MEMORIES: ANCIENT SITES

MEMORIES 9^th Installment

(Scroll down for earlier installments, or type MEMORIES in the search box.)

AFTER ENJOYING INDIA, WE RETURN TO YANBU

©Edward R. Close 2018 

Our visit to India was, for us, far more than just a vacation. We were on a spiritual pilgrimage. I had been a member of Self-Realization Fellowship, practicing Kriya Yoga since 1960, and Jacqui and I were married in an Indian Fire Ceremony at SRF Lake shrine in Pacific Palisades California by an SRF monk. Our primary point of pilgrimage in India was the burial site of Sri Yukteshwar Giri, author of “The Holy Science” and the guru of SRF Founder Paramahansa Yogananda. Swami Sri Yukteshwarji’s burial site is in an ashram in the city of Puri, on the Bay of Bengal.

In Delhi, we spent some time at the Vedanta Ramakrishna Mission, where we were able to meditate in the temple, a rare privilege for westerners. At one point, I opened my eyes and the stature of Ramakrishna appeared to be alive, turning to look at me, nodding and smiling. I blinked, and the smiling saint became the statue again. Daydream? Imagination? It seemed very real!

From New Delhi we flew to Bhubaneshwar, arriving there in the late afternoon. We enjoyed visiting the many ancient temples there. We also attended an all-night-long spiritual celebration with devotees of the Hindu Saint Bhaduri Mahasaya, also known as the Levitating Saint. I participated with sadhus (Hindu aesthetics) in circumambulating the ritual fire while Jacqui and Joshua sat and watched. After the ceremony, we visited with the Rani and her son, the ruling Brahman family of the area.

Bhaduri Mahasaya

In Bhubaneshwar, we hired a car and driver and traveled to Puri by way of Konark. In Puri, we stayed in an Indian hotel near the beach, and paid our respects to Sri Yukteshwar by meditating in front of the Mandir for several hours.

Konark Sun Temple, Orissa State

Sri Yukteshwar Mandir, Puri

Back in Yanbu, I found my transfered to the Engineering Department to be a great improvement. Instead of environmental planner, I was now environmental engineer in charge of over-seeing all environmental subcontracts, I Also continued to try to find ways to solve the many environmental problems that the Company had created. Daily confrontations with an incompetent supervisor were, thankfully, a thing of the past. Instead of being housed in sweltering boxcars, the Engineering Department occupied an actual building, part of the permanent buildings of Madinat Yanbu Al-Sinayah.

The Chief Engineer, a large, imposing man of Greek descent from New Jersey, was a competent manager. He commanded my respect, even if I did not agree with some of his policies. On the first day, he sat me down and said:

“I’m told that you are a trouble maker.” He peered at me over half glasses with dark rims. “I don’t want any trouble in this department. Understand?”

“I don’t want any trouble either, Sir” I replied. “All I want, is to do my job.”

“And I’ll decide what your job is.” He said pointedly.

Apparently, my former supervisor had filled his ear. In spite of this, we developed a reasonably amicable working relationship. That is, it was amicable until the day he asked me to investigate a possible archaeological site in an area designated as a sub-contractor lay-down zone near the northeastern corner of the Industrial City property.

“Eddie,” (No one had called me Eddie since I was a kid back in Missouri.) “the sub-contractor has reported finding some bones or something out there. I want you to go out there and investigate. I want you to write me up a report so that we can go ahead and rough-grade that area.”

When I arrived at the site, the subcontractor showed me what he had found. He had bulldozed a three-foot deep, twenty-foot wide cut in the bank of a ravine in order to gain access to his designated lay-down area (a staging area for construction materials like pipes, caissons, and concrete blocks, prior to their use building the industrial city). Rib cage bones were hanging out of the side of the cut.

“Do you think they’re human bones?” He asked. He looked worried.

It didn’t take me long to find a human skull, a stray mandible (jaw bone), a femur, and assorted other human bones. The bones were bleached white, but so well preserved, that I thought at first that they must be recent burials. But as I explored the area beyond the ravine, I found rectangular groupings of stone and coral rock, marking the locations of former buildings, littered with pot shards. As I looked farther, I found a few stone implements among the potshards, indicating to me that the site might be very old. This was to be rough-graded to be used as a lay-down area!

There were dozens of building sites, and a hand-dug well near the edge of the ravine. I sounded it to find that it was about twenty feet deep. It was dry, either filled in by blowing sand, or perhaps it no longer intersected the groundwater table. Across another dry wash was an extensive cemetery, rows of mounds of black rock and sand. I estimated at least thirty or forty graves.

I was not able to write the report that the Company management wanted. So, I was on their not-so-cool employee list again. I didn’t trust them not to destroy my report and precede to rough-grade the site. The bones and traces of the village site could be buried quickly with the efficient earth-moving equipment they had on hand. Concerned that this might happen, I went to a senior British engineer I knew to be one of the organizers of the local Historical Society. He advised me to call the Ministry of Antiquities in Jeddah, which I did. They sent a team of two men out to Yanbu to appraise the site.

The men from the Ministry told me that the site was pre-Mohammedan, and probably an important stop on the ancient Spice Trail (Frankincense Trail) that ran from Southern Arabia (now Yemen and Oman) to the Nabatean site called Petra, in Northern Arabia (present-day Jordan). The village was to be protected as a historical site. The lay-down area had to be relocated.

                                               

MEMORIES: MY FAMILY ARRIVES IN YANBU

MEMORIES, 7^th Installment

(Scroll down for earlier installments of MEMORIES
 and for CONVERSATION WITH AN ATHEIST)

MY FAMILY ARRIVES IN YANBU!

©Edward R. Close 2018  

It was 1981. Two years before the first cell phone came on the market. The only way I could communicate with anyone back home, other than by mail, which seemed to take forever, or mental telepathy, a skill I hadn’t perfected, was to go to the Company Communications Center and submit the telephone number and name of the person I wanted to call on a piece of paper to one of several young men sitting at one of a row of desks across from eight or ten phone booths lining the other side of the room. After submitting the paper, I had to sit or stand, along with several, other ex-pats and wait. Eventually, a phone would ring in one of the booths, and if it was for me, the young man who took my sheet of paper, would motion to me and point at the phone booth where my call was coming through. The voice on the other end sounded faint and far away. Of course, it was coming from the other side of the world! If you were lucky, you would only get cut off once or twice before you could complete your conversation.

Just before Jacqui and Joshua arrived from California, I was allowed to move from the single-housing barracks into a three-room pre-fabricated house with plastic walls, in Ex-Pat Village. It had two rooms: a living room and kitchen in one room, and a bedroom, and bath room in the other. After the broom-closet I had called home for more than two months, it seemed like luxury! There were two heavy-duty air conditioners mounted in the wall of each room. One running almost continuously, because the outdoor temperature rarely got down to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and was often over 100, the second was a backup. Temperatures regularly reached 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime.

Family Housing in Yanbu

My battle with management continued non-stop. The day before I was to go to Jeddah to meet Jacqui and Joshua as they entered the Kingdom for the first time, my supervisor gave me an assignment that would take two or three days to complete, demanding that the completed task had to be on his desk by the end of the day. I did what I could in the time I had and, the next day, before leaving for lunch, I put it on his desk with a note letting him know that I was going to Jeddah to pick up my family and that I would finish the task when I returned from Jeddah.

 I went home, grabbed a small over-night bag I had packed the night before, and jumped on the mid-day bus to Jeddah. In my haste and eagerness to see my family, I never thought to get my my papers from Admin. In Jeddah, I reserved a room in the hotel and contacted Saleem to take me to the airport and help Jacqui get through customs.

 A new airport was being built in Jeddah, and it was nearly finished, but arrivals were still coming into the old airport. It was hot and crowded, and I had to wait for Jacqui and Josh to get through Customs. I could see them from one floor above, and to one side of the arrival deck. Saleem was dragging the luggage to a holding area while Jacqui, holding onto our three-year old to keep him from running off into the crowd, counted off the pieces of luggage as they came through from inspection. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could see Saleem asking, time after time, “Is this the last?” and Jacqui shaking her head no, after which he would roll his eyes and drag another large suitcase, box or trunk toward the waiting company car.

Jacqui knew there were no supermarkets in Yanbu, so, in the many letters she wrote during the drawn-out wait for visas, she asked me to tell her what supplies were hard to come by. What I didn’t know was that she was stocking up on the things I mentioned as hard to get and had brought them with her. There were large boxes of toilette paper, a year’s supply of rice, and many other things. I think she had 13 pieces of luggage.

We were in the hotel by about 2:00 am, but none of us could sleep. After Joshua finally fell asleep, we talked until breakfast time, catching up. And I worried about how I would get all the luggage on the bus. With Saleem’s help, I managed it and were on our way to Yanbu.

We encountered an unpleasant surprise when the bus was stopped at a newly-erected military checkpoint near the village of Rabigh. It seemed there had been an attempted coup on the House of Saud in Riyadh, and a cache of guns had been found in the Hejazi region. A Saudi soldier who looked to be about fifteen years old climbed into the bus waving a machine gun and demanding papers of all on board.

My heart sank as I realized that I had no papers. I could imagine being led off for interrogation and jail, while Jacqui had to continue on to Yanbu, alone, with all the luggage and our three-year old son. The young soldier spoke no English, so he was not quite sure why I was not producing my papers. The bus driver interceded, telling him that I was an employee of the Royal Commission. But the soldier just seemed to get angrier, waving the gun in my face. Just when I thought I was going to be dragged off the bus, the two wives of a Somali gentleman sitting across from us began to yell at the soldier. The bus driver chimed in, and finally, the young soldier threw up his hands and said “Halas!” (enough) and waved the bus on. Wiping the sweat from my brow, I thanked God, and the Somalis and the bus driver profusely. I sat back down by a visibly shaken Jacqui, and we continued toward Yanbu.

A few hours later, we unloaded in front of our temporary home in the camp. I drug the luggage into the house and collapsed, exhausted. A couple of hours later, I decided I’d better report in. My supervisor read me the riot act for not reporting immediately upon arrival in Yanbu, and for not having the work he assigned completed before going to Jeddah. Too tired to respond to his ranting, I retreated into my office, closed the door and went back to work.

I continued to fight the management and to attempt to solve the raw sewage and batch plant air pollution problems, with little progress on either front. I also continued working on the adaptation of the environmental regulations for Yanbu. This was a project that Company management and the Saudi management counterparts, including the Director General, approved of and wanted completed.

During the 10 and ½ hour days, six days per week that I had to work, Jacqui was virtually a prisoner in that two-room box called family housing. She could take josh and go to the commissary and dining hall, but she had to cover her hair, and be clothed from chin to ankles. We could go to the enclosed family pool after hours, or on the one-day weekend, but she could go nowhere off site without me. 

Jacqui was a beautiful young woman with red hair, and the single third-world workers, men without home-leave for their whole 18-month contracts, would stop and star at her, even as covered up as she had to be. This was a nightmare for her. The only bright spots were that she got to spend more time with Joshua than she had in Pasadena, where we both had to work, and the promise of a trip to India.

As the time rolled around when I would be eligible for a one-month “home-leave” we planned to go to India and Jacqui and I began working on making the arrangements with the Company Administrative Office, travel agencies and the Saudi Government officials in Jeddah. The process was tedious to say the least. Finally, we had the date set, the tickets purchased and were packed for the trip.

On the morning of the day before our departure, there was a note on my desk from my supervisor. It said I was not to leave Yanbu until a complete first draft of the environmental regulations for Yanbu and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were written and on his desk. This task was weeks from being finished, and he knew it.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back! The only reason Jacqui had reluctantly agreed for me to take this job and come to Saudi Arabia, was the chance to go to India, a dream we’d had since we first met in Florida.

I grabbed the note and stormed into the Supervisor’s office.

“We’re going on leave!” I sputtered.

“Not until the environmental regulations for MEPA are on my desk!” He glared at me.

My usual calm demeanor began to crumble. I forgot that I could go over his head. After the months of being harassed by this man, I had reached my limit. I got in his face:

“We’re leaving tomorrow!” I said with force.

“Don’t you yell at me,” he demanded. “Get out of my office and get back to work!”

My patience was gone. Angrier than I had ever been in my life, I leaned across his desk.

“I’ll leave your office when I’m good and ready!” I yelled. “We’re getting on that bus tomorrow, and if you do anything to prevent it, your life won’t be worth a plugged nickel!”

It was the first time in my life I had actually threatened to kill someone. It was so far beyond my nature that I was shocked when those words came out of my mouth! But, I was so angry, I was ready to take him out through the wall behind his desk, and he knew it. He shrank back a little and glared at me like a rat trapped in a corner.

I continued shouting, telling him exactly what I thought of him as a person and a supervisor. I ended with: “You are, without doubt, the worst so-called project manager I’ve ever met! Your incompetence makes what would be a difficult job, utterly impossible!”

I crumpled the note in my fist and threw it at him, whirled around and walked out of the room. 

The Planning Department offices were in boxcar-like structures with a hall down the middle and several offices on either side, with the supervisor’s office at the end, across from a copier and storage room. When I stepped out into the hall, to my surprise, all my co-workers stepped out of their offices and gave me a standing ovation. Everyone had heard my explosion.

I marched right on out of the building, still with a full head of steam, across the sand and into the office of the new Company Director of Planning, a man I had known in Pasadena.

“I’m going on leave tomorrow, Frank,” I told him, “and when I come back, I’m not working for that S.O.B. anymore! You can transfer me or send me home, I don’t care. But I won’t put up with him for one more minute!”

When we came back from India, I had been transferred to Engineering.

AROUND THE WORLD

MEMORIES, 4^th Installment

Going to the other side of the world is an interesting experience, and I think readers might be interested in what it was like for me. So, I’m taking a pause in the story to go back to my notes about my first trip from the United States to Saudi Arabia.

(Reminder: To read previous posts in this series scroll down or type "Memories" in the search box.)

MY FIRST TRIP
©Edward R. Close 2018

AROUND THE WORLD

The flight from SFO in San Francisco arched up over the northern US into Canada, following the “Great Circle” or Polar Route, over Nova Scotia, across the Arctic Ocean, over Greenland and Iceland, Scotland, the Shetland Islands, across the English Channel, down into Frankfurt, in the heart of Germany. As the flight started, it was a clear night, and I could see the reflection of the moon in the rivers and lakes below as we flew over northern Minnesota and Canada.

The sun came up over the Arctic, skimming along the northern horizon, long enough for me to see that Greenland and Iceland were mis-named. Greenland was covered with ice and snow, while Iceland was green! After a short time, the sun went down, and I marveled that a whole day had passed in a few hours! Of course, during the twelve-hour flight, nine hours were “lost” due to the progressive crossing of time zones. My head began to spin as I tried to calculate what day and time it was over the English Channel. It would be about midnight the day after I left California when I landed in Jeddah. There was an eleven-hour time difference between Los Angeles and Jeddah. It would almost noon in LA.

We landed in Frankfort and I marveled at the cleanliness and orderliness of the German airport. Police with small arms were evident around every corner. An enclosed pedestrian bridge crossed the autobahn from the airport to the Sheraton Hotel. I looked forward to the opportunity to practice my German. I had learned some German as a child, because two of my grandparents were of German descent, and German would be one of the languages I would choose to fulfill the PhD language requirements. A polite and efficient bellman accompanied me to my room and complemented me on my pronunciation of words of die Deutsche Sprache. After a short night, I flew on to Athens, and then to Jeddah, on the Red Sea in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

My heart ached, leaving Jacqui and our young son Joshua in Pasadena. It was the first time we had been apart for any length of time. The Company promised they could follow in about thirty days, after my arrival in Yanbu and completion of the appropriate paperwork. But, as the plane descended into the Arabian night, I felt the enormity of the thousands of miles separating us. When I stepped out of the airbus in Jeddah, I sensed a world so different that I thought: “Could this even be on the same planet?” The smells, a mixture of hot desert air, strange spices, and sewage, was like nothing I had ever smelled before. The Arabesque curves of multi-colored neon lights dazzled me as my eyes searched for any hint of signs in English. There were none.

It took hours to get through customs. They searched every nook and corner of my luggage for the forbidden: alcohol, pork products, and “pornography” (anything showing the female form). The customs official scowled at my passport and muttered “Amreeky”.

“You drink alcohol.” the inspector stated, as he rummaged through my socks and underwear.

“No.”

“You got girly pictures?” he asked as he dribbled ashes from the cigarette dangling from his lower lip into my suitcase.

“No.”

He finished rummaging and let me close my suitcase. Before he waved me on, he said:

“You not drink alcohol, no girly pictures, no smoke, no cuss at me, I think you not Amreeky!” He grinned, revealing uneven, brown stained teeth.

Saleem, the Saudi representative of the Company, greeted me as I exited customs and hustled me through the crowd of taxi drivers to a waiting car. By the time I reached my hotel room in downtown Jeddah, it was 2:30 am. Saleem had informed me that I had to be on the bus to Yanbu at 7:30 sharp. It would not wait for me! I looked around the hotel room. There was a raised arrow on the corner of the desk, pointing toward Mecca, and a prayer rug was folded nearby with a copy of the Koran lying on top of it. The Koran was beautifully decorated with sweeping Arabic characters. I hadn’t learned to read Arabic yet, but I found a copy of the Koran in English in the desk drawer. Since I couldn’t sleep, I began to read the Koran.

On the bus ride the next morning, I began to get a look at the Arabian Peninsula. We travelled along in a desolate desert land parallel to the Red Sea, north from Jeddah (Variously spelled Jeddah, Jidda or Jiddah, in English: the first vowel does not appear in the Arabic spelling of the word.) The rugged igneous Hejazi peaks flanked the coastal plain on the east. My training and interest in geology and hydrology made me curious about their origin and weathering. I hoped to get a chance to see them up close while in Yanbu, perhaps on weekends.

About noon we stopped at a cross road village called Badr, about 250 kilometers north of Jeddah. There were a few mud and rock buildings, some stunted palm trees and a clump of acacia shrubs. Villagers in grey robes and checkered head scarves stared at the bus blankly. While the driver filled the tank with diesel fuel, I went inside and purchased a package of cheese and crackers and a bottle of water with some of the Saudi currency (riyals) I had purchased in Jeddah. A few minutes later, we were on our way again. On the outskirts of Badr, Bedouins herded a small flock of black goats.

About an hour later, the bus pulled off the road and entered a gate with impressive Arabic lettering arching above it. I learned later that it read: “Madinat Yanbu Al-Sinayah” (Yanbu Industrial City). The Saudi symbols of crossed swords and palm trees flanked it on either side. There was just a gate, no fence. I had studied the plans for the industrial city before I left Pasadena, but what I saw here was what looked like a group of boxcars sitting in a wide wadi (dry wash) between the Hejazi Mountains and the Red Sea. I stepped down from the bus and the Somali bus driver said: “Company man comes soon”, closed the doors and drove away.

I set my suitcase down on the sand and looked at the box car radiating heat in front of me. It was silent, as if abandoned here in the desert. I looked around. I was completely alone. The only movement was a dust devil, whirling like a fat rope dancing in the mid-day heat waves between me and the black mountains to the east. I looked down at the dust settling on the black polished surface of my shoes.

“What have I gotten myself into?” I wondered.

EXPEDITION INTO FORBIDDEN TERRITORY

Note: This is second in this series of posts. Scroll down to read the first.

THE NEED TO EXPLORE

©Edward R. Close 2018

I was standing there alone for what was probably five or ten minutes, but seemed like an eternity, until a young man showed up, driving a dust-covered Chevy Suburban. After a brief tour of Yanbu Al Sina’iya (Yanbu Industrial City), which consisted mainly of driving to the “Bird Tank”, a water tower painted blue with white sea gulls all over it, and pointing out where the future refinery and deep-water port were to be constructed, the “Company man”, an Australian named Robbie, dropped me off at the entrance to my temporary quarters. He gave me a key with the number 101 on one side and the same number in Arabic on the other.

The Bird Tank

The entrance to the temporary quarters was an Arabesque arch, a miniature version of the grand arch over the entrance to the Industrial City site. Everything was painted white. Two rows of box like structures stood in an enclosure beyond the arch. My room was the first door on the left. I unlocked the door and stepped into a small cubical, maybe 8 feet by 10 feet, with a bunk, a chair, a small table/desk and a peg in the corner with three clothes hangers on it. A single window was over-shadowed by two air conditioners. One droning away, the other on stand-by as a backup. Afternoon temperatures of 120° F plus was not uncommon here in the summer months. After Robbie drove away, I looked around. There was no one here but me.

Robbie had pointed out the dining hall, about a hundred yards away, as we drove up to the temporary quarters location, and said it opened for breakfast at 6:00 AM. It was 4:30 PM as I stood there, and that meant it was 5:30 AM back home in Pasadena. I hadn’t slept more than 3 hours in the hotel in Jeddah, after arriving in King Abdulaziz International Airport about 11:30 the previous night and going through customs. Customs in the Jeddah International Airport was a grueling three hours of mostly standing in line while customs agents went through every piece of luggage, looking for weapons, pork products, alcohol, Christian - or any other non-Muslim literature, and pornography (anything with pictures of the uncovered female form - like, e.g., the lingerie section of a Sears Catalogue). All such things were confiscated. In the hotel, before going to sleep, I read about half of the ornately decorated Koran that had been placed on the desk next to an arrow pointing toward Mecca.

“Well, this is it; the beginning of a new adventure!” I said to myself. I closed the door, set my suitcase down, hung my jacket on the peg and flopped on the bunk. I was sound asleep within minutes. That night, I dreamed of climbing the highest mountain in the range of black jagged peaks looming to the east of Yanbu. Ay breakfast the next morning, I met Giorgio Daher.

Giorgio was something of a wild man. Of Turkish-American origin, from Atlanta Georgia, he looked and sounded a lot like the TV journalist, Geraldo Rivera. He was a landscape architect who had been in Yanbu for a year or two when I arrived; he spoke some Arabic, and he had just purchased a jeep. He and Douglas, a British engineer from London, were two of the friends I made among the 30 or so expatriate co-workers on the Yanbu Al- Sina’iya Project.

There was not much to do within the boundaries of Yanbu Al- Sina’iya during off-duty hours. There was a commissary and a swimming pool, and that was it; and the old city of Yanbu Al-Bahr (Spring on the Sea), about 15 kilometers north, had only two or three shops, and a French-Lebanese restaurant. I was trying to learn Arabic but found it much more difficult for me to get a handle on than any of the European languages.

As the only environmental engineer and planner on the project, I was one of a few “key personnel” who had family status. I was told that it would take about 90 days to get the paperwork in order and bring my wife Jacqui and our 3-year-old son Joshua to Yanbu. In fact, it took quite a bit longer. I had a few books with me and a Rubik’s cube, and I was working on a paper that would become part of my second book, “Infinite Continuity”, but, except for the challenges of the job, after two or three weeks, life in Yanbu became very boring.

Giorgio was a free spirit who would disappear for days at a time, driving his boss to distraction. One weekend, he invited Doug and me to go with him for a drive out of the compound. There was a beautiful white-sand beach, called Al-Sharm, about ten kilometers north of Yanbu Al-Bahr. I had already been there once, on the Company bus. It was a nice change of scenery, and the snorkeling was amazing among the brightly colored fish and coral in nearby tidal pools. But the intense tropical sun and the crystal-clear water made for painful sunburns, so an hour or two on the beach was about all I could tolerate. Another weekend rolled around and the Sharm had lost its charm. We needed something new.

 “OK,” Giorgio said, “Where do you guys want to go? We can drive anywhere within a couple hundred kliks!” (‘Klik” was expat jargon for kilometer.)

I immediately pointed to the highest peak east of Yanbu.

“Let’s go climb that mountain!”

I was fascinated by the massive dark barren wall of igneous intrusive stone about 15 to 20 k inland, running parallel to the Red Sea. What could be up there? Had those peaks ever been explored? The explorer in me always wanted to go where no one, or at least, very few, had been before. Giorgio and Doug agreed, but we had to plan for such an ambitious expedition. We gathered supplies: food, cameras, climbing gear, and a tent that week end and headed out in Giorgio’s jeep shortly after daybreak, the next week end.

All our papers: passport, igamma (work permit) and permission to travel in the Al-Madinah Region, in which Yanbu was located, were kept on file in the administrative office of the project.  It didn’t occur to me, or to Doug, as recent arrivals, that we were supposed to request these documents before leaving the immediate vicinity of Yanbu. Giorgio knew this, but he didn’t mention it because he also knew that, if you asked for them, you would be told that you were not allowed to leave the Yanbu Area except for authorized work-related purposes.

To be Continued…