Yol Bolsun-May There Be a Road

                                                       May There Be a Road

                

                              "One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose 

                                            sight of the shore for a very long time."

                                   André Gide

It was a surreal sensation, standing there  in my new flat, gazing around at the small studio apartment, investigating this hotel room sized unit, now my new home, with the understandings of what that all means. It is here in this space that my new life will transpire, here that my dreams of my Middle East adventure will be based from. Is it what I expected? More or less. And yet like replacing the hero from the book for whom you had already formed an image with the actor now playing him on the screen, there is a shift that occurs, like the shift from the pictures and textures of your sleeping world to those of the waking, walking world around you.

Onward, old chap, I felt inside, move through the progressions of now, ready for the morrow, meaning, from the note on my door, ninety minutes from now. I hastily unpacked, took note of the "essential furnishings" provided for me by the university staff, noticed with a small excitement that the "essentials" included food. Flat bread, but not pita like in the US, thinner and larger in diameter, and oranges, and a big pack of processed cheese, what is called "cheddar" here, a bag of orange jam packs like one gets at Denny's, but without rind, not marmalade, and eight eggs, a large bottle of OJ, eight small bottles of water, yellow tea, a bag each of sugar packets, salt packets, pepper packets, a jar of instant coffee, two small cans of evaporated milk, a couple of apples and bananas. 

I set out my pictures of my sons, swapped the light bulb in the lamp on my bed stand with a red light bulb that I had brought from the states, heated myself a cup of tea, had a smoke on my patio, and jumped in the shower. Weird. That's how it felt to be here showering in this new world, this novel and distant place that I had yet to learn. The enormity of all the about to bes, all the just around the corners, all the new people, customs, smells, weather patterns. All of it made me smile. Yes, I thought. Bring it on. Let's see if we can't just do this one right. Let's see if we can't excel here, rise to the top, shine.

Shaved, dressed, waited. Then an unforgettable, mysterious, ineffable event occurred as I sat on a chair on my back patio in the cool, sixty plus degree darkness. A soft, humming, no a droning, rising, falling, sailing across the air, almost a vibrato, rising in volume came over and through me, awakening an ancient, genetic resonance inside me and I stopped, momentarily frozen with a delight, the type of delight one experiences rarely, a perfect moment. Prayer call. The pre-sunrise prayer call, named in Arabic, fajr. For more than five minutes, maybe eight, mixed now and overlapping with that broadcast from another mosque, it continued. It was that first prayer call, sitting there in my new spot in the universe, more than any other one thing, that centered me and made me nod my head up and down, made me grin, made me say, "yes."

It was like being lowered slowly into perfectly warm water, that call was. Any doubt about my chosen path disappeared. I was reassured and I was reinvigorated, revitalized, renewed. The sound of that voice, those voices, lifted me, carried me, a magic carpet, up, lofted, swimming up and up. Counter-intuitively enough, this lifting grounded me, reassured me, placed me firmly, squarely in this place.

The knock at the door, when it came, was frantic, thrice repeated before I could get to the door, in a studio apartment maybe eighteen by twenty five feet in size. Standing there were two men, one sixtyish in appearance, short, wearing a suit coat and tie, gapped teeth, impish in bearing, eyes darting, Irish brogue, frenetic, Denis. And behind him, Nicolas, an Italian American from Seattle, mellow, smiley, forty eight, short sleeved and with a tie and backpack, a fellow newbie. Chop chop, let's go. So started a frantic rush from office to office, up and across the roof of some buildings to pursue the labyrinthine paths across and around this large university and its corridors of administrative offices manned by Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, and Saudi staff. The Medical Center for blood drawing and chest x-rays. Housing office for keys. Paperwork to start the process for obtaining my iqama, my resident work visa. The IT Building, number fourteen, as all the campus buildings are numbered, the administrative and academic buildings alone numbering into the sixties, and they are not small buildings. The office of the Assistant Director of Academic Affairs. A key for my office. A laptop here. A tour through the faculty mailboxes and copier codes over there. Another office to submit my etickets for the reimbursement of my airfare.

Denis loud, swearing. Bollocks this. Fucking that. An Irish bull in a souk he is. Walking with a limp but hard to keep pace with. Up and down flights of stairs both inside and outside."These people LOVE stairs," he says. Twice. He talks to one man, turns to me, a look of exasperation on his face, turns back to the man he is talking to. "I canna understand a WORD y'r sayin'!" I'll be team teaching with Denis, each of us teaching twice a day for two hours. The group of seventeen he has from ten to noon I will teach from three to five and visa versa. Denis has been at KFUPM for twenty years. In Egypt before that. In China before that. In Spain before that and married to a Spaniard. Married now to a Filipina who he talks to twice on his cell phone, complaining each time he gets off. "These people canna say their v sounds like a b every time," eyes wide, looking me dead in the face, exasperated, raising his hands in the air as though he's given up. Then woosh he's off again and I'm trying to keep up.

The picture above is taken near my housing complex, Old Shabab Courts, which means young man and which is just out of the picture to the right. The administrative and classroom buildings are to the left. The photo below is of Old Shabab Courts, my flat being in back, in the middle, facing New Shabab Courts to the rear.  All staff and faculty housing is farther off to the right and student housing is far to the left, to the north. 

Along the course of this thirty-six hour journey to Dharhan, the city in which I now live, I had been reading a book, The Walking Drum, given to me by my elder son, Teo. Written by Louis L'amour, he of the Western novel genre; it is the story of a young man from Breton who fights and wiles his way across the known world to the Middle East in search of his father. It is my boy's favorite book. He had told me for years of this book and of a Celtic phrase repeated within it, Yol Bolsun, may there be a road. I had devoured two hundred and fifty pages of it already and it was now in my veins, the book and the phrase. There is much in the tale of the history of the The Arab world, of the majesty of its scholarship and refinement, of its grand cities like Córdoba, which had a lighted avenue ten miles long in the twelfth century, of its practices in science and in medicine, of its military feats, of its culture and its architecture. All of this now, the book, the prayer call, the tea I was drinking, the phrase Yol Bolsun, my need to change course in my life, it all came together now like some cosmic triangulation, all the lines intersecting on this one small, arbitrary spot on the surface of this sphere that we live on, fixing the one point on me, here, now. 

The Saudi Kingdom has existed three separate times. The current, modern state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was established by 'Abd al-'Aziz ibn 'Abd al-Rahman Al Sa'ud, referred to eponymously and ubiquitously as ibn Sa'ud, in 1932. The al Sa'uds were a small badu, meaning bedouin, tribe from an equally small village named Ad Dir'iyyah, located smack in the center of KSA, in the large region which covers the central and north central part of the Arabian Penninsula (al-jazeera al-arabiyya) known as Najd. When Ibn Sa'ud, as he is called, and forty of his followers took the stone fort in Riyadh in 1902, by ambushing and killing the governor who ruled for and represented the Sa'ud's rival for power in Najd, the amir, the leader, of the Rashidi  tribe, as he emerged from the fort following sunrise prayer and then rushing the door, entering, and slaying the others inside, the final brick of the wall that is the legacy of the premodern Saudi state which began in 1744, had been laid. During the years between 1902 and 1932 Ibn Sa'ud and his religious warriors, the ikwhan, or brotherhood, raided, cajoled, collected taxes, proselytized, and made allegiances that sewed together the fabric of the modern state.

By eleven am I am back in my flat, having met my three office mates, tired, strung out. I set up my place, posted more pictures, put clothes away, my few books on my shelves, my toiletries in the medicine cabinet, my pens and wallet in my desk drawer, opened the small boxes of dishes, set them in the cupboard, made a cup of tea, moved a second chair to the patio for a desk, sat and read, laid down on the surprisingly comfortable twin bed with its brand new, fleece blanket, and took a nap in the air conditioned space. Closed my eyes, a smile on my face. I did it. In a swirl, a rush, a kaleidoscope of sounds, sights, people, smells, textures, from my known world of conifers and mountains and winter to this flat, sand strewn realm of palm trees, mosques, and prayer calls located not too far from our earth's equator.

Above, the view straight outside my front door, what I see when I open my door and head off to my office in Building 58 each morning.

Yol Bolsun. May you find a road. May we all. What more fundamental offering can one being pass on to another? In both the literal and the figurative senses, a road implies a connection to some place, to some destination, it implies the presence of choice, it carries with it the fundamental understanding that where you now are you can leave if you so choose. Roads go to rivers and seas, they go to oases of services, they go to parks and to hubs of transportation. Roads go to villages, cities, they lead one to communities where the great need of beings exist, the ability to commune and to communicate with others of their kind. And roads lead inside. They travel and they wend and wind around and through and down into the provinces and the hinterlands and the frontiers inside of us, the places marked on the map as Terra Incognita, the spaces still not discovered, the portions which read only, There be Dragons Here.

Above is a picture up on the jubal, said here, jebel, meaning hill or mountain in Arabic. It s where all of the administrative buildings are. It covers a large area, having perhaps fifteen good sized buildings on it. The tower is the symbol of KFUPM, the university, which is an engineering school, only accepts the top 5% of KSA's high school students. KFUPM, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, was established in 1963.

My road here to Saudi Arabia began some long time ago. How does it go, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. As massive collections, clusters of stars burn in the heavens above so too they exist inside each of us. Since childhood my greatest dreams have been of adventure, of travel, of companionship, of love. I have tried my hand at the latter, found myself lacking. Found that as the wick on my candle moves into the lower half of its length, perhaps moving my locus of control from inside of the other back into my own self may perhaps allow me to more effectively use my remaining years to pursue the golden, sepia tinged desires of my youth. 

Tarzan. A stranger in a Strange Land. Around the World in Eighty Days. It was stories such as these combined with the tales regaled for my brothers and me from our father of the almost mythical tales of his life that harbored inside of me, that kept my mind and my focus somewhere else as I sat in class, as I walked, as I lay in bed at night wondering who someday I may become. That made a nine to five existence always and forever an unsatisfying and temporary stop while I waited to catch the elusive bus to now.

My road here has been both laser focused and completely haphazard. It has been long and twisty like a switch-backed mountain highway and it has been, as it was at the end, straight and short like the turn into one's own driveway at the end of a summer vacation. All in all, I suppose, the path here reads like a drunken, late night out. What my last love and I used to call "stumbling distance," the only partially remembered walk home that follows last call. Thusly so I have awoken and I have cast my eyes about and I can see, after a short time of reconfiguration and remembrance, that yes, I have taken a road, some road, perhaps even any road, and here I am. Let the adventure begin.

Here in this new land, this Kingdom, this period of figurative fasting in the desert, my ascetic retreat to the cave, here I search for that road, the one road, my road. Twice married, twice divorced. Two great friends, two lost friends, and lost with them twenty years of shared consciousness, shared love, shared lives. Where did it go. Where did it go. Where does love go when we fall out of it. Like a lap when one stands, it just is no more. Like this universe before the singularity; according to cosmologists it is not correct to state that it did not exist, because trapped in that phrase is the "it" that simply was not. That which can not and shall not be named.

How did Pablo Neruda phrase "it" in his poem number XX, commonly called Tonight I Can Write, from his 1924 collection, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,

                                           The same night whitening the same trees.

                                            We, of that time, are no longer the same.

                                  What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

                                            The night is starry and she is not with me.

                                 I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

                                                 Love is so short, forgetting so long.

Living Some Dream

                                                             Living Some Dream

               "To me the goal was to learn, to see, to know, to understand. Never could I 

              glimpse a sail on an outbound ship but my heart would stumble and my throat 

                                                                  grow tight."

                   American author and storyteller, Louis L'amour, from The Walking Drum

My wait in Riyadh is from four-thirty in the afternoon until three-thirty in the morning. I grab a luggage cart, stack my three bags and my knapsack on it and proceed to wander around the King Khaled International Airport (KIAA) like an indigent person attached to the back end of their shopping cart. The terminal is exceedingly long and narrow, perhaps fifty feet wide, at least the portion one can loiter in without going through security. I feel the proverbial stranger in a strange land, one of perhaps a half dozen non Asian people, meaning mainly Saudi, Middle Easterner, or South Asian, that I see. I work to project an air of respectfulness and non haughtiness. I purposefully look away from the fully covered females, look down quite a bit, especially at first, filled with uncertainty and social trepidation.

I tried to withdraw money, Saudi Riyals, from an ATM machine, but was rejected. I was thirsty, but not a one of the dozen or so bubblers I encountered worked. If it was water that one wanted, one buys a bottle of it. This in a country where water is quite literally more expensive, per unit, than oil. Having no local currency, I went without, without both currency that is, and without water. I looked in the restroom but found that they were always quite full and I did not want to draw attention, not able to rid myself of the sensation, imagined I am certain, that I was being viewed somehow by the others in some vague judgmental manner. Interestingly, each restroom has what look like open, tiled, shower stalls with no walls, just faucets and raised, square, tile boxes, shower pans, if you will, and the words, in English, "Ablutions." This is where the men wash their feet before prayer, adhering to the word of the Prophet (peace be upon him-this is the phrase that follows any and all references to Mohammed in print in the Arabic world) to clean oneself before submission, prostration, devotion. 

I walked the length of the terminal three times slowly, going outside to smoke twice and to marvel and to breathe in this new place, this new dream. Yes, I thought, living a dream. Not the dream, not some specific dream, not the American Dream, not material wealth, not status nor the envy of my peers, rather some dream, any dream. A dream. Life is but a dream, is it not? How did the Bard phrase it? A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Yes. Yes it is a flash, coming in like some barely decipherable streak of light and shadow, like that something tha runs across the road in front of your headlights that you can't quite make out, never, though we foolishly continue to expect that it is just about to, clarifying. In this brief candle flash we move through this play of puppet shadows where we never really become the player itself, only the paper thin silhouette continually distorted and stretched out of true proportion upon the screen. I have spent good money purchasing substances to keep me somewhere on that blade edge between the kingdom of Morpheus and the solid world, not fighting to control the distortions or the lack of control, but rather joining it, moving along with and inside of it, going with the current and not against it. Now, ironically enough, stone cold sober, I am preparing myself to shift into a realm hitherto never considered, a new flash of light, a new shadow puppet dance. A new dream.

I found a spot to lay down, pulled out my down pillow, the very same dependable, mute companion that accompanied me the five hundred miles across he north of Spain, and I slept for five hours on the thinly carpeted floor of King Khaled International Airport, arising at one-thirty am, two hours before my departure for King Fahd International Airport in Dammam. I went back outside to have another smoke and met a man of about thirty, Mohammed, traveling to his younger brother's wedding the next day. I ended up having about five cigarettes with him and talking to him for about an hour.

He was impressed that I will be an Instructor at King Fahd University. "It is the best University in all of Saudi Arabia," he assured me, sitting on my left in his red and white headdress with the double black cord wrapped to hold it in place, and his full length white thobe, his robe.

Mohammed offered to buy me a coffee, which I accepted. He went inside and returned with a hot American coffee for me and one for himself. I asked if he drank Arabic coffee, that cardamom spiced, overly caffeinated, milk infused witches brew, and he shook his head. His favorite, he informed me, was from Dunkin Donuts. His father is a native Yemeni who immigrated to KSA for work. Mohammed works for a famous fashion clothing store, Zafra, and is the manager of a retail store in one of Riyadh's thirty plus malls. He wants to live either in America or in Spain. 

"Why Spain?"

"The beautiful women." I asked why he is not married and he replied that he is waiting to find his real love. I applauded him this. Wished him better luck than I have experienced. Explained to him the meaning of the phrase, two time loser. We smoked and sipped our coffee and I was then plenty awake. Suddenly time to go. I shook his hand and thanked him for his generosity and his company, and then I turned to go inside.

On the small plane to Dammam, seating maybe sixty to eighty passengers, I was the only non Arab. The worm had already begun to turn. Before take off, along with the multi-lingual safety messages, was a reading of a passage from the Quran. I try not to despair, thinking that in my culture, if the pilot read a verse from the Bible, I would be really quite afraid that he knew something that I did not.

It was a fifty minute flight. It was a descent into the next world for me, a passage to the other side. I girded myself, breathed, readied my spirit for whatever should come next. You asked for this, remember that. This is what you want, right? So relax that puckered sphincter, sit up straight, and look into the bright light of the sun. What's the phrase, To get the truth you've got to get close, you get too close, you die. I wanted, I was thinking at that moment, just to get kind of close.

Upon disembarking, about four-thirty in the morning, I collect my bags. I have been tasked with calling one of two numbers given me in order to get my ride to KFUPM. One is a Mr. Mohammed. The other a Mr. Hassan. But I haven't a phone.

A taxi driver who offers me a ride listens to my story and then dials one of the numbers for me. There is no answer. As the helpful gentleman begins to dial the other number, a bespectacled young Saudi man in his clean, pressed thobe, approaches with my name in all caps on a piece of paper. "Are you Mr.," stumbling on my family name. I say yes. He leads me to his car, aides me in piling my luggage into the back seat and we drive off. He is polite but says nothing during our thirty minute drive, except to answer in monosyllables when I query him on various things. Soon, realizing that he has no interest whatsoever in communicating with me, I stop talking and simply look about. We go 110-120 in 40-50 kph zones, get to KFUPM as the birds begin to chirp and the sky begins to lighten. 

In my head I continue the few mantras that I have been holding onto. Three days before now I did not know that I would ever come to KSA. Then suddenly an email arrived informing me that if I can come in the next few days, the Faculty Affairs Office will recommend to the University's Rector that they allow me to do so. But being as the second term, Term 142, has already begun, if I can not come now, it will not happen. My son, Teo, helped me book a ticket and I sent the itinerary off to KFUPM, and voila, forty eight hours later, Teo and my other boy, Paolo, drop me at Seatac Airport at five am and here I am. 

Just breathe. Just breathe. Change is difficult but it is good. It is all change, and change is good. Change only ends when we do. And I am not through. I am only beginning. This is what I want, have wanted, for so long. The nerves, the doubts, they are good, they are like the pulse in the blood, a sign of vitality and, ultimately, of life. Embrace it, look it in the eyes, thrive. Go forth and thrive.

We enter the main gate at KFUPM after a twenty plus minute ride and soon are driving around and around a modern, clean, nice looking apartment complex. I am pleased to see where I will be living. In the photo below my place is the ground floor unit in the center. 

He looks about considerably and pulls out of the parking lot as he dials a number on his phone, speaking in Arabic. Then back into the lot and around the building again. Then back on the phone. Now we pull out and around the block to another set of smaller, shorter buildings in a tight cluster. They are not as new and many of the units, in fact, seem to be crumbling. A pick up truck with two South Asian, older, leather faced men who do not speak English greet us with that sallow, half afraid smile of the serving class, and my driver unloads my bags and drives away without a word. It is a tad odd, but, whatever, I think, exhausted from the better part of forty hours of travel and a shift forward of twelve hours. Disorienting it all is, but I made it. I can stop clenching my teeth and saying my mantras. I can put down my bags and relax.

Using sign language and smiles, the two men help me carry my bags to number 1109, hand me a key and, still smiling gently, body language and tones of the migrant workers that they are, turn and leave.

As I go in I notice a yellow post-it note affixed to the front door, I grab it, bring it in. The place is a studio, and not the one bedroom apartment that I had thought I was getting, but it is, after all rent free, and it is clean. I put down my bags and read the note. "Dear Mr. Bicchieri," it reads in a blue ball point pen scrawl, "I will be by to pick you up between 7:30 and 8:00 to start your paperwork." It is signed, "Denis Kearny." I check the time on my iPad. It is now a hair before six.

Bienvenidos a Saudi Arabia!

The Shifting of the Lens

                                                         The Shifting of the Lens

                        "Life teaches us much of which we are not aware. Our senses perceive 

                          things that do not impinge upon our awareness, but they lie dormant 

                               within us and affect our recognition of people and conditions."

       

                                                                  Louis L'amour

It is four pm on the sixth of February and I sit at an airport bar at JFK Airport on Long Island's southern tip drinking a twelve dollar, twenty ounce Goose Island IPA,pondering, as I ready to board an eleven hour flight to Riyadh, how long it may be before I again am able to indulge myself with a beer. Hell, it is New York, I buy a slice of pizza to form my quintessential last supper. 

I look around, listen to the variety of languages, of accents, see the sundry kinds that swirl around me, the skin colors from Nordic translucent to midnight, purple black. For how long, for how many years, have I tucked myself away from this world, the real world, to stay planted, an awkward thing of folded limbs and inward focused senses, forgetful, some remarkable feat of dissociation that helped me to not remember the giant, thick forest of humanity into which we are born. A healthy, wholistic Petrie dish of, can we say, culture? A birthright of us all, to mix and to merge into this rich stew of humans, of our kind, and, in the final and most enlightened analysis, simply of us. It has long been apparent to me that we as individuals are no more separate one from the other than a colony of bacteria, or of algae, a flock of birds, a school of fish. We make great efforts to emphasize our differences, because inside, deep inside, we are, like the other examples, a collective being, holons, units, cells.

Some too many recent years I lay curled up, fetal, moving, if at all, in Mesozoic, dawn of time slowness, curling and uncurling, moving not at all, engaging not, growing, manifesting, not. No, no, for such a time, a decade methinks, or the better part of, I have mostly hibernated, observed,, plugged into a narcotic state of mind and of body, both figurative and literal. All this time I have bided, as though it counted not, as though it did not matter. Now, fifty years old, overweight, dulled as a blade buried too long in the earth, I struggle to arise, struggle to command what I had at the last remembered to be true. That my body was capable of this, enabled. Yet now it is changed. The man that I was before  vain, lively, proud, veritably crawls now out of my somnambulant trench, moves forward more by will than by the glee that once cast me out from my front porch, the same front porch that I have struggled to leave lo these past seasons.

Here in the Big Apple, steeped again in the broth of us-ness, remembering who and where and what I have been, I prepare to rise, to once again do, not content now to simply be, and to aim for empowerment, aim for engagement with the universe around me, aim for peace in the knowledge of self fulfillment. Here I am swimming once more in this giant ocean of what is, and I am excited to feel the buzz, to feel the scintillation, the quivering energies of yes. 

So I step outside of Terminal One, the international terminal at JFK, underneath the signs for Airfrance, Korean Air, Saudia, Royal Air Maroc, Turkish Airlines, to have a last cigarette on US soil. I'm singing The Band's "The Night They Tore Old Dixie Down," and all the people were singing, it was, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, na, in the cold winter air, people hurrying to make their flights, stepped up, east coast style, and I am happy and I feel on the edge of something I am not yet able to understand, something both magical and yet still intimidating, and, looking into the biting wind, I smile.

Inside at Gate 3, ninety minutes prior to boarding, I witness men, at this point only two who consecutively share the same small rug, perhaps actually one of their jackets, prostrating themselves, pointed towards Mecca, or, Makkah, as the Arabs spell it, praying.  And just now what I presume to be the staff of the plane which I will be traveling upon, parade past me, a small brigade walking regally. In front are three men who appear to be the pilots, Arabic men in crisp, blue uniforms, followed by a veritable harem of perhaps twelve or more women, handsome women, in loose fitting, blue pants, white button shirts and jackets, round, blue caps covering the top of their heads, a flowing blue fabric whose top is tucked into the cap, carrying down sound the back and sides of their faces, their remarkably beautiful faces, each of their eyes replete with curling, heavy eye liner in a bit of a swoosh. The black eyed flight attendants, I presume. Inside of me, barely known to me, some ratio recalculates, some scale shifts over to a new tare, a new metric, a previously not known place.

To the plane now, and to my seat. The lovely Saudi young man through whom I booked my flight, after a small but warm conversation about how good his English is and how he learned it, set me up with the best seat in the Guest section, what we in the possibly less imaginative West call Economy. The first row is perched behind no other seat or wall, adjacent to the flight attendant food and drink station, an area perhaps eight by eight feet with the left aisle of the aircraft running through the right side of the space to which I sit fully to the left, my legs stretching forward into an area that is in no way used. A Saudi who speaks great English and who lives in Dallas, is in the seat one away from me, no one comes to sit between us; even his feet are not in the aisle. He flies to Riyadh one week every month to oversee, consult, and coordinate software that he sells and manages to hospitals in the KSA, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I told him how it came to pass that I was allowed this great spot, "I was wondering how you got such a good seat."

It is hard to get past the fact that after a typical zoo experience on an American Airlines flight, full of overly packed, cattle herding atmosphere with plenty of barely concealed anger and anxiety, this feels so, gosh, at peace. It is huge, more space than US planes, a monitor for each passenger with, I shit you not, a remote control tethered into a small, latching compartment, and a plethora of films, Western classics like Jeremiah Johnson, my all time favorite, 2014 Hollywood hits, International films, TV shows, Arabic films, video games, internet, music, menu, flights information-wow. 

The flight attendants on my Seattle to NYC leg were sort of typically diluted down, older, fussiest, almost demanding in that entitled, we have the same rights as you so don't push me sort of aura, but not here. They are lovely, both as physical specifies representing the female ace, and everyone is in fact female, and as energy bodies, polite, helpful, smiling. I think that I shall perhaps, for a first time, not want to sleep this whole twelve hour flight to Riyadh away. I am excited to see what the meals will be and am considering re-watching Jeremiah Johnson as a sort of quintessential experience memory moment.

The flight attendants were largely, if not all, I believe, Filipinas. They all spoke English well, their native tongue, which my ignorance precludes me from identifying, and their ability to speak Arabic seemed to vary from one to the other. They did their jobs effectively but with none of the projected authority that I am used to from my own culture. They were extremely polite but not in any way subservient. The attendants in the first class and business class may have been Arabic, because some looked ethnically different, but given what little I understand about the nature of Islam, the fact that they were not bundled up like a mummy speaks to their not being so.

As we neared King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh, my entry point to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, KSA, I lifted the blind on the window on my left and saw what looked like the images of the planet Mars. Red sand, wind carved dunes, small streaks and smears of sparsely vegetated wadis, and nothing else as far as I could see. Shortly small circles of green began to dot the land below, telltale signs of irrigated farming. Then homesteads began to appear, nestled inside of variously sized, relatively large, irregular rectangles of piled up sand, like small defensive positions. It puzzled me at first to look at these small compounds because the walls all bore perpendicular scrapings coming away from them at very regular and closely spaced intervals, as though some bored diner had made a wall of mashed potatoes around a small piece of meat and had used their fork to make impressions around the wall, all pointing straight away from whichever wall they started from. As we descended further, as more and more areas sprouted up in the red beige landscape, it became clearer that the scrapings were the markings of earth moving machines, bulldozers perhaps, that must be used fairly often to keep the naturally loose sand piled up to a height difficult to judge, but at least five feet tall. It was then that I saw my first camels. They were moving about, maybe a dozen of them, tan, brown, and one close to white, their long, odd heads pushing back and forth on the end of their gawky, necks. The walks served, I then supposed, to form corrals.

I just passed through customs. Went well, a bit of surliness on the part of my agent, but I did my part to look non challenging and respectful, and after doing and redoing my fingerprint scans, and after a brief explanation about having a valid entry visa in an invalid passport presented along with my valid passport, I was waived into get my baggage. The young man, handsome with big, dark brown eyes and, like most every male in their twenties here, with a tightly clipped, manicured beard, had a bit of an imperious air as he looked at my papers and said every so often, "Up," or, alternately, "Again," or, "Down," instructing me in monosyllables to continue playing he biometric game. I don't really know if my fingers were not being read properly by the scanner or if he was just exercising power, but it was a bit of a Monty Python routine, "Up," "Down," "Again."

He ended up stamping my passport and scribbling the better part of a page of hand written notes in my little blue book of such great importance. Then I smile for the camera and SNAP, a picture that will end up on my iqama, my residence visa. These people love pictures. I was nervous as I moved my bags towards the machines and the people who look through the baggage, scenes in my mind of Midnight Express, of having, in my rush, overlooked something in my bags that could get me jailed.

Even as I waited in line for customs a strange odor continued to make itself known. It was sour, a bit like the smell of unwashed bodies, but what I kept thinking of was the smell of camel dung. It was inescapable. As I later moved through the terminal, which would be my place of being for the next eleven hours until my fifty-five minute flight to Dammam, the other smell that stayed with me was that of toasted bread.

I was waived right through. I grabbed a luggage cart which, unlike the six dollars I paid by credit card in the states to use, is free here. The sun was setting and I could not help but be drawn to the outside, to receive my first taste of the weather and the air and the outside of KSA. In fact walking toward the exit door, pushing my cart, I had this sensation of almost desperation, like I had been too long underwater and I needed to make it to the surface. After such a long time, such a fight to get here, walking through that door, going from travel phase to actually stepping into this new world was like greeting a lover too long held away.

A brilliant air greeted me, about seventy or seventy three degrees, a mild, floaty breeze, no humidity to speak of, and the pink clouds of the late sun above the immaculate mosque across the street from the terminal, crescent moons adorning the tops of the main dome and the minaret. Here in KSA the patterns of art, buildings, lattices, inlay, paving stones, it is all geometry, intricate geometric patterns. The Islamic cultures, due to specific understandings passed down from the Prophet Mohammed, especially the particularly devout, do not use images of persons, in photos or, over the centuries, in their art. Portraits and paintings of Muslim rulers over the centuries don't really exist, not as our Western mind is used to seeing chronicled through our various cultures.Their artistic and architectural energies have gone instead into patterns, arches, colonnades, designs. Look closely at most any mosque and it is inlaid with Arabic script in all its swirly, calligraphic majesty, generally expressing words or teachings of the Perhaps one oft the five pillars of Islam, the five required beliefs and actions needed to become a Muslim, the first being, There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.

Four days prior to today I did not know that I would be coming to the Kingdom, my five month wait for an entry visa having not come to any fruition whatsoever. Suddenly my passport with the entry visa came, just two days after I had reported my passport as lost or stolen to the US government. After four months of waiting, and after the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission had reported that they never even received it, despite the USPS tracking information stating the contrary, and following all advice, I report it stolen and then, viola, it appears. An emergency trip to Seattle, two hundred more dollars and an appointment with the US government and an expedited, four day wait, I am finally ready to go. I sent a picture of it to KFUPM and their response is that if I can come in three days then they will recommend to the Rector that I should come! otherwise! not this year.

Through my senses, down inside, I know that this I the correct course to pursue, I know it is right. My step-more asked me recently, less than a week before I get this communique, if maybe it wasn't time to give up on this plan, time to ride a different horse. "No," I said, "this is the one. This is the job and the place that I want." I told here that perhaps up until that time I had not really wanted fully to go, not really. That it maybe I still had unfinished business to attend to during those many months waiting. That maybe the universe knew this and that not consciously I was not ready. I told her maybe I really need to let go now, to truly intend that this shift should occur, that I needed to surrender and allow. It was in fact only then that the design I had followed since April of last year bore fruit.

And I knew this all, knew it was right, now it was right and I was right with the world, in harmony as I drank in the air outside of the airport's terminal, as I marveled at the color of the sky and experienced a feeling that I had not known since I was a boy looking up at the broad expanse of the stars so far above, feeling and understanding my small place within its magnificence and the perfection of the sublime and unlimited universe, the entire Milky Way, and the limitless depth of the firmaments above.