Byline: Keith Howard

After making local arrangements, I’m being driven by 4X4 into the desert with a tent, sleeping bag, food and water. I’ll get dropped off around 7:30, pitch my tent and experience the nighttime alone. In the desert. Until midday tomorrow. If my driver remembers, he’ll pick me up. If not, I’ll waste away slowly, the sun cooking me, evaporating every last bit of moisture, until, after a week or two, I’m just Keith jerky.

Eva and I also talked about the cultural differences among Europe, England, the US and Morocco. She asked what I did for a living. When I told her I work with folks in recovery from drug and alcohol, she got a very inquisitive look in her eye.

I’ve been accurately accused of being a lot of things—a drunk, a junkie, a weirdo, a pompous clown and just plain crazy, to list just a few of the charges. One particular adjective has been universally true, at least since I got into recovery—I am annoyingly optimistic, believing anything that needs to be done CAN be done, given enough focus and effort. The universe always has more solutions than it does problems.

After five hours in the Sahara Desert, or at least Merzouga’s Erg Chebbi dunes, I’ve found what I expected to have been completely wrong. I’m not being self-critical here. I’ve just learned my view of the world is different from normal people’s.

At 10, she moved to Durham when my grandfather was asked to start and be the first president of the Thompson School at UNH. In Durham she made new friends, who were also lifelong, including a girl named Jane Abell. Jane was whip-saw smart and she and Bev were inseparable until Jane left town for boarding school.

I’m now a bit more than halfway from Marrakesh to my destination, Merzouga, on the edge of the Sahara. The trip has unfolded beautifully, with time to sit beside riad pools and walk through the rocky and arid landscape, experiencing the vast indifference of heaven.

Driving alone through hard but beautiful land with no distractions, I was comfortable—with me, with my life, with the universe. This ease, this peace did not come early or easily to me. In my previous life, every time I drank and drugged, I did so to get out of me, to break the bonds that tethered me to me.

I came to Morocco to find a desert. Instead, I found an overflowing spring of humanity. In particular, I met Younes Krimane. Let me explain.

Whenever I travel, I think about the possibility of death, my death. I know the word “possibility” could be replaced by “certainty,” but I’m talking about dying during a particular period. Morocco is a safe country. I’ll be driving a safe car. I’ll be staying in safe lodgings. Still. Camels get rabies (I think). Flash floods very occasionally strike the Sahara. Meteors hit the earth.