CHRISTMAS in KHOBAR - Excerpt from the Introduction
This map pinpoints the locations of the first 40 wells drilled into the Dammam Dome, the geological name for the oil field that started everything in Saudi Arabia. It shows the Dhahran camp and the basic topography of the surrounding area to Al Khobar on the Gulf coast and toward the much older port of Dammam to the north.
To the west are the twin free-standing jebels: Jebel Midra Ash-Shemali at 509 feet tall and Jebel Midra Al-Junibi, which was two feet taller. Almost everything between these two landmarks and the Arabian Gulf is untouched desert, the same as it has always been.
This map was published in 1947, the year I was born in Dhahran.
I spent the greater part of my first 30 years in Saudi Arabia, watching the nation explode into a modernity that literally redrew this map.
In a stunning display of bad judgment, the governor of the Eastern Province delivered Jebel Junibi into the hands of a consortium of rapacious Saudi businessmen who leveled this 500-foot-high natural wonder to make cut limestone blocks.
The highest peak and one of the most unique micro-ecologies on the entire coast from Kuwait to Qatar, a specialized habitat replete with peculiar insects, rare plants, Neolithic markings, and a view to die for was reduced to bricks. I witnessed the last 30 feet of the jebel being methodically mined in 2012.
Today there isn’t a piece of land east of Dhahran that is not developed. Homes, stores, apartment buildings, car lots, factories, stadiums, roads and freeways, offices and luxury malls cover the earth. There isn’t any desert anymore.
Gone too are the herds of sprightly gazelle trotting through the morning mist, the jackals slinking around in the rocks, the hedgehogs and small foxes snug in their burrows, the huge lizards called dhubbs streaking across the sand.
Look up into the night sky, and you can barely see a star for the glare of the metropolis. The air smells of asphalt and exhaust. No matter where you turn there is no quiet. The quiet that is the voice of the desert...
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