Feeling the encroachment of that catastrophe of boredom, anxious to escape what was an island solitude, we put on our boots mounted up riding straightaway into that parched infinity beyond. My riding partner was from Los Angeles, a veteran of dirt bike riding treks into Death Valley and the Mojave Deserts. He had rode with Steve McQueen, an avid dirt bike rider.
In those days the desert surrounding Al Khobar and Dhahran was still virgin territory, few foreigners had traversed this brutal terrain. The big dunes had not been fenced off and it was indeed a huge ocean of sand. The desert lured us into leaving the main roads. So there we were on a road that was no more a road, dissolved and broken off, leading into a land of unending harshness."Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man", we are no more than a tenacious intruder irresistibly drawn by its challenging brutality, but man on a machine can only tame the desert here and there, and only momentarily, for within a day the wind will erase all tracks, of where we have been on its vast and overwhelming landscape.
We pass old windblown outposts and are suddenly catching a breeze off the Arabian Sea. We sit atop a dune deciding to leave some monument behind of our passing. We build a very diminutive pyramid of rocks atop the dune. A camel gives us a sidelong glance that tells us we are intruders on his ancient home. As we mount up to leave, a sudden blast of sandy, dusty wind reminds us that our monument too will have a short life expectancy out here.
Heading back and riding into the assault of a shamal beginning it's battery on us, we decide on a short cut through a large garbage dump. We run into acres and acres of trash with fires burning among rusty cans, bottles and bones. With the smoke rising there is a surreal picture and ghostly solitude as the wind pitches common things about the signs left by civilization. Those dead animals you see on the highway are brought here to burn. With the smell and morbid scene we race to get out of mans trash yard. I watch as a tattered coat does a strange dance on barbed wire in the wind. The fires that have burned here leave many things melted down, and they appear as wax in the suns rays. Amidst this sea of trash , I spy a doll have submerged in sand, with it's upraised arm it looks as if a wax tear is falling from its melted eye. "the tears of eternity, and sorrow, not mine but mans".
As we pass the last dead camel, its mouth frozen open in an eternal scream, with the stench of him chasing us onto the highway. we are forever grateful to be gone. Now we are traveling with skeletons of bones beneath our skins and know what that hot roof leveling wind, bred on the desert is howling about.
Jack J. Johnstone (first published in The Northrop News 1975)
