Hashtag Eastern Province
I woke up this morning wrapped in my blanket, laying on a windshield sun visor from a car, on the sand and scrabble of the Saudi desert. It took me a moment or two to recall why it was that I had gone to bed in that fashion and in that place. Little black ants walked slowly, poking around in their thorough robot way on the corner of my blanket in my as of yet unmoved visual field. My clothing and pack items spread liberally on top of them. As I lay there with a great thirst, the space between my ears feeling muddled and heavy like so much wet cotton, the events of the day before began to come back in flighty, Kodachrome snippets. But that piece of partially eaten cheesy garlic bread half covered with small, black ants, half buried in the chalky beige powder of the Eastern Province soil some couple of feet from where I curled up for the night? I don't remember the garlic bread.
I had come to this gathering after receiving news of it from my friend, Ned. Another Lecturer, an American named Blake, had invited Ned and it turned out that I would be able to join as well. Camping. A Hash event. Those were the only two facts that I had and they were all that I needed to know. There have been two goals for me since arriving in the Kingdom which have stood a bit taller than the rest. Getting outside of the urban areas to see and possibly explore some of the landscape of Arabia and breaching the hallowed, secure perimeter of the Aramco compound. This camping trip seemed to me to be the key that may unlock both of those doors.
Hashers are people who self describe as drinkers with a running problem. The group was started in the 1940s by a group of four men who were serving in the US military. Today there are Hashers worldwide. In many ways the group is akin to the traditional understanding of a fraternity or a sorority, though it is equally open to the members of both sexes. So that one needs to be invited in by a current member to join a Hash event. Each inductee will be given a Hash tag, their Hasher name. The camaraderie and ribaldry exchanged between the members and the worldwide acceptance of a wandering Hasher into any chapter anywhere, these are also aspects of the Hashing tribe that mimic those of the secret orders of the Greek systems.
I put together the meager camping goods that I could manage from among my personal belongings here. The fleece blanket from my bed, a tattered sun visor for the front windshield of a car which I had found blowing around behind my flat, water, a spare shirt, underpants, socks, my toiletry kit, my small music box, book, iPad, my down pillow, a couple of food items, flip flops, sun hat, and a folding beach chair that I had recently picked up for about nothing from fellow teacher who will be leaving KFUPM at the end of this module.
A tall, fit man named Izzy arrived in a white SUV at a bit past one pm to pick up Ned, Blake, me, and our lumpy, inelegant pile of camping items. Izzy is a tall, fit military man who is working with the joint US and Saudi mission to train and establish a Saudi coastal defense force of five thousand soldiers, a KSA Coast Guard. He doesn't talk a lot but is not a grim, stereotypical jarhead. He seems rather gentle, has an open, toothy smile, is polite. All I know about our destination is that it is an hour or two south of Dhahran in the area of the Shia city of Hofuf and that it is in some hills and close to a canyon of some kind. I am later to come to understand that this canyon has a name. It is Scribner's Canyon.
The drive goes quickly enough. Along the way we begin to see camels of many colors in small, loose groupings, off to either side of the freeway. We pass through one police checkpoint, more a military checkpoint, but are not stopped, just slowed down over a series of speed bumps and driving between orange traffic cone separated lanes, small toll booth looking buildings, a pillbox, a mounted fifty caliber machine gun in the back of a military half ton pick up truck. These sort of statements of government presence are more or less ignored by everybody, they are not viewed with foreboding. Given that the Eastern Province is Shia majority and that the Shia have on many occasions risen up in anti-government protests, there is no surprise about the check points on the arterials connecting the larger urban centers of this part of the peninsula.
Concrete structures in every stage of both completion and deterioration, mingled with junked machinery, blue plastic tarps flapping in the heavily sand laden strong desert wind accompanied our drive, all of them, along with the camels, ubiquitous inhabitants of the Saudi landscape, at least that part that abuts the freeways. Upon reaching the correct exit we pull into a junked up petrol station with prices nearly double that of Khobar, the larger city that Dhahran is attached to. .94 Riyals a liter here, or about one dollar and ten cents American per gallon. There were a number of camels across the road and we drove over to see them up close. As Izzy had guessed, sure enough, they approached the vehicle, pushing their noses a bit inside. Patting the soft, flabby skin covering their mouths and nose reminded me of touching a horse. They have the same feel, including the coarse hairs that poke out here and there. And they smell somewhat the same, although these had a bit of a petrol or diesel smell as well.
We parked near to the station, a motley, rubbish strewn blight that reminded me of the now defunct, 1940s era service stations in the deserts of the southwester US states, except it is dirtier here, more unkempt. It seems to be a characteristic of this country that one finds rubbish all over, collected especially where the wind blows it up against something which blocks it's further progress. Empty plastic pop or water bottles, plastic grocery bags, the lids of juice bottles, parts of newspapers, candy bar or pastry wrappers. We waited for approximately fifteen minutes for the other six Hasher vehicles to arrive and then followed them to the spot on the smaller road that we now took, turning off the road, down about a six foot, very steep embankment, onto the desert floor below, from whence we drove in a modern day caravan across the desert for about two kilometers until we arrived at the campsite somewhat hidden amongst the small hills that turned into much bigger hills and Mesa looking buttes within about a kilometer.
Leaving the road and heading across the uneven, terrain brought a rush of adrenaline; this is what I have been dreaming about, to get out of the city with its concrete boxes, it's inorganic, overly organized shapes, it's air conditioning and fluorescent lights, to be allowed to become free in any atavistic sense, to roam and wander the untamed parts of this portion of the planet, the fractal patterns of nature, the warm breeze, and the smells of dust and vegetation in my nose. We were moving pretty fast, maybe fifty to sixty klicks per hour as we stayed in formation with the other SUVs, all trailing tight plumes of whitish dust. The Martian looking surface was good and bumpy, the hills and bluffs we were driving towards forming a close facsimile of the American southwest, a couple flat topped mesas maybe four hundred meters in elevation formed the backdrop to the first and second row of dramatic foothills.There were of course a few exceptions.
A pipeline roughly eighteen inches in diameter ran parallel to our course, perhaps one hundred and fifty meters to our left, crossing underneath the road hind us, it ran straight towards and then up and over the first large, maybe one hundred meter tall hill of greyish tan earth. Besides the black pipeline ran five furrows which looked every bit like single lane roads, each separated from the adjacent one by a berm of sandy earth perhaps a meter and a half to two meters in height; it looked as though some gigantic being had taken an equally oversized garden rake with just five tines on it and pulled it straight across the earth, up and over the large bluff just to our left.
The vegetation was also not the same as the deserts of the American West. No sagebrush, no creosote bush, bitter brush, or Russian Olives. A different low shrub with much less leafy material than the artemisia tridentada of the Great Basin and the western plains, a spindly plant with very small leafy structures that appeared more like single strands of arbor vita poking out strait from the central branch at intervals on one to two inches. Small curled up plants that looked like teeny trees about three to four inches tall popped out of the earth at fairly regular intervals. As I was later to learn, the great flat furrows in the earth that moved along with the pipeline up and over the top of the rise above us were the marks left by the treads of a five tracked behemoth machine designed to relocate oil drilling platforms. The pipeline carries water to the sites where the drilling relocates.
We shortly pulled into a space hidden between two arms of what turned out to be the mouth of a canyon. The actual opening into e canyon was not visible from this sandy bottomed wadi. The seven or eight SUVs were soon arranged at somewhat regular intervals along the edges of the small natural arena and along one of the two forks of the arroyo that ran out of the main wadi, small tents and cots beginning to crop up before the twenty plus persons assembled began to migrate towards the head of the depressed area, close to the small boulders that stacked up at the beginning of the canyon.
It is with a bit of shyness that I enter into a group of blokes who obviously know each other well, fighting the sensation of feeling the outsider. I walked up to the collection of chairs set out around a low fire pit, drinking some water to await a run or a hike which would commend shortly. Lots of fit fellows in their smart running gear, things which I do not posses. Thinking thoughts to myself about how this coming fall I will get some running shoes and a pair of athletic shorts and a running shirt, things which I did not bring with me and have not bought. In fact I can't say I am much of a runner, having run as a regular form of exercise for only a handful of times in my life outside of high school sports.
Being somewhat overweight and having weak ankles and flat feet, there is a good bit of punishment to suffer when I do much regular activity. I have been riding exercise bikes and shoot some evening hoops, but not running. If I can climb down another ten pounds I think that my feet and ankles may allow some running. I opted for the walking group, composed of four ladies and three other guys. The runners set off in the hundred degree, hot sun, while we kept up a decent clip behind them over the soft, loose sand and small rocks. We engaged in light, casual conversation, learned that one of the gals was from Czechoslovakia, two from South Carolina, the other a Brit. The sun around here does not play. It beats on you and there exists a bit of mind game involved in working somewhat actively to not mind. We climbed over the pipeline when we got to it, surprised at how hot it was, painted black, stretching roughly forever. No doubt hot enough to cook an egg, one needed to straddle it quickly and slide over it, careful not to, well, fry one's eggs.
Putting one foot in front of the other in the earth, which varies here from the softness of talcum powder to bony, calcified scrabble, puts a mad rush of juice in my veins. It is so the diametric opposite of holing up in either my concrete office, my concrete classroom, the concrete student mall, or my concrete flat. I like outside. No, I need and love outside. I would rather live 100% outside than 100% inside. To walk out where I can turn my head around and around and up and down and take in fully high definition, IMAX type, 3-D visual stimuli like this brings me a fine and utter gratification. Sure it's not blu-ray, it may not have that great glow, but it is pretty dang good to look at. And hey, does blu-ray let you feel the grit of wind blown sand in your ears and scalp? Deep down in the corpuscles and the double helixes there is a vibration that only responds to this, and here in his place I am buzzing like a magic fingers bed with two fresh quarters in it..
We returned to camp about forty five minutes after we set off, just before the runners got back. Before too long the shadows were low and long and mean old mister sun was poking his fiery head down below the walls of the wadi. With the falling of the light came a very certain, very present, raising of the night. The amber started flowing, the campfire was lit, the main event was about to get its groove on.
Ned and I congratulated one another many times over the course of the evening, chuckling, clinking our glasses together, our good fortune in and of itself a worthy cause for celebration. One of the Hashers, Shut the Chuck Up, played guitar and sang songs on and off for the entire evening. Pink Floyd. John Prine. Rolling Stones. The Band. An oblong pit was dug in the sand, charcoal bags dumped in and lit, and two grills laid down across the top. Upon this perfect outdoor range was arrayed a variety of skewers, potatoes, steaks, chicken. The smell of the grilling meats, the cold drink in my hand, the company of women around the fire, the gay and vibrant verbal jousting, teasing, joshing, talking. All of it has been too long in the waiting. Before long the songs began to get a little bit louder, the jokes a little bit funnier, the lines of reasoned conversation a bit harder to find.
Living in a society that does not have women to talk to or even to look at or to be around, be it as a check out girl in the store, a bank teller, a barista, a neighbor even, it takes a toll that is hard to assess. It's one of those things you don't exactly notice until the lack goes away. No. No women in the Kingdom. Here it is men, a Kingdom of men. Living with men. Working with men. Teaching men. Men for cab drivers, and store clerks, and baggers in the grocery store, and servers in the restaurants, and manning every position behind the bar at every coffee shop, from Starbucks to Dunkin' Donuts. I talk with my mother on occasion. Recently, maybe four days past, I spoke with her and she asked me, "Peb, are you in love?" I laughed. No, mom. No, I am not in love. We don't actually get to see women here. The only ones that you can see are black Caspar the Ghost figures shuffling along from a distance. As a friend calls them, Moving Black Mailboxes.
Then we ate as the music continued. One of the guys, a feisty, smaller man with a European name, hailing I believe from Lebanon, or maybe Jordan, set many tea candles along a series of horizontal ledges against the wall that stuck up vertical about six to eight meters bordering our ring of chairs around the campfire so that these lovely small lights lit up the rock up close in a string, illuminating more intensely in spots what the firelight was painting with its strokes of dancing, brighter and less bright patches. And through it all a wondrous, caressing breeze pushed through, the perfect and most welcome complement to the seventy eight degrees ambient temperature and the heat from the fire next to us.
Then the Hash Circle was called and things went a bit properly sideways. The Hash leader, a Limey some twenty five years in the group, led the forty five minute event. Think of sailors, sea shanties, celebrity roasts with the added piquancy of bawdy and certainly inappropriate humor, and you'll be in the ballpark. It went something like this.
Our evening's Hash Circle emcee says, "Yanksoffalot, it's your turn, mate. C'm'in ta the circle." His stepping forward is followed by chuckling, heckling. Yanksoffalot knows enough to bring a full drink with him.
"I think I'm gonna tell a lil tale, then," says our emcee, who proceeds to talk about a Hash event that he and Yanksoffalot were involved in that took place in Thailand in a downpour so torrential that three to four inches of running water covered the ground, obliterating any marks for their trail run. This tale goes on for five minutes of untoward descriptions of incidents from that Hasher trip, put downs and profanities laced aplenty. Sexual innuendos, make that flat out sexual insults, are flung at the man in the middle and then emcee man begins one of many short drinking songs sung for the purpose of ridiculing the penis size of the participant or their sexual prowess, their inability to hold their drink, etc.
He's the Meanest
He's the Meanest
He sucks the horse's penis
He's the meanest, he's the horse's ass.
Ever since he found it
All he does is pound it
He's the meanest, he's the horse's ass.
So drink it down
Drink it down,
Drink it down, down, down, down,
Down, down, down.
Yanksoffalot gulps the rest of his drink and moves back to the edge of the circle.
As a Hash virgin I, and four other first timers, are brought into the middle, asked a few questions, not ridiculed badly, made to drink, insulted relatively little, and moved back to the edge. Why did we come to KSA. Why did we come to his event. Then emcee begins this sweet song for us.
Here's to the virgins ,
They're true blue,
They are Hashers through and through,
They are arseholes
So they say,
Tried to go to heaven,
But they went the other way,
Drink it down,
Drink It down,
Drink it down down, down, down
Down, down, down.
There was a naming ceremony for Izzy our driver. It was not his first hash event but he had yet to be named. He was brought into the circle not to be named, but just, as every single person around the fire was, for the purpose of ritual lambasting and heartfelt inclusion. Emcee man was asking some questions, as he is won't to do, for the purpose of finding an entry point into the target's sphere that he can exploit for harassment.
"What did you do earlier today?"
"Worked then did gym and swim, then packed up to go camping."
The only Saudi man present, a Shia man who I would later learn had been expelled from KFUPM as a student in 1982 because he was arrested and held by the secret police in Riyadh for eighteen days during a Shia uprising, speaks, "You should not be doing Jim." After a brief silence in which comprehension settles in, there is an eruption of laughter, even Izzy grins broadly, understanding the joke made at his expense. A second round of guffaws go around, as this homoerotic turn of phrase, especially coming from the one non-native English speaker in the crowd, continues to pay out in well merited mirth.
"Doing Jim! I believe that'd be a right fine Hashtag for Izzy." Emcee says, holding his cup up high, the firelight turning him into some archetypal medieval fireside bard. "Doing Jim!" Assesses the nodding heads, the murmurs of assent, the other glasses raising. "Do I hear a second?"
There is a second, and it is confirmed.
"On your knees, Doing Jim." He kneels, a cup of libation and a fistful of sand are both used to baptize him, his shaved head lit by the fire now tarnished. He gets a rousing collection of shouts and giggles as he stands, a new man reborn a Hasher.
Why was he born so beautiful?
Why was he born at all?
He's no fuckin' use to anyone,
He's no fuckin' use at all.
They say he's a joy to his mother,
But he's a pain in the asshole to me,
So, drink it down,
Drink it down,
Drink it down, down, down, down
Down, down, down.
The Hash circle doles out its requisite verbal abuse and mandated chugging of libations, runs its course.
After the Circle is complete, the guitar strums back to life, there is a lighting of paper globes, Japanese lanterns really, so that the piece of flammable material suspended below the soft globe fills it with hot air, causing it to light up like a magical, naturally lit globe maybe the better part of a meter in height, lifting slowly up and up and up, becoming smaller and smaller until it drifts too far and is lost behind the wall of the edge of our little firelight lit wadi.
Drunken food eating happens, louder laughter, continuing on for another hour or two. The evening could not be more meteorologically gentle, the crowd mellowing. It is not much longer before people begin to drift off. I, deciding the amber wasn't doing the trick, go for a cup half filled with what is called "mother's ruin," and find myself stumbling about as though somebody had improperly tampered with my gyroscopic controls. It can't be but ten minutes after this that I decide, if that precise a verb can be attached to my very much anything but precise state, that perhaps heading for horizontal may be the best or only reasonable choice. There is a bit of haziness that creeps into the pictures of what happens to me at this point. But while I remember still shots of the firelight on the faces of some of the Hashers, somewhat tilted and grainy images of the wadi as I shuffled in search of my bedroll, I am gonna guess that one of the items that I reached for as I made my last fly by of the food table, en route to bed, was the tin foil wrapped, cheese covered garlic bread.
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