Not every desert in the Arabian Peninsula is sand.
The house, the human shelter in this photo sits where the Hejaz mountains fold down onto the flat Tihama coastal plain. The house’s position in the landscape tells the story of: water–there is life; and no water–no life.
In the mid 1980s I lived on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, in the Western Region. The area is known historically as the Hejaz after the mountains running north from Jeddah, parallel to the Red Sea coast. This is the region of Mecca and Medina. And the Hejaz mountains divide the Tihama, the coastal plain influenced by the Red Sea from the inland deserts, Nafud, and Nejd.
The first time I heard the phrase in the above image caption, ‘no water–no life’ was in Morocco in the early 1970s. I was sitting with a group of people including a young Moroccan man, from Meknes, whose family originally had been farmers in Taza. He said, “Without water there is no life and no cleanliness.”
In the Nejd and Nafud deserts, it was these sand dune beauties that called…that seemed to be the emissaries of the Empty Quarter, the Rub Al Khali, the world’s largest contiguous sand desert, located in the southern Arabian Peninsula, to the south east of the Asir Mountains and north of Yemen and Oman.
In the 1980s, while living and working in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I travelled the triangle from Jeddah to Riyadh to Medina, touching the edges of the Nejd and Nafud deserts, and then via the Red Sea coast back to Jeddah. There were always somewhere in the landscape…sand dunes–not always continuous but amongst rocky plains and stony mountains, sand dunes tucked here and there.
Somehow these sand dune emissaries had moved north on their own from the Empty Quarter, and I must say–they began as magnetic attractions for my eyes.
But also their landscape stories, their landscape reputations became magnetic attractions through the ears as heard by St. John Philby, Bertram Thomas, Richard Francis Burton, Wilfred Thesiger, Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence–all authors, all travelers, all mesmerized into their own Arabian Peninsula sand dune desert explorations.
Discover a portal, cross the threshold…unpredictable, unimaginable, indescribable, transcendent…all possible…
I am working through a transition from planning, designing, building and maintaining gardens, landscapes and plants to writing about them.
The above graphic shows how I link past experiences with my stories. I describe it in a little more detail here.
In the next months, I plan to select landscape, garden and plant images from my past decades of work in North Africa and the Middle East to demonstrate what it is that inspires me to write.
W. Curt Mulligan, a Los Angeles Landscape Architect, executor and close professional friend of George Moleson, recently met the author at the above pictured Eau Zone pool deck restaurant in Dubai. Credit to Kerzner International Developer, EDSA Consultant and Desert Landscape Contractor.
Over the past year via some excellent beta reader reviews from Goodreads, I have updated my original Beta of Crystal Vision to Beta 02.
The 23 Club featured Erik Chalmers and occurred primarily in the Arabian Peninsula sand desert known as the Empty Quarter.
Crystal Vision is a pilgrimage, beginning near Medina in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia, that ultimately takes George Moleson and his design journals into the landscape heart of the Bernese Alps–Grindelwald, Switzerland.
George Moleson is a professional landscape architect from Los Angeles who had taken a job six years ago planning, designing, building, managing a new town on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia.
When his best friend on the job commits suicide, George is shocked and is left with only one clue. His options become clear when his own job is terminated and he has nowhere to go. He begins a pilgrimage to the cities and hinterlands of Thailand and Switzerland in a hunt to find the fiancé of his recently deceased friend.
Along the way, George has doors of perception opened in Thailand’s Golden Triangle where he meets Vrndadevi, a permaculture specialist who talks to him about spiritual settling. Then she points him to the Swiss landscape where yodeling and the Bernese Alps encourage George into deeper personal and professional introspection.
These peculiar landscape events gradually refocus his original search to close the loop on his friend’s suicide onto his own professional and personal life uncertainties–a search to answer questions that we all face.
On the surface, this story is about design, plants, gardens and it takes place in exotic locations–a natural for me. But then it turns into something deeper.
Normally designers’ notes and their journals do not interest me–they are the overelaborated microscopic views of narcissists–the stuff of ethereal ephemera–but this one is different.
George’s design journals are like a well structured and well detailed beautiful garden, a series of garden rooms that had unfortunately been neglected, had become overgrown.
Look closely at them, pull out a few weeds, cut back overgrown others–the careful cleaning reveals beautiful plants with the spark of life, with kernels of good health. Inspirational portals of excellence await discovery, enjoyment, exploration.
Crystal Vision is a landscape story. It is a novella, literary fiction.
The past reaches for today
In Crystal Vision, George Moleson, an emerging professional, leaves his landscape architecture roots in Southern California, to build his international career, becoming a key person on a huge new town project located just near the Tropic of Cancer, on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia.
After six cosseted years on that project, a quick succession of personal and professional events batter George. They untether him; and he embarks into the labyrinthine mists of landscapes…landscapes the nature of he had never ever imagined.
As I move toward the completion of my second landscape story, Crystal Vision, I have updated the novella’s story line.
Labyrinthine Mists is the landscape through which the main character moves.
Geo was from LA. He was a young and successful landscape architect; yet he sensed…an unease. He took an offer to work in Saudi Arabia, an excellent challenge where he would have exponentially larger responsibilities.
During his six years on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia, his professional and social life evolved inside a bubble, a cultural bubble protecting him from uncertainty…until…the bubble burst.
He lost his tether to ‘reality’ and began a blind journey into a landscape labyrinth. A labyrinth by definition does not have an end; but Geo sensed…an obligation and something important to find. And so, he embarked upon an exploration of labyrinthine landscapes he had never before imagined.
