A Symposium on Deserts
MOST OF what is now Riyadh was once an oasis surrounded by desert, before it was transformed into a metropolis where neighborhoods were divided into one-kilometer blocks—a city devoid of squares and other spaces of assembly. Today, its highways are packed, its fast-food restaurants are full, and skyscrapers pierce the horizon.
When winter comes, city-dwellers go out to the desert. Some only venture as far as Thumamah, on the outskirts of Riyadh. Others travel a hundred kilometers to oases such as those in Tuwayyq. Besides enjoying the modest greenery and springs that the winter rains bring, these sojourners are driven mainly by a desire to flee the city.
At night in the desert, people wrap themselves in wool, sip tea, converse, and warm themselves by a fire. The word for “fire” is literally “light.” Spark the light. Some tribes used to view the sparking of the light as a sign of hospitality, a beacon to attract guests and wayfarers.
I’ve never been a desert person, but a friend of mine is. I went with him to Thumamah recently, much to his chagrin. He had wanted us to venture farther, to the “real desert.”
“After a rainfall, it’s wondrous,” he said as he opened the trunk of his car and pulled out a carpet, which we spread over the sand. “Leave your phone in the car so we can speak freely,” he said, alluding to the ubiquitous surveillance.
We took out some pieces of wood, charcoal cubes, and a coffee pot, and sat down on the carpet as my friend started to spark the light. The sky did not boast many stars, but the moon was full. He warmed his hands by the fire and poured me a cup of Saudi coffee. Then we began to talk.
—Tariq al Haydar
STRANGE WHAT one remembers and what one forgets. Very big events in my life have a way of fading quickly, at least in the grainy details that alone confer some sense of reality on lived experience. But I recall with hallucinatory vividness, for no particular reason, a camping trip to the Borrego desert that I took with Ellen almost fifty years ago. We were young, still happy with each other, fiercely political, giddy with the irresistible energy and zaniness of California in the early 1970s. One winter vacation, when the clouds and rains settled over Berkeley, we flew to San Diego, rented a car, and drove east across the mountains. At first, to eyes that had been feasting off the beauties of the Bay Area, the landscape was disappointing. The creosote bush, smoke-thorn, and ocotillo were a far cry from coastal redwoods and Monterey pines. It all seemed weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.
Sighing at the mistake we had made in coming, we took our small tent out of the trunk to set it up for the night. And then it happened: we realized what it actually meant to be in the desert on this particular day, in this particular season. We looked around for a level place without sharp rocks where we could spread the ground cloth. There were many possibilities; much of the terrain around us was almost drearily flat. But as soon as we actually focused our eyes on the ground, we saw that we had a problem we had not foreseen. There were flowers absolutely everywhere, many of them small, to be sure, but exquisitely beautiful. Never before or since have I seen so many. And we understood that they had been long waiting beneath the dun-colored sand for this moment, when they could arise and show themselves. There was no square inch without them. What I remember now, across a great gap of time, is the strange feeling, a mingling of pleasure and shame, at pitching our tent on top of them.
—Stephen Greenblatt
ALMOST TWENTY years ago, I took a road trip deep into the American desert. With me were thirteen members of a Berkeley
