All white. Is it purity or are my eyes influenced by my hopes and dreams?
I almost missed…Spring: the last snow…
We all have been busy in the northern hemisphere as winter expired into spring–I too, have been busy–so much so that I almost missed that winter into spring transition–so here begins a series of transition images from these Alpine slopes that capture that transition.
…too busy…almost missed Spring…1…next
Erik Chalmers, American born and bred professional landscape architect, used all his skills to manage these very large, complex iconic projects in the Arabian Peninsula. He knew that the multi-cultural and technical complexities required not simply a left side of the brain number crunching iron will; but they also required what he called…performance art.
What is the magic–what are the skills required to succeed on these huge complex projects being designed and built in such challenging and downright dangerous environments? Erik Chalmers’ post project notes give insight into his successes.
But Erik Chalmers, for the first time in decades on an assignment without his wife Madge, was about to learn if he had done one project too many and lost his one true emotional certainty, his one true root.
Chalmers felt what he had missed over the past eight months–the fullness of the water, the plants, the soil, the wholeness–it was holistic, it was an existential comfort.
Following is a short narrative from Chapter 13: Pilgrimage, that imparts some of the landscape connections in The 23 Club.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The 23 Club
Immersed in the contemporary culture of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, against the backdrop of the Empty Quarter, The 23 Club tells the inside story of how an iconic project gets built in the oil rich, Gulf region of the Arabian Peninsula.
Table of Contents
The Last Kilometer
Chalmers was returning after eight months on his own. Nobody in the UAE called him Erik. It had been eight months of Chalmers. Eight months of taking care of his own meals, his own shopping, his own laundry. It was the little stuff that informed his daily life culture. It was the little stuff that built up…big time.
As the train took Chalmers closer to his stop, his thoughts turned to Madge. He was returning to his shared spaces, his shared life. Chalmers was becoming Erik again. He missed Madge; but he was uncertain how this return would be. Long distance communications always filtered, always blurred emotions.
Chalmers recalled the worst of his time away…he had not been able to hide his week in the hospital from Madge. He was supposed to have gone to Singapore for silk; but her worst fear came true. He had been injured in an automobile accident and hospitalized. She suffered to hear about it from distance. Sorry just did not cover it…from either side.
He arrived at Lauterbrunnen and thought, it won’t be long now.
He transferred from the train to the funicular. It was late in the afternoon and the sky was overcast. This time of year there was little difference between the valley village and the small plateau up where he and Madge lived. Fall plants were already naked of leaves. The first big snow could come any day. The temperature 5ºC or below; frost threatened.
As the funicular rose, Chalmers recalled his excitement nearly nine months ago when he was asked to help fix the first five star resort destination deep in the Empty Quarter. It had been about the challenge. It had been about his joy in providing beautiful gardens for people.
Now the job was complete. The gardens were a success. The owner was satisfied, happy. That world was finished. Now he was home.
And he was worried. Had he traded off something of emotion and trust, something he had held closely with Madge, just to build a couple gardens?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(to be continued)
© 2015 Edward Flaherty
**Blatant Plug: If you find this writing about humans and landscape intriguing, please share it with your like-minded friends. Thank you.**
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ok, here’s what I’m gonna do–over the next month, I’m gonna select a short passage out of each chapter of The 23 Club in order to give readers a feel for the landscape character of this story–a story dominated by the sand desert landscape of the Empty Quarter, known in Arabic as the Rub al Khali, and found in the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula.
This is the first short passage; and it is called, Desertification. I hope you like it.
Desertification is the noun derived from the verb desertify, no? But, riddle me this–what then is desertification…when one starts with 100% desert?
Can humans be desertified? Maybe desertification begins when a reader sees a never before imagined desert image…like the above Empty Quarter human-made oasis and desert gazelle image?
The Empty Quarter, and all other Arabian Peninsula deserts, desertify every human they touch.
Following is a short passage from Chapter 1 of The 23 Club: Desertification.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The 23 Club
Immersed in the contemporary culture of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, against the backdrop of the Empty Quarter, The 23 Club tells the inside story of how an iconic project gets built in the oil rich, Gulf region of the Arabian Peninsula.
Table of Contents
T. E. Lawrence, was once asked,
‘What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you to the desert?’
‘It is clean,’ he answered. ‘I like it, because it is clean.’
Erik Chalmers is a retired American landscape architect, a retired expatriate American landscape architect, living with his wife in the Swiss Alps. He had spent most of his professional career building projects and living in an ancient and very strange part of the world. Some people call it the Middle East, others call it the Eastern Mediterranean, and others still call it Southwest Asia. Erik Chalmers called it Anatolia, and the Arabian Peninsula.
This time he had been enticed out of retirement, and was heading back to the Arabian Peninsula, once again to the Gulf Region. He buckled his seat belt on take off from the Zurich flughaven. But, something just wasn’t right about this trip. He couldn’t put his finger on it. On every previous assignment, he had always been accompanied by his wife, Madge. This time he wasn’t. And that itself bothered him.
He and Madge, both in their early 60s, had retired almost 18 months ago, in early 2008, to the Berner Oberland, above Lauterbrunnen. They enjoyed the alpine pastures, the valleys, the forests, the steep granite peaks, their glaciated shoulders and the waterfalls, the rivers and lakes. This was the place that had always been their cool, fresh air refuge–a refuge they both needed from Anatolia and the Arabian Peninsula–landscapes of stifling heat and awkward cultures–landscapes that harbored amorphous threats…unresolved queries…enigmatic auras. He had never grasped the source of that awkwardness; but he had learned to live with it. That had always been part of his work.
And Erik, he still had some of that Arabian Peninsula desert sand in his shoes. That sand had been talking to him again. And he still had the fire in his belly for another large project; but this project was taking him somewhere new. To build beautiful gardens for a five star destination resort, he had to go deep into the mysterious, shifting sand dunes of the Rub al Khali–the landscape known as the Empty Quarter.
That was the challenge put in front of him during his recent Skype session when:
Theuns van der Walt, the developer’s representative, speaking from the United Arab Emirates, pushed:
“Listen, Chalmers, I have a world class destination resort in the Empty Quarter with beautiful gardens–and I am in trouble. It’s screwed up! I need you down here! You are the best–you have to fix this for me–you have to come down here! You have to make our gardens sing!”
Erik Chalmers said:
“Theuns, understand this, I’m out of the game. I’m retired. I’ve had enough of these last minute mashups. And this project, this project…it just has too much noise.”
Theuns van der Walt, this time with mounting aggravation, pleaded:
“What do you need, Chalmers? Money, autonomy? Just tell me, I will arrange it all; but get down here now!”
After that, for Erik Chalmers, it was all one way traffic back into iconic project work in the Gulf Region–except for the sharp words from his wife, Madge. Erik could not get them out of his head. She had unloaded:
“Why do you even think about going down there again? Have you forgotten the impetuous clients? Have you forgotten the bad mannered consultants…the lying contractors?
“Have you forgotten all fresh food imported from thousands of miles away? Have you forgotten the poorly maintained refrigerated trucks…and stores?
“Have you forgotten the fraudulent labels? Have you forgotten pirated everything?”
Turning her eyes away from Erik, she paused and looked out over the Berner Oberland landscape, asking, “You’re giving this up?”
As his flight taxied out to the runway, Erik remembered it all, as if it was happening again–it had not been resolved.
She turned back to him and looked straight into his eyes, “And don’t even try to tempt me to come with you. I’ve had my fill of hole in the ground toilets…standing in urine…stool marks on doors, stool marks on floors. I have had my fill of red-spit city sidewalks and walls. I have had my fill of hot and sweaty 24/7 days…and my fill of air conditioning that just does not ever work right.
“And your health…your father started with high blood pressure medication at forty, your grandmother took high blood pressure pills all her life, why gamble again? Can I be any clearer? We’ve done our time! We’ve saved all we need. It’s done! Why, why go? Why even think about it?!!! That place drains the life right out of you!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And here is where Erik Chalmers comes face to face with his own desertification.
© 2015 Edward Flaherty
**Blatant Plug: If you find this writing about humans and landscape intriguing, please share it with your like-minded friends. Thank you.**
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Landscape is all of these–all the time–stirring–changing…and so I must write.
And so it is, too, for Erik Chalmers, the protagonist in The 23 Club, himself strangely attracted to the mysterious Empty Quarter…despite the exhilarating life around his home in the Berner Oberland of the Swiss Alps.
Only his obsession with landscape, to build captivating gardens, could drive him to this place, the Empty Quarter, a place historically incapable of supporting life!
This is Erik Chalmers’ landscape journey into the Empty Quarter. This is the Rub al Khali. With its own chiaroscuro, this beast turns obsession inside out.
The 23 Club is a landscape story. It is fiction from fact. It is chiaroscuro. Erik Chalmers’ journey through geography…through history…at best, like the story itself…chiaroscuro…always a blur, always a hope–for clarity, for an inspirational result.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The 23 Club
Immersed in the contemporary culture of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, against the backdrop of the Empty Quarter, The 23 Club tells the inside story of how an iconic project gets built in the oil rich, Gulf region of the Arabian Peninsula.
Table of Contents
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It may be a passion trying to find fertile ground, before it takes root. But then as it takes root, a strange transition occurs–passion into obsession–the roots go wild, they travel hard and fast and far…the obsession grows…and then what?
Berner Oberland: a humid, temperate, arable soil forest that I first experienced in real life in the 1960s, and it has been a landscape destination for me every decade since.
Rub al Khali: an arid, tropical, topsoil free, sand desert that I first experienced as, if you will permit me, a mesmerizing augmented reality in David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. That was also in the 1960s in the London West End. It became a landscape mystery I have explored every decade since.
Throughout my professional landscape architectural career, I have over and over, walked, drove, read, smelled, heard, felt–explored the above landscapes…they live inside me–they have taken root. They are growing.
From these distinctive landscapes has emerged a landscape obsession, an infatuation that can only be satiated by giving life to landscape stories, fictional stories that derive from personal experience, stories that endeavor to explain those landscape experiences which are…beyond words.
My first landscape story is The 23 Club, and it does unbundle those two landscape images above, revealing…(to be continued)
Wet and dry can describe a lot of situations in life.
Wet: These snow flakes can not wait to reveal their moisture–it flows.
Dry: These dates protect their moisture–they shelter it.
Lots of ways to understand wet landscapes from dry landscapes–the landscape of the humid temperate northern slopes of the Berner Oberland from the arid tropical sands of the Rub Al Khali.
Wet is not equally distributed on the Earth’s surface. Wet and dry have to be managed. Please permit me to offer a tenuously linked digression, just for fun.
In the big picture:
Wet: water, if you just measure surface coverage, makes up 70% of the Earth’s surface or 70% wet. Ignores the underground water table wetness.
Dry: the land surface coverage makes up 30% of the Earth’s surface or 30% dry. Includes the land permanently covered by snow and or ice.
If we generously average the area covered by a standing human, averaging babies and adults, we can say each human covers 0.5 square meter. The number of humans in the world is 7 billion, therefore humans, standing shoulder to shoulder cover much, much less than 1% of the Earth’s surface.
Is there truly a shortage of water on the planet? Plentiful water or water paucity? I wonder…if someone, in the Berner Oberland flushes the toilet with less water, will more dates grow at the edge of the Empty Quarter?
Summary of numbers:
Shortage? Hardly seems like there should be a shortage of wetness does there? Am I on the edge of an enigma here? Or is ‘water shortage’ just another nuanced imperialistic push by the globalizing Western world on others…they won’t find me…I am tucked away in an enigma.
!!!Ah–but the population growth projections! Ah–but the climate change projections! Ah–but the software programs that are without fault or human error or human political influence! Ah, yes, we are sure we can control climate and weather, right?
Another glass of water, please…I know a place where the tap water is really good!
An ancient saying comes from Bharat Varsha, known these days as India–‘austerity is the wealth of the brahmanas’.
That is an intriguing concept–a lack of material possessions as a source of wealth. It does indeed respond as a balance to the obvious excesses of material acquisition, does it not?
For seven hundred years the local Berner Oberland farmers have organized, and agreed how to manage this mountain landscape, rich in water and soil, but limited in arable land.
The food chain of Berner Oberland sustainable agriculture has worked for nearly a millennium.
Now over the last century, the advent of tourism–itself is a mark of increasing affluence–has thrown a bunch of new challenges at these farmers. They continue to work through them.
But the landscape–look at it–it is cared for–the animals are cared for–it is beautiful and beautifully managed. This image depicts the essence of human stewardship of the landscape.
I was walking along pastures this weekend and noticed melted snow beneath tree canopies.
Even in the winter, the tree is working.
See the heat generated by the root mass.
When I look at these Berner Oberland landscapes–filled with fresh water, snow, ice, I am amazed by their inherent wealth and health. I am awed by their physical presence.
For decades I lived around that Empty Quarter arid sand desert of my most recent posts; but I needed refreshment, I needed recharge, so I regularly retreated to these water rich mountains.
These two geographies, one lifeless and the other full of life, put me in contact with the extreme ends of the water continuum of life.
Landscape astounds me.
Landscape journeys enthrall me.
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.
