The Smile

Mark and I were on our way back from a shoot near Ouarzazate, on the other side of the Atlas Mountains, almost where the Sahara begins. This was a landscape filmmakers had been drawn to for decades, the region where movies like Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator had been filmed.

I like to say, “I shot Jesus in the desert,” when asked about this trip because essentially that was why we were there, to capture content for a documentary series about the life of Jesus.

I don’t remember his name.

We met him on the way back after the shoot. We had stopped for a rest about two hours into a four-hour drive, a grueling trip along stretches of one-lane road with sheer drops beside us, in a truck that had seen better days.

I had never heard of the Amazigh people, whom I knew then as Berbers, or anything about their way of life. Our guide sat on the edge of a cliff smoking a cigarette, right at the edge, as if it were nothing. Streams of blue smoke drifted against the brown mountains behind him. It must have been a quarter-mile drop from his perch into the canyon below, but he was completely at ease, as though he had sat there a thousand times.

Across the canyon was a small village that looked as if it had been carved from the rock itself. It seemed as though it had been there for a thousand years and weathered many things.

We had tea with this man and his family. He was the caretaker of a historic building where they lived. They made rugs, and I bought one, without any idea how I was going to get it home. But I did.

The rug is still rolled up in a long triangular FedEx shipping container between the beams of our furnace room. Every time I change the filter, I see that box and smile.