The Empty Quarter

I find myself absentmindedly thumbing through my passport from time to time, and recently noticed that my profession is listed as Muhrem on my UAE visa. I wondered what that meant so I ran it by our friends in Mountain View. Muhrem, describes a man's legal connection to a woman, either familial or marital, (sometimes both where tribal bloodlines are dwindling) as permitted by the Koran. While Vanessa isn't required to cover her head in public here, the concept of Muhrem traditionally indicates that I'm one of the few men she can let her hair down around.  As far as the government is concerned, my job is to be Vanessa's husband, and, should the police decide to come knocking on our door late at night, I have proof that my presence in our home is legitimate. While there are many unmarried couples living together in Dubai, and people seem largely unconcerned about shacking up, there is some jeopardy that non-marital cohabitation might become a problem if you run afoul of the law in some other area. 

It was in my capacity as Muhrem that I accompanied my wifemployer on her work retreat this past weekend. Thursday morning we sleepily loaded our bags and borrowed camping gear into the back of our friend Ed's SUV and made for Ibn Battuta, a single story sprawl mall boasting global themed buildings of varying stye. Reportedly, "It's a Mall World Afterall" was rejected during the naming process. Aside from all the sand, it's these thematic real estate projects that invite comparisons between Dubai and Las Vegas. 

From Ibn Battuta we joined a convoy of V's Environmental Group co-workers and began a longish drive towards the 650,000 square kilometer swath of desert known as Rub' al Khali, or simply, The Empty Quarter. Here the desert has a burnt orange overtone, an illusion created by a scattering of almost paprika like sand grains. I imagine this is the scorched skin of the desert, baked to a darker hue by the relentless sun. Whatever it is, you feel like you're afloat in the high seas, surrounded by sandy swells that never arrive.

After two hours or so, we left the main road and continued down a sandy path until all but one of the two wheel drive cars became hopelessly stuck. Getting stuck in the sand is apparently the desert past time, and very few of the 4x4's in our party would remain exempt. We came to a stop just across from a camel farm that breeds a very friendly, dark brown variety of Arabian camels. Myra, a Pakistani coworker of V's, noted that these gentle animals were very different from the two-humped bactrian type that she's used to seeing at home. These gregarious creatures seemed to enjoy their celebrity, and needed almost no coaxing to interact. So while most of us were off petting the livestock, a few industrious SUV owners managed to push and pull the small cars free, and we were off. We left the compact cars on the hard packed ground near the camel farm and ferried the marooned passengers up to the campsite.

Our location had been picked via google maps, and was more or less just a random set of GPS coordinates that happened to lie downwind from a decaying camel corpse. Occasionally, its alarming stench would punctuate the desert's sweeping beauty, reminding us of its potent lethality. As we unloaded our gear from the 4x4s someone made the suggestion that we lump all our belongings together and pass them down into the valley of the surrounding dunes in a coordinated bucket brigade style hand off. This plan relocated our belongings to the campsite with far fewer trips up and down the steep slope, but because we had borrowed a tent and sleeping bags (ours were custom made for Billy Barty) we had no idea what our equipment actually looked like. After pondering a cold sleepless night under the stars, of which I've never seen so many, even on the clearest night in the Sierras, I did eventually find everything and for once we managed to get our tent up before nightfall. The temperature had dropped by several degrees as the sun began to wane, and we still wound up fairly cold throughout the night even with our borrowed gear. Near dawn I got up and put the rain fly on, which improved our insulation favorably until the sun eventually chased us out of a now sweltering tent.

As this was a corporate retreat, meal responsibilities had been assigned weeks earlier via email, our appointed chefs grilling burgers and skewers of chicken until everyone was full. We contributed to dessert, toting a corpulent bag of marshmallows, graham crackers and chocolate bars, and coaching various Poms, Scotts, Kiwis, Aussies, Seeth Ifricans, and a lone Spaniard towards constructing their first s'more. I don't think I'd had one in over twenty years myself.

After dinner I got my guitar out and somehow found myself providing the musical backdrop for a compulsory round of silly dancing. Seated around the campfire, each person was compelled to stand up and shake what their mama gave them, one after the other, no exceptions. I actually took up an instrument based on the concept that musicians don't dance, but I guess my skills were found wanting because I too cut a sandy rug. Revelers were heard late into night, with at least one co-worker adopting a new vodka fueled persona, about which he refused to comment the next day.

In the morning, I walked out into the desert until I was out of sight and ear shot of the group. The silence there is intense, and several of our fellow campers complained that the solitude exposed a low ringing in their ears that is presumably drowned out by Dubai's incessant drone. Looking around, with dunes on all sides of me, I could see the movements of birds, beetles and small animals written in the sand, tiny weaving tracks that traced inexplicable routes and patterns. 

Our own presence in the Empty Quarter must have altered the landscape in ways that will be legible for some time to come, despite our best efforts to pack our trash and leave things much as we'd found them. It is a strange thing to see an essentially hostile environment like Empty Quarter temporarily populous. It's a place where the borders of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the UAE dissolve into anarchic confusion, a place that belongs to know one in particular. If not for our four wheel drive cars,  portable shelter, and gallon upon gallon of drinking water, this quiet country would surely have swallowed us whole.