Sohar Beach is a peculiar shade of brown somewhere between gold and dirt. Beaches are a matter of fact piece of the landscape here, and treated no differently from the mountains or the parks scattered around the cities. There is no great migration to the beaches by tourists or vacationing locals, just footprints running like roller coaster rails in loops and circles across the surface.
I sit in the shade of a palm tree sipping tea with an Egyptian. There is a line of palms planted near the parking lot behind me. In front of me the water is nearly empty of bodies. All of the boys on this beach are happy to have a flat piece of ground that isn’t covered with rocks. The beach is simply a place to play ball. Five or six pick-up games of soccer emerge at about five o’clock, when the sun has lost most of its strength, and end an hour later, around dusk.
There are a few women on the beach, most towing their children behind. Occasionally they take them down to the water, and the children (in swimsuits) with the women (covered head to toe in the black cloth called an Abaya) poke at the warm surf with their feet.
Black sea birds, that fly like gulls and caw like crows, gather around the minaret of a nearby Mosque. The call to prayer radiates into the waves, not as a summons, but as a warning. The land-born know the power of the unspoken faith in the sea; a power that manifests simultaneously in its fullness and emptiness. Where the desert god chose a palette brimming with colors, the sea god used few. Its beauty does not come from inexplicable flashes, but the overwhelming mass of its domain. The sea creates and consumes with hypnosis, and I would venture that the end of days will not be signaled by a rain in the sands, but by the terrible silence at the end of waves. When surrounded by prayer it is difficult for the mind to flee entirely from religion.
Further down the beach a line of white, wooden posts become a boundary that separates leisure from tradition. A hotel built of squat, whitewashed concrete buildings looms over the small space of beach chairs and thatch umbrellas. The crenellated white towers are supposed to make the hotel look Arab, but are in fact mimics of the Portuguese; who were the builders of Oman’s first forts and castles. Past the occasional flesh of a bikinied tourist the beach again transforms, or rather, returns to the long rows of fishermen’s huts with the scattered debris of nets and ropes filling the spaces between.
For centuries Omani date farmers had provided the fishermen with the ash gray fronds of their trees. This gift of shade was purchased with the bounties of the waves. There seems a deep stirring of the timeless in these actions. A repetition repeated through so many generations that it may have wormed into their DNA. The awe of the archaic is constantly broken by the intrusions of our modern world though. The rambling tracks of SUV’s and trucks, the tell-tale green of Mountain Dew bottles, and the shimmer of aluminum from crushed packs of Marlboros.
We modern creatures find a great comfort in the traditional and these intrusions from our world threaten our visions of the living past. Those born within the timeless cannot help but relish the speed of its collapse. These are the two unstoppable forces spiraling through the developing world, forces which do not collide or explode in Oman, but merge for a time and simply continue along their paths.
As I walk along the huts and boats and nets and cars I watch children play soccer in the upper sands, perhaps fifty feet west of the foam. They hang fishing net over posts of driftwood and run in a kind of suspended animation in the thick sand. Their parents appear in flashes as the white of their dishdashas reflect sunlight when they move beneath the roofs of their huts.
At dusk, a white pick-up rumbles between a line of palm trees and a pick-up soccer game. Two black figures gleam in the back. They do not seem to move their immense frames, but they are alive, as the center of the ocean is alive; in its mass, in its ability to make you shift in your seat to confirm that you are not a part of it. Their coats have no sheen and they do not reflect the glare of the setting sun. They absorb it, like two bull shaped holes cut from the fabric of night. When the truck stops a teenage Omani gets out of the cab and pulls the two bulls out of the truck and into the water. Those hulking mounds of midnight were bred not to pull plows, but for battle. In Oman the bulls do not fight men with swords and capes though, they fight each other. There is no great crashing of a dead beast, but simply two great animals slamming their bulk against one another until one is defeated. Within fifteen minutes the bulls are bathed, back in their truck, and driven back to wherever they came from.
The cloud of sand and exhaust from the bull’s truck dissipates to reveal a whole family trudging out to their boat. The overweight grandmother, or possibly first wife, nearly bursts from the fabric of her flower print Abaya. Two men and two boys push the boat over round logs on the sand, while two small boys move the logs the boat has passed over to the front of it.
Two logs away from the surf the call to prayer bursts from another nearby Mosque. Everyone stops, but only for a moment, if they pray it is silent and quick. When the boat moves into the water with the ululations of the Imam behind it I rethink my opinion of the seaside Mosque. Maybe it is not a warning but a ward. So those that slide along the waves are rocking to the rise and fall of Allah’s prayer. They do not begin their fight with the endless God of the Sea but coast into its bosom upon a sound that mimics its movements. Do not worry, the Imam sings, for you ride on my voice and the rhythm of my song is the only rhythm you will remember.
Benjamin Franklin once quipped that he preferred lighthouses to Churches. He might find irony in the fact that the seaside Mosque can serve both purposes. For returning sailors and fishermen do not return on the providence of a beam of light but the lilting fugue of a minaret’s song.
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