November 24, 2008 Camio Calamity; A Fictional, Fanciful Fable

Disclaimer: This fully fictional fable bears no possible resemblance to anything that happened anywhere, ever. Really. I mean it. Stop speculating. No, seriously, cease all conjecturing…

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Once upon a time, in a faraway land, on a snowy afternoon, there was a camio.*

This camio carried a couple categories of cargo. One should be sold in a showy souq shop, and the other quite quietly, in downplayed, discreet dealings. The former were carrots. The latter were… substances consumed by some, to swindle their cerebella into sensing something like summery sunshine. Let’s call them “kettles”.

But back to our blarney… The driver of this carrot-and-kettle-filled camio discovered that the dirt road he was driving was dead-ended. Darned blizzard, he derided.

He reckoned he’d return the same route…but then he received word that the rural watchmen had created a checkpoint behind him. They’d comb through his camio and come across his carrot and kettle cache. Carrots create no concerns…but his kettle cache, which he’d counted on changing for cash, could conceivably contribute to correctional confinement. Crud, he cursed.

At this juncture in his journey, he just jettisoned the junk. Great – what’s gone won’t get the guards’ gander, he thunk.

He continued on contrary-wise, and his carrot-carrying camio caught no condemning consideration from the cops. Congratulations to me, he cheered.

Aways a-hinder, his abandoned aforementioned articles…attracted attention. Allelujiah! all announced.

Locals liked the look of the leafy left-behind lumps, and pocketed portions of the piled produce. Lucky us, they pronounced.

And with words of would-be wisdom and loud, lilting laughter, they all lived … weirdly … ever after.

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[* A camio is a truck, usually a dump truck, used to transport produce, sheep, people, merchandise, whatever – sometimes all at the same time, sometimes not – and is the most commonly seen vehicle in rural Morocco. I assume the name derives from the French camion, which means truck. There are no nasal sounds in Tamazight or Arabic, so it’s easy to see how caa-mee-onh, ending in that uniquely French sound halfway between a honk and musical note, became caa-mee-oh.]