A Big Hard Sun

...O, there's a big
A big hard sun
Beating on the big people
In a big hard world

When I go to cross that river
She is comfort by my side
When I try to understand,
She just opens up her hands

-Eddie Vedder, Big Hard Sun

Recently I serendipitously stumbled upon an old, scratched-beyond-recognition CD from Peace Corps days. In the Marrakech souk there are myriad stalls of pirated music. We frequented one in particular and fed our American need for newness after weeks or months of hitting repeat on CD players. For Christmas a fellow volunteer, David, gifted me with a CD of Beck's Sea Change. I was a moderate Beck fan at the time, but David said I'd like it and the power of a crush can make a woman believe anything.

There was nothing to talk me into with that CD. I was in love from the first play. One song in particular, Paper Tiger, just bought me and kept a hold of me throughout my Moroccan experience. I would lay for hours when the electricity would go out (often), leaving me in the dark and restless, listen to that haunting melody. Especially as the war inched closer, I played it more often. It wasn't until later in my life that I first experienced the agony of panic attacks, but I think some of those evenings waiting for news of attacks, news of evacuation, I think there were moments in those evenings that Beck and his Paper Tiger nursed my fetal positioned, journal-clutching, self into believing it would all be alright. I don't think I ever panicked in Morocco. But I think my heart broke often, and some evenings that song just felt like a blanket. A road somewhere pretty and warless, a road that led somewhere expected, no surprises.

I listened to the song again, perhaps the first time I've heard it all the way through since leaving Youssoufia. It's odd, I know I've given the CD to others, or burned that song in particular onto many a mix for ex-boyfriends or friends going through breakups. But I think it was habit, and subconscious acknowledgment that it was a song that comforted me once. I listened to it again and became reacquainted with the notion that the senses are time capsules. I could feel the hardness of concrete beneath my feet, the cold of it when I'd roll onto the floor from my inch-thick mattress. I could smell the cumin wafting from the family that lived above me, feel the condensation on the inside of my walls that dampened everything I owned. I could feel the heavy bruise in my stomach, the hopeful knot of anxiety that rose with every day--will we go to war with Iraq before Thanksgiving? Before Christmas? Before Easter? Should I tell my students now? Who should I leave my kitchen goods to? Does it matter? Does any of this matter at all? I could feel it all, and hear the happy, resigned sighs of my Moroccan self. The girl who wanted to stay but knew she would not be so lucky.

In the past few months I've had Eddie Vedder's soundtrack to Into the Wild on steady repeat in my apartment. "A Big Hard Sun," especially, has been on the type of rotation that would probably drive anyone other than me insane. Much like my former Paper Tiger obsession, or Closing Time, or Hurricane, or Sunday Bloody Sunday, or La Marseillaise...

I am waiting for no war. I am happy in most of the ways that matter, and anxious only in ways and for reasons that I think are fairly healthy. I enjoy the world I've tucked away for myself. And so I wonder, years from now, when I stumble on Mr. Vedder and his Big Hard Sun, when I play it again for the first time in a decade, what will I remember of these months. What will reawaken in my gut, what dreams will I remember, and what will I recall as the underlying thesis of these moments?

In a couple months it will have been seven years since my unexpected and unappreciated evacuation from Morocco. Seven years and yet there are moments, songs, smells, that remain visceral in a way I cannot adequately describe. I wonder what moments will be the moments I cannot adequately describe 10 years from now. And if those moments are hard to pick out, perhaps it's time to start making them, make sure my Big Hard Sun era is easily, excitedly, happily recalled.