When I wrote recently about the Moroccan city of Casablanca, I referred to the 1942 Michael Curtiz movie of the same name. You know, the one that features Humphrey Bogart playing the hangdog café owner Rick Blaine.

Then again, how many among us could avoid the kind of heartbreak that Rick endures after being dropped by Ilsa Lund, a woman played by Ingrid Bergman at her most stunning?

So when I write about Marrakesh – another Moroccan city that my wife Mary Pat Treuthart and I visited during our 2019 trip – it feels only natural to bring up a song written by Graham Nash and recorded by him, David Crosby and Stephen Stills (who together, of course, constituted the trio Crosby, Stills and Nash).

Click here to hear “Marrakesh Express.”

Unlike Nash, we didn’t arrive in the city by train. Instead, we’d booked a private driver. The one train trip we did take in Morocco came shortly after we arrived, and then it was only from Rabat, the country’s capital, to the Mediterranean port city of Tangier.

And again unlike Nash, we didn’t experience “ducks and pigs and chickens” or “animal carpet wall-to-wall,” not to mention “American ladies five-foot tall in blue.” The train, which was barely a year old in the fall of 2019, was modern, spotlessly clean and the rival of any train we’ve ever traveled on in Europe.

It might even have been on par with the Japanese train that we took from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport into Shinjuku Station.

Whatever, back to Marrakesh, we’d driven in from an overnight stay in the Sahara Desert (where I’d ridden a camel, we’d slept in a yurt and both of us had risen before dawn to see the sun emerge over the sand dunes).

And for whatever reason, in the crush that met us in the city, I immediately was on guard. Maybe it was because we’d been traveling for a while, had just come from a sandy landscape and were exhausted after finishing a long day’s drive. Or maybe it was because I felt the press of humanity in Marrakesh as some sort of a threat.

Or maybe it was a combination of all the above. My travel experiences in India, Turkey and parts of Mexico – among other places, such as the New York subway system – have upped my spider sensitivity whenever I mingle among crowds. I feel it especially when I’m being badgered to purchase someone’s wares or simply place money in someone’s outstretched hand.

As we toured the city, though, I gradually relaxed (though never completely). And as always, in our short stay I can’t say that we saw more than a little of what the city has to offer. But we among the more memorable things we did was to visit the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, which has an outdoor garden that boasts a mass of greenery offset by the bright blue museum building. The noted fashion designer apparently adored Marrakesh, not just its people but its light and, of course, its color.

And speaking of gardens, one of most impressive places we experienced in Marrakesh was the famed Secret Garden. Dating back some four centuries, during which it changed hands multiple times, the garden had fallen into disrepair. Then in 2008 an effort began to convert the garden into a public place.

That effort took eight years to complete, but the result is a place that offers travelers a chance to get out of the heat, find some shade and a cool drink while, when refreshed, taking in a feel for the city’s ancient culture.

As for Marrakesh’s more contemporary culture, we experienced a feel for that when we toured the Marrakesh Women’s Museum. The exhibit touted the achievements of a number of women, among them activist/journalist/politician Malika Al-Fassi and Morocco’s first documentary filmmaker Issa Genini.

The feel for the museum, which claims to be “the first cultural initiative of its kind in North Africa,” is best wrapped up in a statement delivered by the late Moroccan sociologist and feminist writer Fatema Mernissi.

“Dignity,” Mernissi wrote, “is having a dream, a strong dream that gives you a vision, a world where you have a place, where your participation, as minimal as it is, will change something.”

Those words kept coming back to me later that evening when we toured the vast market square Jemaa al-Fnaa, which was full of thousands of revelers, vendors of all types, performers and singers,  all aglow from a light show caused by a sudden fireworks display.

Hungry, we stopped at an outdoor restaurant just off the square. The place offered a range of Moroccan dishes, mostly being tangines full of coucous, vegetables and meats. And the young guy who served us seemed delighted to have a chance to practice his English with us.

All the while I looked out on the square, at that mass of humanity, seemingly so willing to celebrate just being alive. True, what I saw was likely just a temporary cessation of the rancor that seems to be growing daily around the globe.

Even so, it felt good to recall both Mernissi’s dream of dignity and Nash’s song, which features the line, “Hope the days that lie ahead bring us back to where they've led.”

My interpretation of Nash’s hope is that, amid all the madness, our participation – however slight – could possibly, potentially, lead us all back to a kinder, more forgiving world.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking as I washed down my food with cup after cup of sweet Moroccan mint tea.