A Saudi Picnic

These past couple of weeks have predictably making me stir crazy. I've been spending too much time at home and too much time playing video games. Despite having made a schedule produced explicitly to keep me in good health mental, physically and emotionally, I really needed to get out of Rabigh for a while. Thus it came as a boon when a coworker suggested that we hold a picnic at a place he knows, just out of town.
In three cars a group of about ten of us made our way out to Mathew's mysterious campground. In the forty minutes or so it took to get there, I was astounded by the diversity of the landscape--no really! Here it was flat and sandy, then covered with shrubs, then it was hilly, then covered in boulders with little trees popping up here and there. Eventually, we ended up in a a small valley, with a shallow (but far-reaching) lake. It was a bona-fide  desert oasis. There were flocks of goats, and even camels! We had our picnic under a copse of palm trees. 

Some years ago, I read the short novel, Ismael, in which the author suggests that this part of the world was once covered in lush greenery, and that it is now barren because of man's unsustainable habits. The trip was a reminder that things really do grow in Arabia, especially in this western region--in fact tenaciously. I found myself wondering just how correct the author of Ishmael really was.

I mean, once thing is for sure: Arabia was once covered in vegetation, and inhabited by a massive amount of wildlife. We know this because of the enormous subterranean seas of oil. The only question is if there weren't endless herds of goats stripping the landscape of plant life, would the peninsula look much different?

I'm guessing it would. As the colleague who organized the trip mentioned, there used to be lions here, but the natives killed them all off. So, if there are no predators, even if there were herds of goats, sheep, camels, or whatever that weren't counted as livestock, they would not linger in any given place. Instead of stripping the ground of vegetation, they would eats some, then move on, propelled forward by predators, spreading seeds, and fertilizing the ground as they go.

Modern man has gone a step further. A few meters from where we sat to have our picnic, one could find, here and there, among the hundreds of discarded water bottles, shot-gun shells, and the corpses of massive hawks. Clearly not shot for food, as their entire corpses were intact--but purely for the fun of it. Sometimes I think Saudis have a deep seeded resentment for all living things and are doing all they can to erase life in the peninsula altogether.

None the less, it was a nice place to picnic. I was excited to see camels so close to our picnic site, and got quite close to one in order to take its picture. Evidently, it became very curious of me as it began walking towards me then following me back to the picnic site. I was a little alarmed, until one of my colleagues approached and petted the animal. It was docile, but decided to turn away when it got closer to the group of us. 

When the sun began to set, a few of us decided to hike around the surrounding area awhile. The ground was soft and muddy for several meters where the water had recently receded. I avoided the soft ground by walking on an elevated ridge, and then hiking up one side of the valley. There was a plateau on top, and I was amazed to see that around the jagged rocks thereupon, spouted beautiful, bright green grass. The view was really nice. I could see the water stretch onwards as far as the eye could see towards the north.

We left shortly after I came down from the plateau.  The excursion was brief, but pleasant, and for a while Arabia didn't seem like such an inhospitable environment. It was a welcome break.