Taking a ship from Louisiana to Morocco and places beyond | Food & Entertainment

I’m planning a trip to Morocco — by ship from New Orleans — for next year. I had thought arriving there would mark my 50th country.

It will not.

And still, I count countries.

Yes, it will take a long time to get there. Yes, that is a statement about the journey being the thing — not the destination.

Counting has been on my mind lately, as we prepare to move back into our house after the fire and figure out what survived.

I started keeping track of states when I was a kid. My country list started in 1992 when I went to Mexico, my second country.

Truth be told, I had never flown on a plane until August 1987, after I drove a U-Haul truck to move across the country to Reno, Nevada. The trip home for Christmas was not up for discussion.  

I remember my best friend and college roommate telling me, “Someone told me that the first time you take off in a plane, you can’t help but smile.”

Whoever told her that was right — I smiled.

For the next five years, the only place I flew was home — with the exception of my first business trip. In 1988, I flew from Reno to Los Angeles. I remember walking into my hotel near the airport and seeing a lot of really tall guys. Like, really tall guys.

I eventually learned they were the Detroit Pistons who were playing the Lakers in the NBA Finals. For a 24-year-old from small-town Mississippi, the experience felt otherworldly.

During the next decade, my world got considerably larger. I moved to Europe and visited 10 more countries. I went to all sorts of places in the Caribbean. I visited six countries in West Africa.

Once you’ve been to a dozen or so countries, you have to start being pretty deliberate about where you’re going next. For years, I thought I was at 44 countries. Then I went to India and Nepal. Then Scotland. Then Türkiye and Greece.

I had used an app called Been to count countries since right around the time apps started. My country count stood, I believed, at 49.

For the joy of a round number, I’ve been excited about getting to my 50th.

One day, I visited the app and it said I had not been to 49 countries.

The trouble started with Scotland.

Originally, Been and I counted it separately, the way plenty of travelers do, because it feels separate — a different flag, a different accent, an underdog identity that I understood, what with growing up in Mississippi.

Hong Kong — same thing. Yes, it was previously a British colony. Then it was a Chinese special administrative region. It was never sovereign. I knew that. I counted it anyway.

I’m not completely certain why lists like this matter. How accurately can geography be measured, but the honest number sits south of 49. Plenty of places are asterisked.

Borders move. Unions dissolve. South Sudan did not exist until 2011. Czechoslovakia does not exist anymore. A person can visit a destination in good faith, write it down and come back 20 years later to find the label gone.

Still, it existed. It was there — so was the visitor.

Which brings me to Mary Pettibone Poole, a woman I may never be able to verify existed beyond a small 1938 book called “A Glass Eye at a Keyhole.”

One line attributed to her is: “He who laughs, lasts.”

I like that sentiment a lot right about now. Yes, earlier versions of the saying existed. She likely didn’t say it first. But almost nothing else about her appears to have lasted. There’s no reliable biography or easy-to-find birth date. 

Strangely, I find that somewhat comforting and another reminder that permanence, as it turns out, is negotiable.

As we prepare to unbox the things that apparently survived our house fire, we have no idea what we will find.

The parallels to my country list are clear. I’ve spent a lot of my life keeping track of what I’ve seen. Now I’m about to find out what we still have.

I am trying to rewire my brain not to care about how many countries I have visited.

I am not there yet.

The trouble with counting is that eventually we have to decide what counts.

Either way, here’s to Morocco.