#9 Drugs, Dreams, and Disillusions …

“Il y a un porte-bagages dessus it has a roof rack on top,” the old man across from me in the grass replies with a smile when I ask him how to recognize a Moroccan plane.

August 30, 2024. It wasn't until five o'clock this afternoon that Heidi and I finally managed to leave Antequera, heading a thousand kilometers north toward the storage unit we're renting in the Catalan village of Roses, near which we still lived only three months ago. After leaving Catalonia, we traveled to the Netherlands, where—unsure where we wanted to settle after our Catalan setback—we lived on a campsite for two months. I suggested settling in Italy—had in my head already renovated and decorated a trullo in Puglia—when Heidi, on the internet, found a cave house for rent in Antequera, a small town just north of Málaga, in Andalusia, where we've been living for about a month now. Three weeks ago, we already made a round trip to Roses. The lease on the storage unit expires the day after tomorrow, so tomorrow, we'll lug the last few belongings still waiting for us in Roses into the back of our Berlingo and bid Catalonia our final goodbye.

Darkness fell as we passed Murcia. It’s one o'clock now, and we’ve just driven into this overcrowded area de descanso, a rest area, about one hundred and fifty kilometers past Valencia. We were lucky. A car pulled out of a parking space in front of a small patch of grass. We slipped into it, and while Heidi went looking for a restroom at the Cespa gas station a little further up, I rolled out our sleeping bags in the dry grass in front of our car. I stretched and let the balmy night grab me, along with the agreeable tradition we have accidentally become part of.

The Moroccan summer migration! Every year, tens of thousands of Moroccans drive from all over Europe to southern Spain, cars laden with goods scarce in Morocco, to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and visit their families. A few weeks later, around this time, the journey is reversed, cars laden with goods scarce in Europe. The closer one gets to the Spanish cities of Almeria, Algeciras, and Tarifa, the busier the areas de descanso, gas stations, and combinations of both. Heidi and I, when traveling, usually spend the night in a quiet spot at the edge of a forest a few kilometers from the highway or in an olive grove. Not tonight!

Hundreds of Moroccans sleep between cars and in the grass. Gas stoves hum, and those who aren't sleeping, cooking, or drinking tea chat with others still awake. Two women and three children sleep around the older man in a white robe across from me in the grass. After I had rolled out our sleeping bags, stretched, and let the balmy night grab me, we made eye contact, and just as I hoped, he beckoned me over. I sat down across from him. He took two small glasses from a stack beside a gas stove in front of him, poured tea from the copper kettle on the stove into each, handed me one, and placed a jar of sugar in front of me.

"Merci," I said, swallowing the word shokran to avoid giving the impression I speak Arabic. "Pas de sucre no sugar."

"Moi non plus me neither," the man replied. " Diabète diabetes ..."

And there I sat, staring into the kind face of a Moroccan man, feeling a familiar but unpleasant sensation in my neck, realizing it had been a while since an Arab beheaded me. Man, it all happened so fast! I was running across golden desert sand. Arabs in white robes galloped after me on fast, agile horses. Right behind me, one of them leaned in and swung his scimitar…

It took years until I was no longer overcome, all too regularly, by the sensation of a sharp sword that eh… whatever. I was five years old when I dreamed that dream, and it still haunts me occasionally because it's incomprehensible how I could have dreamed it back then. There was no television in the house, and in a movie theater I’d never been. Books with pictures of Arabs on horseback? I can't remember them. Sure, I'd seen horses. Big horses, draft horses. Not the horses of those Arabs pursuing me in the desert—which I'd never seen either. And I often still wonder if I’d seen horses galloping at the age of five or had seen a scimitar for that matter. And where did that lifelike sensation in my neck come from or the affinity for the Arab world I cherished all my life? That dream will always remain a mystery, and … "Vous allez où where are you going?" my white-robed friend interrupted my thoughts.

“Au nord de l'Espagne to the north of Spain,” I replied, and after explaining why we were traveling there, I learned that he was on his way from Morocco to Boulogne-Billancourt. Not the seaside resort that came to my mind, but a suburb of Paris, where he lived since the 1970s, the people sleeping next to him in the grass his wife, sister-in-law, and three of his arrière-petits-enfants, his great-grandchildren.

My gaze drifted to the enormous amount of luggage, wrapped in a brightly colored plastic tarp, strapped to the roof rack of his Audi, which stood shining in the light of the nearest lampposts. I cracked the old joke about recognizing Moroccan airplanes, and now, settled into unpretentious chitchat, my thoughts drift to Morocco, a country I explored extensively in a former life, its people always making me feel at home, a prolonged stay on the farm of two hashish-growing brothers in the Rif Mountains among the best experiences I ever had there.

The day before I ended up on the farm of those hashish-growing brothers, I attended a corrida in Málaga. In shock, I fled Spain on my motorcycle, taking the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, from where I crossed into Morocco, driving east with no destination in mind, ending up, early that evening, in a restaurant—a covered porch with some plastic furniture—in the village of Bab Berred. After I had ordered viande, meat, the only item on the menu, the owner of the restaurant slaughtered a goat next to my table. The kitchen, as it turned out, was a sawn-in-half oil drum in which a fire burned. As I munched grilled goat chops, another guest of the restaurant, who only later introduced himself as Mohammed, invited me, hush-hushish, as if it were a clandestine operation, to spend the night at his and his brother's farm. That night turned into fifty nights.

Some days, Mohammed drove me around the area in his little red Peugeot, but most of our time together, Mohammed, his brother Ali, and I squatted in the farmyard, taking turns operating a mechanical press, pressing the powder extracted from marijuana buds into slabs of hashish, taping every five slabs together to create one-kilo blocks. The work was monotonous but, in a sense, exciting at the same time. As prison time piled up against a wall behind us and we endlessly drank tea, Mohammed and Ali educated me in all the intricacies of the drug trade.

One of those intricacies was that it didn't matter whether I smuggled a kilo or a thousand kilos of hashish out of Morocco, as long as I paid the right people. Drug smuggling wasn't a crime in Morocco; failing to pay the right people was. I also learned that the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, was trying to undermine the Moroccan drug trade—something Mohammed and Ali applauded, since all DEA efforts boosted the price of their hashish. Part of the plan to undermine the Moroccan drug trade was the construction of a chain of watchtowers along the Mediterranean coast, each tower manned by a group of soldiers. Once those soldiers had been paid, smugglers who chose the sea as a smuggling route could beach their boats, load them, and depart.

It was in Morocco that I opened my eyes to the farce of the war on drugs. It’s that war on drugs that gives drugs their value, and it’s that war on drugs that’s responsible for a large portion of crime in our societies and thus for more victims than the drugs themselves. How many lives had been sacrificed to shoot Pablo Escobar out of his flip-flops? The vacuum created by his death was filled before his body hit the roof tiles of a house in Medellín, and the import of cocaine into the United States and Europe only increased. That year, as every year, more people died from the side effects of prescription drugs than from illegal drug use. A war on drugs while Coca-Cola and McDonald's remain legal ... oh man ...

Most nights at the farm, I slept in my sleeping bag on a stone bench along a wall of a charmingly Arabic-decorated room. Every morning, before anyone had woken, I sat in the farmyard with my back against the well, writing in my diary and drinking the coffee I brewed on my fuel stove—until I ran out of coffee and waited for Mohammed to buy me a package of ground coffee in Chefchaouen, the nearest city. During the day, I did my bit to keep the war on drugs going, pressing slabs of hashish, and some evenings, I drove Mohammed's Peugeot to the coast, where I built a campfire on the beach, grilled the meat Ali had given me, and thought about the corrida I had attended in Málaga.

Patrolling soldiers usually left me alone. Yet, one night, after the soft sound of the surf and the crackling of my campfire had lulled me asleep, a soldier poked me in the ribs with the barrel of his rifle. I opened my eyes and stared into three more barrels. As my captors led me off the beach, they spotted Mohammed's Peugeot. With four rifles in my arms, I watched my new friends cram into the small car. I put the rifles in the trunk, climbed into the driver's seat, and had myself guided through the dark night to the headquarters of a young lieutenant, uneasy about the occasional scraping noises coming from beneath the Peugeot. The lieutenant asked me to take a chair opposite his desk, stretched his legs, had a soldier bring us tea, and told me he had studied in Paris. Then, he asked if I was familiar with the work of Rousseau.

“Nous sommes intimes,” I answered truthfully, and a memorable night unfolded. The tea, poured without pause, the lieutenant’s Omar Sharif resemblance, the French we spoke, and the fan slowly rotating on the ceiling. Although le lieutenant et moi only needed to keep each other company until the ship that had beached where my campfire smoldered was loaded and had sailed off, it wasn’t until dawn—and after a breakfast of fried eggs, bread, and olive oil—that we finally bid each other goodbye, and … Heidi sits down next to me, and my white-robed friend—Abdul, I learn when I introduce Heidi to him—hands her a glass of tea from the copper kettle.

Abdul is seventy-two years old. In a village in the Rif Mountains—just east of where I once lived on the farm of Mohammed and Ali—he once repaired cars and tractors in his own workshop. Big money lured him, his wife, and child to France when he was a young man still, where he didn't repair cars at a Renault factory—as he had hoped—but worked instead à la chaîne de montage, on the assembly line. Abdul had two more children in France, lost his job at Renault, received benefits—if I translate the word allocation correctly—until he reached the age to receive his pension, and he now works on call for the sons and grandsons of his Moroccan friends who started workshops near his home.

Despite his gray hair and beard, Abdul looks younger than he is. He has cheerful eyes, and he looks healthy and vital. But I sense a certain resignation in his composure as he picks up the kettle and pours more tea. Before I can stop myself, I ask, "Ça valait ... ça en valait la peine was it worth it?"

Heidi looks away, and Abdul's hand, holding the kettle, hangs motionless for a moment. Then, he places the kettle back on the stove. He looks at me, shakes his head, and says, “J'ai fait ce que j'ai fait pour ma famille I did what I did for my family. I thought it would be good for my sons and daughter to attend a French school, maybe even go to university. All three of them studied, but now they do pointless work in the city. They have expensive houses, drive expensive cars, have no time for anything, and are always short of money. They're married and have children, our grandchildren. Two of our grandchildren are still studying; the others have finished their studies and followed in their parents' footsteps. Expensive houses, expensive cars, no time for anything, not even for their children, our great-grandchildren, and they're even more short of money than their parents. We have four great-grandchildren. These three,” pointing at the children next to him in the grass, “traveled with us to Morocco. But they're not interested in the journey. They're not interested in the ferry crossing at Gibraltar, and they're not interested in Morocco. All they want is to build things with blocks on a screen.”

Abdul still looks at me when he adds, "J'aurais dû rester au Maroc I should have stayed in Morocco," and I feel bad for having asked such a stupid question. We finish our tea, and as I shake Abdul's hand before we crawl into our sleeping bags, I feel like I once felt when bidding Mohammed and Ali goodbye in the Rif Mountains.

It's still dark when I make tea and coffee. Behind me, Heidi packs our sleeping bags. Two Moroccans in their forties, a woman and a man, sit on a rug in front of a stove, an aluminum kettle on it, where Abdul had been sitting a few hours earlier. Next to the couple, a Mercedes stands shining in the light of the nearest lampposts, an enormous amount of luggage, wrapped in a brightly colored plastic tarp, strapped to the roof rack, three children staring at mobile phones in the backseat. Dawn announces itself to our right when, forty-five minutes later, Heidi and I drive into Catalonia, sipping the tea and coffee Heidi poured into the caps of our thermoses. As we pass under a large, black road sign with orange letters reading HIGHWAY ROBBERIES, Heidi says, "Remember?"

Of course I remember! A little over six months ago, when we still lived in Catalonia, I was foolish enough to let us be robbed on this highway—a bit farther north—and I chuckle inwardly as I recall how, for the sake of humor, I called the police with the make, color, license plate, location, and direction of travel of the robbers' car. For the sake of humor, because no car, these days, goes far unapprehended if the police know its make, color, and license plate. Yet, I knew our robbers had nothing to fear from the police, which is funny. European citizens are expected to protect themselves from robbers who can often be apprehended within seconds, while governments wage war on drug smugglers who will smuggle drugs as long as there is demand …

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