My fatigue is not from difficult terrain or from boredom, for the land I've crossed thus far (between Morocco's capital city, Rabat, and its religious center, Fes) has been one of wide and gently-rolling grassy plains. It has been perhaps the easiest terrain I have walked to date. And with the days filled with such an abundance of warm sunshine and green scenery and blue skies I really could not ask for a more perfect place to be at this time of the year. Indeed, the scenery and the weather are much like what I would find if I was to walk through eastern Colorado or western Kansas in the early fall.

And my loneliness is not because of lack of conversation or because--as was the case in Spain's interior--I find few people. No, if anything, you are never physically alone in Morocco, and the people are hardly shy or unemotional.

Even with all the open plains, there is hardly a kilometer that passes beneath my well-worn boots that I do not pass two or three dozen Moroccans shuffling along farm animal trails on their pointed cloth slippers. More often than not, they are swaying percariously in horse-pulled carts, or just plain squatting on the ground beside small piles of carrots, or mushrooms, or tethered chickens.

My problem is simply that of being an American in a land of moochers. All day long, from the mouths of the young to those of the adults, it is a constant "Give me, give me, give me." So much so that on several occasions it has taken every ounce of my willpower to keep from striking out at their demanding hands and faces.

They come at me in dirty town after dirty town, and from one mud farmhouse after another. And because I am on foot, there is no way for me to escape as other travelers can. There is no denying that the vast majority of the Moroccans I pass are dirt poor, that their cities and villages are mostly slums, that jobs are few and that the work is of the type that breaks a man before he is 40. Nor can I argue with those Moroccans who lament that their king is more interested in his own forunes than in theirs.

But, does that give them any right to demand money from me immediately upon sight? And to do so in such a rude and incessant manner?

I feel beseiged. I feel in danger. There are no others of my kind to run to, to seek advice from, to hide behind. Even in my most worn clothes, and with my shoes now torn and my backpack splattered with mud, I still stick out starkly wherever I go.

They can "smell" an American as easily as I can smell their own unwashed bodies. They come so often I almost feel at times like sitting in the dirt and crying. I like to think of myself as a kind and gentle person, but many of the Moroccans are forcing me to be a hard and rude person if I am to preserve my sanity. I am not the money tree that many seem to think we Americans are.

"Everyone knows you have money in America. You cannot fool us," one shifty-eyed older man argued yesterday evening. He demanded six dirhams from me simply because I had talked with him. And when I refused to pay, he threatened to not let me pass.

"You are free to travel, to come to Morocco, to go anywhere you like, to take all this time so far from America, " he had continued in a nasty tone. "You must have much money to have such freedom."

I did not pay him of course, for I believe a man must have convictions, must not be afraid to take charge--two qualities that several Moroccans have told me separate the average American from the average Moroccan.

"Look what your country has done in only two hundred years," remarked a university student studying political science. At the time we met, I was crammed into a hellishly-crowded train taking me from the Jaquiths in Marrakech to Rabat, my walk's starting point in Morocco. "You Americans have become the number one country in all the world--the richest, the best! And then look at us. We are still the same as we were five thousand years ago. Perhaps we do not agree with everything you do, but we must admire your character, the way you Americans stick together and complete what you set out to do.

"We expect others to do everything for us...and you see how little we have because of our lack of courage."

He had been especially amazed at how my country was so united and concerned over one captured American pilot in Syria. That sense of "oneness" was something Arabs in general had never mastered, he observed. And, as did so many other Moroccans I've spoken with, he wanted to "escape" to the United States.

Last night, as I waited wearily in the dark for someone to sneak up on me for some of those "many" dollars I must surely have with me, I too was feeling an urge to flee this den of thieves and greedy eyes. Quite frankly, I am too vulnerable, I realized as I thought of how on the train ride from Marrakech I had had a new pair of walking shoes and all my food stolen from my backpack even as I'd slept beside it.

Morocco is definitely no place for a lone American walker.

Steven