“I DARE YOU.”
This was long before my mind was filled with thoughts of climate change and rising sea levels wiping out all the cities on the East coast.
Before I began to think about Being on the Beach. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to head out on the highway road tripping past the last of the stop signs.
“YOU CAN DO IT”
It was toward the end of the last millennia, one Ramadan near the end of the first Gulf war and I was sitting behind the wheel of a white 1990 Caprice.
I’m not saying my trip had the same vanishing point as sitting behind the wheel of a white 1970 Dodge Challenger but I did have to ask myself was I ready to go.
I had borrowed a company car explaining I planned to head south from the Eastern region through Abqaig, Hofuf and Ain Dar then head west through al Kharg to Riyahd and Jeddah, turn south again to Taif overlooking Mecca and then follow the coast through the mountains down past AbHa to Khamis Mushat on the border with Yemen.
From there I would take the Layla Road through Tathlith and Wadi ad Wasir up to where they were starting to build Hawtah.
“COME ON, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!”
The people who loaned me the company car gave me my passport back with an ARAMCO travel permit and the “ if you get in trouble we will disavow any knowledge of you” speech.
“DON’T YOU?”
For a while I followed the polychrome painted Mercades Benz Hurdy Gurdy wagons that carried bulk cargos down to the Rivers in the Desert on the Crystal Plateau where the spice merchants caravans followed lines of kites and cairn laid down by gazelle hunters when all this land was still savannah.
Visible above the license plate of the one ahead as it slowed down to pass a wreck was the slogan “Lovely People, Lovely Work”.
There were lots of wrecks because when the dust storms closed in you couldn’t see the road, or the camels crossing it, or the trucks driving on the wrong side of it, and when things went south the word Inshallah took the place of brakes and horns.
Thousands of km over 100 ° non-stop then the words “Road is not maintained beyond this point” half buried in the drift sand” as the last of the bilingual signage.
“THIS ISN’T FUN. I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE”…
“TOO LATE NOW”
In the mountains I entered a region of old mudbrick forts and terraced fields looking like something from pictures of China or Peru with roads disappearing into wadis where small groups of villagers sat smoking kief in open storefronts with plastic shopping bags full of “Pebsi” instead of “Pepsi” at their sides.
Driving down into Mekka in Ramadan the traffic was hopeless, so I re-provisioned at Taif up in the mountains above where the shopkeepers did their well amused “we don’t see this every day” best to understand my illiteracy.
Eventually having passed the point where the baboons sit on the edge of the cliffs to watch you go off the road coming down from the mountains near Khamis Mushat the engine began to slam boom bam its complaints.
It was clear as I pulled into Tathlith it wasn't going much further so I got the villagers to build me a sand ramp, drove up it into the back of a hurdy gurdy and headed back into the city of towers 6th century style industrial district.
I spent the next month living over a garage waiting for parts with a bunch of Egyptian Arabs who could fix anything, even hammer the well compacted result of a car truck collision back into shape.
We sat on the roof smoking kief, watching soccer players below, drinking green tea, eating Ramadan cakes after our fast, went into town to dance and sing Egyptian rock lyrics.
“DO YOU WEAR THE HOOP, THE HOOP, THE HOOP, DO YOU WEAR THE HOOP?”
I learned Freedom is a state of Being without limits.