Arabian Sands

I didn't get out much in Abu Dhabi. I didn't make many friends or do many of the things you are supposed to do, yet I was there a year, and looked back on it favorably during the last morning sunrise, watching that golden desert sun light up the tall flashy buildings on Reem Island, the sprinklers flood the grass of a soccer pitch adjacent to my hotel. It often perplexed me, often made me feel stagnant and like I was running in place, but now I find myself en route to Washington DC one marathon richer, knowing the Arabic alphabet and an assortment of words, better traveled and better read and better loved, and being able to afford one of the best degrees money can buy. That too is Abu Dhabi, one of the great enablers of my life.

I find many parallels in perspective in Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands, which chronicled his travels across the UAE's empty quarter in the late 1940s. He did falconry with the country's founding father, endured an almost incessant hunger and thirst, and found himself multiple times in the middle of tribal feuds. He was also remarkably prescient when it comes to what the region would become once infused with oil wealth and cars. The fast food joints, the child obesity, and the general excess are things I feel would break his heart if he were alive today. His account is a tribute to a dying way of life, now dead, a Bedouin heritage the many Emirati children of today will never know or understand.  

For him it was a grand open space to be, and I too found great comfort in the desert and its great expanse, rolling dunes as far as you can see. A recent trip alone out into the empty quarter - via the comforts of a car as opposed to Thesiger's camels - was one of the better days spent in the UAE. On the way back in the middle of the night I many times stopped on highways and looked up at the stars, just listening to the quiet in my head and engineering my goodbye.

It's possible I'll look back from Meridian Hill Park or the National Mall and say I should have stayed longer. But I expect I'll look back on these conflicting times and see an urgency to create something new and sturdier, to create more, to realize the possibilities I know are there. In the background, my mind drifts back to hot summer runs along the corniche, the strange pubs that drew all kinds of shady patrons, the hazy sunsets clouded out by sand and dust, the calls to prayer in the earliest morning hours. It also drifts back to the many temporary people that call Abu Dhabi home, the countless who struggle there to an incomprehensible degree, but also those whose lives have been enabled from their own brief sojourn in the gulf, like mine.