Twenty miles outside of Usfan, between gas stations and building supply warehouses, we follow white arrows of gypsum laid across the wastes to a flat, dirt parking lot. Tractor tires form black pyramids in the corner. The engine of my old, black Chevy rattles and moans as I watch the winds carry away the cloud of dust that marked my passing. I sit outside smoking a cigarette within the absence of sound left by the cutting of the engine. The landscape is without a tree or a blade of grass. There are no sand dunes, no shifting cartographies, only the hard hills of metallic rock, whose pieces clang like gym weights underfoot.
To the east there is the squeaking of a bulldozer, caked with sand and rust, grinding its treads as it turns the loose top of a hill into a plateau. The hills beneath the power lines are constantly being raked into trails and crude roads for a development plan that seems random and formless. There may be elements hidden beneath the surface, or suburbs awaiting construction, but this far in the middle of nowhere all any of us can do is guess at the designs of progress.
To the north the view is dominated by massive power lines, disappearing in the dust and sky of the horizon in two directions. Fifty feet up they sizzle and hiss. In this desert, devoid of houses, they are the closest things to wind chimes, as the gusts shimmy between the wires they create a haunting melody, the soundtrack of a dead planet which the landscape makes easy to envision. It is the symphony of the extinction of man.
Before long a caravan of beat up accords and spotless luxury SUV’s begins to emerge from the highway. They park, unloading expatriates and their children. Women and men, uncovered and smiling into the sun, begin to flow together into their tribes. The Saudis and the Africans stretch out getting ready to run while the Europeans and Lebanese sit in camp chairs or meander around mingling. The parking lot takes on the atmosphere of a country fair, small but genuine. The hash location is kept relatively secret in Jeddah, but the locals have begun melting into the group. It is their country, but for most of the westerners, especially the women, shedding their covering outside in the lost hills beyond the city is one of few respites from a culture that lays so many restrictions on them. So there is a silent and tentative truce between us. We all know half the reason many of the young Saudi men come is to see uncovered women anyway.
The Hash House Harriers, a group started by British expatriates in Malaysia sometime in the middle of the last century, has often been known by the moniker “Drinkers with a running problem.” Islands of hard-drinking trail runners have since spread to most major cities across the globe. Since this desert is very rarely the first stop for most expats, and for many more the last before retirement, stories abound about runs throughout Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia and other places. Almost all revolve around running through towns, cities, jungles, and meeting and mixing at some bar for the rest of the night. The run was what was endured in order to get to the debauchery.
In Saudi Arabia we don’t have this luxury. There is virtually no alcohol at the gatherings, unless we’ve struck out on an overnight camping jot, and there is nowhere to go afterward except the compounds where we live. The vast majority of the western hashers are married with children, or married with grandchildren, and the ground of loose rock is often too precarious to merit anything but a light trot.
Where other cities are filled with young, backpacking English teachers or eager, corporate ladder climbers in branch offices, Saudi is mostly aging old hands in the middle east who had made their travels along the contours an exotic world that has vanished in the maw of globalization. It is for us a literal escapism. We pass through the shark’s teeth, steel gates, armed guards, and spools of razor-wire tipped concrete blocks of our transplanted western suburbs and pretend to belong to the moonscape of the countryside, if only for a few hours.
Before long the group is assembled in a circle to hear the creative witticisms of old, British ringmasters of the small circus. New members and first-timers are welcomed and mocked with equal sincerity in a series of movements and gestures that have continued, unabated every weekend for over thirty years.
In a few minutes the group is on their way, following the hares (whomever has laid the trail) into a valley or up a small hill into the slipstream of bodies with their heads down, following the chalk. It doesn’t take long after the run starts for the demographics to unspool themselves across the trail. A small group of hardcore runners sprint ahead, some looking more like mountain goats coasting across the rocky hillsides than trail runners. Behind them another group jogs, engaged in conversation, letting their bodies soak in the sun, like nursing the first beer after a long week of work. Behind them are the walkers, the ones who come for the community more than the exercise, generally older and potbellied if not entirely more gregarious about all things Saudi.
On the occasions when I join the runners, we arrive at a small circle of chalk on a hilltop and look out over the landscape. Over the next bluff we can see the string of hashers, spread out over the trail. When I watch them, slowly crawling over the rocks, in old shoes and old shirts and old jeans or shorts I cannot overcome the vision of a band of refugees fleeing some disaster in Darfur, or Somalia or some other island of misery. Some carry their children over the lifeless shards of shifting rock, the sweat grows like dark lobster bibs on their chests, and they squint into the afternoon sun.
The run starts in the late afternoon, after the most torturous hours of sunshine, and generally we find the last rest stop around the time the sun is setting. Even in the rocky wastes it never fails to be beautiful. At the last stop there is an extra long break from the sweat and the sun to eat a few slices of fresh oranges, guzzle the last bit of water and watch the colors dance down from the sky. The runs always end the same way, the gathering of strength, and the long flat expanse to the parking lot, racing against the ropes of dirt-infused light that weave themselves across the shadow draped horizon.
After the last runners have trickled in there is another gathering, announcements are made, and another series of awkward rituals consume the crowd, but they are extremely light-hearted and great for the kids.
Despite the environment of the city and its innumerable restrictions, life always finds a way. There are hash couples, hash weddings, and life-long friendships that flow across these dusty meetings. Last year I was shocked to find that after the rains had fallen, seedlings, dormant for I can’t imagine how long, took root, and for three weeks the rocks were covered with foot high grass in every direction. We ran through the stalks, the tips tickling our legs, in a state of happy shock, like finding the dead at the graveyard, sitting on their tombstone and ready to go for a stroll. Since then they have disappeared, and no rain has fallen to coax them out of their dark slumber.
Every week the group has met, and will probably continue long after I leave this place. They will arrive like laughing locusts, spilling color across the sheep pens of the occasional Bedouin and depart in a convoy of headlights back toward the highways. The city of Jeddah will continue to crawl out to the shadows of these mountains, maybe one day bowling them over and pushing the group further into the bled. They will go though, for as long as runners are allowed to live, they will find somewhere to run, and as long as people are invited from the western world to Saudi they will find a place to shed their cloth cocoons, and flit across the paths of prophets like bottled djinns escaping into the day.
