to because it has a bank, and that's about it. But here I found myself on the sunscreen hunt.

"Do you have sunscreen?"

"Bumstreen?"

"Er, no, uh, une creme pour le solei?"

I am handed olive oil by a Moroccan who looks about my age. We give it a few more tries, and I walk away from their tent full of kitchen supplies and random odds and ends even more exasperated by the hunt. I try to surf about 4 or 5 hours a day, and it's doing a serious number on my face.

A huge, dusty gust of wind blows over the tent I just left. I run back to help set it back up, and I eventually found myself invited back, huddled in a grubby van with the crew that runs the shop. A huge pot of meat and veggies and potatoes sat before us, which we attacked with bread for utensil.  They think the English word for potato is hilarious, and i don't absorb a second of the Arabic they teach me.

In two hours eating lunch and helping out at the shop with my new gang, I learn more about Moroccan life than one would in three weeks in a taghazout surf school. They share, only sometimes in words I understand, the frustration of their poverty, their desire just to work anywhere, especially in America, and the happy kinship they shared every day running the sunscreen-less market stall. The call to prayer pulls a few of them to mats on the other side of the van, and I get Hassan's address and phone number to play some football if I'm around next week.

I don't think adventure is so much a physical experience as a physic experience. Sometimes shopping for sunscreen beats more classically adventurous-labeled activities like climbing and surfing. I think part of being an adventurous soul is just knowing when it's hit you, and learning to open up to it.

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Imssoune. Tiny town north of Taghazoute, south of Essouira.

Muhammad goes on lots of walks. After knowing him for 4 days, I realize he has absolutely nothing to do 90% of the time. He works in two restaurants in town, but hardly anyone is ever there in the low season as it is. We always shake hands and talk for a bit, then part until I see him on his next round in the tiny fishing village. Slowly walking. I don't want to say it's despairing, but there's a certain ennui to it that makes me feel sorry for him.

The Bay becomes my least favorite surf spot. Ever. You have to make the jump off the tide pools, then scratch around for mushed 6 to 8ft peaks that bob around without form or predictability in the ambiguous waters just outside the harbor.  The constant currant tears you back, waaaaay back to the beach. You cannot win. You get a few shots if you're lucky at a peak, before the current takes you all turns dark and evil rears it's ugly head and...

Ok so it's not that bad. But after 4 days, I was hit by the revelation that with a car I was royally screwed to find waves unless I went back to Taghazout. Everything else is too spread out. Thus, I am living in the woods in my board bag, layered up in clothes each night in a beautiful little canyon 20 minutes walk from down town.

The stars are oriented differently in Morocco. hadn't really noticed that before.

And Now in the South...

Hey! Hey, you! Bonjour! Mon ami! Heellloooo!"

Stop. Stop it. For pete's sake, dear god, stop.

I kept me eyes set in the coldest, most bored possible way and stared straight ahead.

I am not going to your spice shop. Or shoes or couscous or dyed cloth or music or art or pottery, nor your "uncle's" shop just around the corner.

Even though, I know I'm white and western and probably make monthly in Alaska the annual median income here.

These are the winding souks of Marrakech, an endless maze of stalls and shops where everything imaginable is for sale. I was passed several times by boys pulling carts loaded with snails. The militant Berbers who work them have pulling and swindling visitors down to a science, and I was at times literally pulled in shops before I could jerk my hand away. it's a romantically foreign scene, full of colors and smells and dust and noise, squeezed into narrow passageways in the heart of the city.

Wandering them was my life for three days, as I lived on the roof of a nearby hostel for €5 a night (50 Durham). It was a hectic international group of Germans, Brits, americans, swedes, Romanians, and Spaniards, all crammed together in what I now affectionately call the hostel situation. Personal space is sacrificed in the glorious name of sociality, and the result is usually remarkable people to spend time with. To list the hostelers I have befriended over stories lived and told is too big a task to try.

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""Paddle! Paaaaaaaadddddle!"

Eva got moving and popped to her feet. "Wooo!" Success.

That's all you need at this stage. I wasn't worried about getting anything more myself in the one ft beachbreak at Panorama Point. The crowds of westerners lounging on the beach and up in their RVs watched on, as a few of us rode the whitewash on epoxy longboards. The hot Moroccan sun beat down on our necks, as a late afternoon breeze cooled our faces and chopped the water.

Morocco is to Europe as Mexico is to the US. A warm, southern place to hide from winter's greyness. And apparently, my planned basecamp of Taghazout is at the center of attention. Germans and French and Brits come to stay for weeks at a time in classy apartment rentals, and suffers come from all over the world for Anchor Point. Slater surfed it some time last year, a heaving and dangerous right-hander that spills onto some nasty rocks if you bail in the first 10 feet. There are nice restaurants and wifi cafes, and an unbelievable number of camper vans passing through.

"Camel?" asked a kid towing a literal camel as I sloshes out of the water.

"No, no thanks." I replied, secretly desperate as I was for a picture with a surfboard on a camel. It'll have to wait.

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Now it's my turn to paddle. Hard. I make the drop, and my new favorite board slows in a section of mush. The wave reaches the inside, and all of a sudden jacks up vertically. Looking down the line, I can see the top feather, teetering, thinking about it... It mystically pitches over my head, and my eyes grow wide before filling with salt water.

Connemara and Fishing

"Just follow my line, you'll be fine!"

"Er, ok. Sounds good."

They call it a battle roll when you manage to roll your kayak in a real situation on the river, not a relatively safe practice roll. My first battle roll commenced about 30 seconds after I supposedly followed couch-surf-host-Macca's-housemate-Claire's line down the rapids. It consisted of me frantically slamming my paddle on the bottom until I flopped on the breathing side of the river, just in time to swallow the next rapid. I think there's a name for that one, the shallow river boyscout roll or something.

But sweet. That worked.

Claire and I sat in the eddy in absurd January Connemara sunshine. How the heck did I get here? I pinched myself, sitting in a free kayak in a free wetsuit getting a free whitewater primer for few other reasons than chance. Rounded, recently glaciated peaks drained down to a beautiful fjord in a very familiar way. Sheep ran amok over the hillsides.

"Alright! This next one is going to be similar but a little longer. "
 "Right... let's do it!"

Next one really was longer. No battle rolls, just some frantic paddling -- "just keep paddling!" -- and eventually spit out into calm waters once more. There's a nice rhythm to it, the cycles of action and pause reflecting my travel life perfectly.

For now, I sit in calm Galway waters before blasting down to rapids to Dublin to London then Oxford, for a short calm before rapids spit me all the way to Marrakesh.

Morocco.

Then perhaps no longer rapids, but waves.


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Hitch hiking is like fishing. You've really got to be standing in just the right spot, and your bait needs to suit your target.  Timing and appearance is everything. And patience is the fundamental virtue.

I have been sternly quizzed on decadent American politics, learned about how Antony the truck driver met his wife in a Limerick nightclub, and gripped my seat as we passed "slow" cars at 100 miles per hour while chatting about Brian's expected child. New-agey physical therapists spoke calmly about life in the woods outside Killarney, and compassionate mothers told stories of their husbands' young adventures thumbing around France. It took farmer Sean five sentences to comprehend Riley was my first name. All were appreciated, and quite a bit more memorable than the bus. Not to mention cheaper.

You can't manufacture moments of genuine human contact.  But you can put yourself in the right position. Kinda like fishing for experience. 

Carrauntoohil and the Aran Islands

Carrauntoohil.

What the heck is that?

     The taxi driver said that we could take the Heavenly Gates Route if we wanted. "You know why they call it the Heavenly Gates? One slip -- bam! Done for!" he roared as we hurtled along misty roads into blackening morning clouds over the McGillycuddy Reeks. Gah, this had the potential to be hell. Just keep moving, layer up, you don't get too cold, right?  But this was looking a little bit wet and/or cold for the brazilian behind me in blue jeans.

     The rain fell hard as we set up Jack the rad Brit's camp for the next night in a rocky plot of land jealously guarded by fluffy sheep, staring quizzically at all the stuff we plopped on the mushy ground. Then quizzically at the Brazilian in blue jeans. Then back at us.

    Three hours later we gained the summit ridge in ripping winds. The air cleared, and Jack the rad Brit and I looked out over a dusting of Irish peaks standing far above the ocean. My shoes were soaked from the scramble up the wet gully of a route. The sun poked through for a miraculous second, and we saw a gorgeous valley from the Ring of Kerry below. We turned up the mountain and in a half hour were standing on the icy rocks of the summit, with the impossible clarity of the county Kerry in view. Killarney sat at the edge of a distant lake, my treasured hostel tucked away safe in a downtown lane, pleasantly out of mind in the mindlessness of a summit. Beautiful. I pulled my several hoods up tighter against the frigid blasts of wind, we took the summit selfies, and took off before a pack of clouds engulfed the highest point in Ireland. Carrauntoohil.



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The Aran Islands.

I am amazed monks lived places like this. A little amazed people do now. Most folks here still speak Gaelic fluently, even.

We went to Inis Mor. It's seriously a barren, flat island constantly battered by the raging north pacific. Lucy-the-ridiculous-connection-back-to-Los-Angeles and I took a bumpy ferry over from Galway, and spent the luckiest sunny day meandering a few miles back from the end of the island over ancient stone forts (predating the Celts… thus 2000-2500 yrs ago) and absurd stone walls pixelating the countryside into innumerable enclosures.

I mean, how did they get out there, and get supplies to come in consistently? Our day, the ocean was angry. There were waves tossing water with the wind up sea cliffs at least 300 feet tall as we ran forward for pictures and ran back for fear of being tossed over by the wind. You don't just sail that stuff often. Good on 'em, and the five Romans buried near the churches. Romans, here on this rock on the end of Ireland. They even had to create soil by layering sand and seaweed until it became workable for small plants of potatoes, and grassy for cattle grazing.

One doesn't exactly have to be an intrepid monk to get out there these days, thankfully. Lucy and I took pictures and talked the day away, and didn't see a soul on the supposedly touristy island for hours. In the end, we hitched part of the way back to catch the only ferry out that day, thankful for the time amongst the rocks and sun and quiet island life. There's no life like island life, even here off western Ireland.


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I hope you're all doing well, friends and family. I think of you often, and am trying to do well myself. Adjusting to life on the road did not come as simply as I had thought, but the tires are turning smoother now -- especially if I caught them with my thumb between Cork and Limerick! The rhythm of this life of movement is developing, and I'm slowing down after years and years in school and work. Peace!

Riley

Ireland

I turned around in my seat, and grabbed the 5 Guinness placed on the bar, and passed them out around the group. We'd been playing in the key of A for three straight hours, and I am not sure which number beer this was. Hal the fiddle player gave me a nod, and everyone burst out into some incomprehensionable joke about an old man in a flatcap who had just walked in to escape the dreary weather.

Ireland.

Cork, Ireland.

Apparently, I've got some old Haggerty family here in Cork. None of them made it to the bluegrass session at the Quarter Room, half-seven on Sunday night. Instead, I was following Hal and the rest of the Old Valley String Band. By that point, my mandolin chop was starting to lose some precision, but that's the way the music is meant to go sometimes. "Ah, maybe one last tune lads," and off we went into the key of A for another half-hour. Another Guinness, or two?, the I-IV-I-V sinking into my bones, more flatcaped old men enter, and we all sputtered to a random stop on the V. It's time to end. And "pay" for the drinks? Riley, you'll learn, when we play we don't pay.

I found my way home in the dark and rain, back to John the couchsurf host, thinking about the traditional music sessions I'd sat in earlier that day in more corners of more pubs, and the brilliant weather out on the coast from the day before, as me and the Brazilians created our own sneaking hike through farmers' wet fields and over fences. Travel is an absurd density of experience, but I needed to chill down. Too much backpack train bus road time. Time to get out of go-mode, the only mode you can get away with in Oxford, the kind of mode that sacrifices a patient pace I've come to both respect and hunger.

So today, tapping this out on an old iPod touch, wandering little back neighborhoods in the sun, finding this great cathedral to sit in and tap. Tap tap tap.

And then the chapter ended.

I walked out of Pembroke College and didn't feel much. Just a warm, calm peace. I walked out into the street, crossed into Christ Church meadows, and took a nice long walk. The stillness didn't seem to admit I was finished with undergraduate life. You don't think that kind of thing comes quietly.

But nonetheless I've finished. Grades have all got to be sorted, and I've got a presentation blah blah but really, the true substance of my degree is finished with an essay on Gerard Hopkin's God's Grandeur for Andrew. It's a beautiful piece, something only Andrew in his absurd wisdom would assign in philosophy of religion, as we talk about God and reason and the creature-ly-ness of who we are. Eight weeks of term in Oxford have wrapped up an experience spanning more than four years, in Los Angeles and the Sierra and South Africa, filled with more remarkable people and more experiences than I could ever merit. The giftedness of it all holds me hostage -- I don't know how to respond but in a stupid, humble thanks, and I know there is no real method of repayment.

To finish college is not to finish an education. In fact, with college behind me, I can do a lot of the work on my education I've always wanted to but never found the time. This education is a constant process, a process of seeking understanding in life for its own sake, that pure motivation that so defines what I feel in my humanity.

Yet something in me cannot accept that this formal academic process is through. In all my interests, undergraduate life feels like it has opened doors of understanding that I can feel beckoning me in all directions. Who knows what the future will hold, I suppose. But what I have earned is a nice, long break, to live with my feet and not just my mind. Travels and adventures await! I live in Oxford for a while, and then take on into the great unknown that is the next few months. Ireland, France, Morocco, the possibility of climbing Denali with Killian in May.

Jesus Hall.

Wednesday market in Gloucester Green.

OUMC climbing weekend!

Back to Jesus College from the Bod.

Jesus College.

Light and color in Lincoln College.

Thames River.

Oh! Look at that!

About to head to the Union ball!

Christ Church and Christmas lights over Cornmarket street.

Christ Church College.

Cambridge.

Big dyno!

Steve on a V2 I think, in Dartmoor.