Arabian Son

Christmas in Khobar - Excerpt from Salt Tablet Lake

Half Moon Bay! What can I say? 

Living in 1950s Aramco, it was paradise. Not as much for the Ras Tanurans who lived at the beach, but for those us in Dhahran living on the rocky jabal or the citizens of Abqaiq, planted deep within a vast sand dune field thirty miles from the coast, Half Moon Bay spelled happiness.

From the beginning its warm, unspoiled waters lured us all: toddlers, mud castle builders, swimmers, fishermen, sailors, water skiers, snorkelers and beachgoers of every age. 

The shore was completely undeveloped and the beaches as far as you could see were absolutely as pristine as they always had been – not a speck of plastic litter anywhere. Just clean sand bleeding off into the waist-high water for a few yards until sharply descending 15 or 20 feet at the drop off. 

In the summer the water temperature can get into the high 80s but go out to the drop-off and dive under about six feet and you’ll hit the thermocline, a sharply defined layer of cooler water, and the temperature will drop to the 70s. Cool and refreshing. The entire coastline of Half Moon Bay was pretty much the way it had always been for thousands of years, if not more. 

A road had been built across the head of the bay, maybe in the 1940s, leaving to the north a lake a couple of hundred yards long that was cut off from the bay. Salt water kept seeping in, but it never left and the lake kept getting saltier and saltier. The water was much greener than in the bay, so we called it Salt Tablet Lake in honor of the hallowed salt tablet and the ubiquitous hunter green salt tablet dispensers that were everywhere in Aramco. Every weekend hundreds of adults drove past the Salt Tablet on the way to the Yacht Club. Hardly any of them bothered to check it out, but we did. 

The Salt Tablet was probably saltier than the Dead Sea or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. We’d wade out into four feet of water and sit down to float around as if we were seated in chaise lounges. Go out a little deeper and try to dive to the bottom and you couldn’t do it. No matter how hard you swam, by the time you got past your knees you‘d come bobbing back up like a cork.

We’re all sixteen. Ben, Landis and I are floating around in the Salt Tablet with Marie and Sheila. Splashing each other, trying to dive down, bobbing around talking about the party tonight at Barclay’s. It’s August around two in the afternoon. The temperature is about 125 degrees and the UV Hazard Index is about 20 points over death ray, so we are obviously having a great time....

Christmas in Khobar @ Amazon