Places have different colored air. When I debarked the plane in Saudi Arabia, I realized something – you can see air. The air has color. I never noticed this before because I had not often left the center of the North American continent, where the air tends to have a light blue-green tinge, like corn-seedling-green mixed with Walmart-blue. But the air in Saudi Arabia is red-orange, somehow simultaneously clear but also the color of flame and sand. There’s a scientific reason for this, due to suspended particles in the atmosphere and the latitudinal angle of the sun in the sky.
Places have smells. Southern Wisconsin smells like moss, but northern Wisconsin smells like wet granite. The Dakotas smell like cedar wind. St. Louis smells like cigarettes on a summer evening and baseball hot dogs, but New York City smells like traffic on a summer evening and street corner hot dogs. Saudi Arabia smells like sand and sand.
Places have sounds. Wisconsin sounds like early birds and the distant hum of agricultural industry. The Dakotas sound like campfire crackle and the silence after a shotgun blast. Silence is a sound. Sand sounds like silence.
Saudi Arabia has two sounds: the extremes of very loud and very quiet. For example, take the dichotic tones of the Arabic language. To my Western ears, it first sounded angry and emotional, coming from a part of the throat that English speakers reserve for shouting or hacking up lung disease. Arabic communication has no Middle American coyness or fake nice. If a Saudi person doesn’t like something, they will tell you with great passion. And if they do like something, they may pretend it’s rubbish so they can get a cheaper price. Bargaining is an art form in Arabic culture. After time and some language study, I learned that people weren’t arguing, it was just the cadence of the language. But still, it set my nerves on edge for a few months.
Along with this was the chaos of the city noise. Riyadh at the time had a population of around 7 million and was growing exponentially. My idea of the big city was Minneapolis, with a population about 80% smaller. Only Mexico City and New York City are bigger than Riyadh, and New York not by much. Even Chicago, the third largest city in USA, has only half the population of Riyadh, despite sprawling over almost 10 times the area. The population density creates traffic and shouting which at first drove me crazy.
But I could always sleep after the sun set, because Riyadh is a desert city, and the desert is quiet, especially at night. In a conservative Muslim country, there are no bumping night clubs or midnight theater matinees. Arabic language can also be very soft and quiet at nighttime, when people sit on their roof tops to sip fruit flavored tobacco from cool burbling water pipes and murmur at cat ear volume. If you go out in the desert, you can experience true quiet that’s something like true darkness when they turn the lights out during cave tours. This is true silence of the wide open spaces, and sand.
Sand sand sand. It’s everywhere – not just the soil under your feet. It coats the entryways, stairwells, windowpanes, comes through cracks in the doors and leaves miniature sand dunes on your floor. It gets in your eyes and teeth when the wind blows. The sand got into my ears and then my brain and I don’t know if I ever got it all out.
Simeon Brown 