Ya Basic

How a Moroccan camel taught me to lighten up.

The café smelled of mint tea and grilled lamb. Outside, scooters buzzed and the calls to prayer bounced off the narrow Marrakech city walls.

“Ka’ra L’ma,” I said to our waiter, nodding confidently at Trish.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“Ka-Ra-La-Ma,” I repeated, rolling my tongue to get the accent right.

“What are you saying, sir?”
“He wants a bottle of water,” Trish said.
“Ah! Qra d-lmaa.” The waiter skittered off.
“I don’t think you’re saying it right,” Trish added, quite unnecessarily.

I was trying to fit in. I don’t expect to be mistaken for a local, but I want to seem like I belong. The other tourists don’t even try. You can spot them a mile away in their khaki shorts, hiking boots and bulging fanny packs, looking like plus-sized REI models.

I say “Shukran” instead of thanks. “Salam Alakum” instead of hello. In the Agafay Desert I stretched my vocabulary, explaining to our guide that I didn’t want to ride the camel who was staring me down.

“Camel no thanking me.”

“I’m sorry sir?” the guide replied in perfect English.

“Camel, no thank you, is not now,” I explained to the baffled camel owner, who we paid in advance.

I didn’t want to join Trish and our friends on the camel ride and photo op. It’s too touristy and I’d look ridiculous. I have a 1965 photo of my German grandfather, Jacob Rothschild, perched on a camel in Israel in front of the Beersheba Desert Inn, wearing a suit, white shirt and Gatsby cap. I don’t want future Rothschilds to look at me the way I look at him, foolish and touristy.

But off we went. Like toddlers on a pony ride, we rode in circles across the faux desert, waving like idiots. My elderly camel scoffed at me, thinking “this is what you do in your free time?”

The sun dropped behind the dunes, bleeding orange in the sky. I felt ridiculous and strangely free, like I was on a postcard I’d never buy. I made a peace sign in the group photo to look cooler. It didn’t help.

And what the hell was my grandfather doing atop a camel in Beersheba in 1965 anyway? This serious man, this Holocaust survivor, looked like “Lawrence of Bavaria.” But the more I stared at it, the more I wondered if that photo was less about tourism and more about triumph. He’d escaped Germany with his wife and two small children while much of his family didn’t make it out. Maybe the camel wasn’t a humiliation, but a victory lap. Proof that he could sit tall, ridiculous or not, in a world that had tried to erase him, in a new country willing to embrace him.

And there I was, decades later, trying to curate my own version of authenticity in a desert, pretending not to be a tourist while literally paying someone to make me one.

After my own camel ride, at dinner in the Agafay Desert, we were treated to a raucous Berber musical trio and a juggling fire breather. I rolled my eyes under the starry sky. I took what I hoped would be an ironic photo of the Berber man magically spinning flames in the night sky.

I’m not sure where my fear of seeming typical stems from. I don’t care what people think of me, as long as they think I’m more interesting than anyone else they know. Is that asking too much? I have a compulsion to seem unique, which may explain why I have four post graduate degrees, which did not remotely impress my camel. My college degrees may make me seem accomplished to strangers, but on that camel, there was nothing to hide behind, just a wobbly saddle, a goofy grin, and a judgy animal.

Of course, nobody else thought I looked foolish up there. Nobody thought about me at all. The camel owner wasn’t thinking “such stupid tourists,” but more likely “I hope we’re not having couscous again tonight.”

It’s a humbling thought. We spend half our lives trying to look cool for an audience that isn’t even watching. Maybe that’s what connects us—the absurd urge to be seen not as we are, but who we wish we might be. We’re all doing our best impressions of who we wish we were for people doing the same thing to us.

When my grandchildren someday see the photo of me on a camel—turban, shades, and a smile that’s part joy, part embarrassment—they’ll laugh and shake their heads. They won’t know that I was laughing too, trying to look cool and failing spectacularly. But maybe they’ll see what I know now: that feeling foolish is proof you’re alive and trying new things. My grandfather rode his camel after surviving war. I rode mine after surviving myself.

We all have our camels. The moments when we’re caught between wanting to belong and wanting to stand apart, between being the observer and the spectacle. Some people hide behind flawless photos, others behind biting sarcasm, but it’s all the same impulse. We want to look cooler than we feel, safer than we are, more in control than life allows.

But life’s too short to worry about how we look. No one’s watching anyway.

Ride the fucking camel.