The bulk of my childhood was spent playing in a giant sand box by the Red Sea. I remember my first day in country; I was eight years old. We had arrived in the evening after traveling countless hours by plane from California to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. We disembarked the plane directly onto the tarmac. One may compare this experience of being high up in the mountains and the temperature is well below freezing. Step outside and your nose freezes instantly and you cannot breathe. Except in Jeddah, it was a wet humid heat, gagging and overpowering you with a taint of salt and fishiness from the Red Sea.
We lived in a small compound called “17-Villa” on a landfill in Alhambra, right on the Red Sea. One could see the King Faisal Naval Port to the south and an expanse of desert to the north. Every once in awhile, we would see, run out and greet a Bedouin family traveling through, their large single hump camels and herds of goat. Camels are handsome animals, until you get close to them. They have a tendency to slobber, spit on you, make your clothes smell like camel, and then they leave you with the gift of poo; a trail of large round rabbit pellets.
It was very safe living in our walled compound, not that there was anything to fear, the crime rate is very low in Saudi Arabia. We pretty much played on our own, traveling wide and far with no adult supervision. In addition, we had our own guard dogs, a pack of wild dogs that had adopted us and lived within the compound walls. The pack blended in well with their surroundings, all shorthaired mutts, with sandy coloring. We named them Pringles, and Ruffles, and Lays, and Bugles, after our favorite snack chips. Once in awhile, another pack of wild dogs would invade our territory. With our dogs, bicycles and plenty of rocks we would drive them off.
We did not spend much time at the Red Sea close to the compound; it was too close to the industrial area and too new of a landfill for nature to establish a balanced ecology. But we’d still try to fish off of a half submerged dump truck, our bait of frozen shrimp stolen from somebody’s freezer or a piece of bacon. I think the fish here were Muslim too; they never ever were caught with the bacon.
We had a resort facility called “Jeddah by the Sea”. It had a large slimy dark green salt-water pool, surrounded by single room cabanas. I still have nightmares about the pool, it was deep, cold and slippery and you could never see the bottom. There was a long wooden pier, the posts encrusted with barnacles. We could spearfish off the pier at night, armed with our spear guns and flashlights, hunting for octopus; at least until the tiger sharks started coming in. During the day, we used a large homemade pontoon boat, six fifty-gallon oil drums welded together, with a platform of steel beam and wood planks. Rails made of steel pipes and mesh fencing kept all the bodies in, which had gates to let you on or off or to dive. We would take the floating dive platform out a few miles and dive huge coral heads at fifteen to twenty meters. No one took the time to show us kids to scuba, so I free dived with mask, snorkel and fins, filling my dive bag with a multitude of conch, cowry, pearl oysters, and cool looking razor coral. I would take my treasure home and boil the animals out or bury the shells near an anthill; they would clean it out in about a week.
When I turned fourteen, I started working during the summers as a lifeguard, teaching swimming to two to five year olds in the mornings and helping with the summer fun program for the older kids in the afternoons. I would call the motor pool and reserve a bus to take a group of us kids to the beach, most of the time without adult supervision. The local hire bus drivers never knew how to swim; I always asked and I always attempted to talk with them. I was very curious of everyone’s ethnicity and language. I benefited in my own worldview by experiencing the diversity of cultural and ethnic background, and to this day at every opportunity, I still do.
We would go out to pristine beaches, large expanses of sandy dunes meeting up with miles of unpolluted shallow bright blue water. We would wade out a hundred yards, chasing blowfish and manta rays before stepping up on top of the reef, looking out into the large horizon of deep green. We would dive off the reef, the adrenaline and vertigo hitting our senses as we looked into the depths, turning as we dove, facing the reef face with the myriad of bright colors, watching the schools of fish and keeping an eye out for moray eels, chicken fish and sharks. Then we would come back in, comb the beaches for shells and sand dollars. There was never anyone else out there, just us kids, enjoying another beautiful day at the beach on the Red Sea.