Heat And Dust

We are in the midst of a dust storm.  Though I'm not sure "storm" is quite the right word.  There's no wind at all.  It's more a pall of dust that has settled over the city like fog.  It even looks like fog out the window.  But when you're outside, it's very obvious that it's dust and that's as unpleasant as it sounds.  It gets in your eyes, in your hair and on your clothes, it makes your brand new Vans dirty.  You can taste it, and it gets in your nose.  Worst of all, and this is not funny, it gets in your lungs.  It's very fine dust -- that's why it's hanging in the air in this low-pressure system -- and obviously very fine particles of anything are not a good thing to breathe in.  The local news has had reports of people checking into emergency rooms with breathing difficulties, especially, of course, those with asthma or other respiratory conditions.  I don't have asthma, and I'm not a hypochondriac, but I can tell you my chest has hurt a bit and I've had some sinus pain.  Residents have been advised to stay indoors.  No kidding.  Who would want to go out in it anyway?

Well, I'll tell you.  I was up on the roof of our hotel getting this picture at about noon on Saturday, the worst

day of the dust (visibility was only 300 meters in parts of the city).  Mind you it was still a hundred degrees.  And up there I witnessed the somewhat incredible sight of several guests, mostly young women, sunbathing at the pool.  I was amused, but also disgusted.  We're not talking a bit of smog here.  This dust is very tangible -- it feels like being in a really dirty attic or warehouse.  You want to shower after you're out in it. And these silly creatures were sunbathing in it.  

I've grown increasingly annoyed at people frying themselves like fried chickens, often for hours at a time, in brutal sun -- especially when they're already an unhealthy shade of brownish orange.  How much widely-reported modern research about skin cancer do you need to ignore?  Not to mention that the motivation is vanity, and they're defeating themselves on that score too.  Any older lady can tell you too much exposure to sunlight is the first cause of aging skin.  (A friend from Sydney dismissed the notion a lot of sailors seem to have that it's romantic or traditional to have leathery brown skin:  "Yeah, I think I'm over the whole 'Having bad skin and dying young because it's romantic' thing.")  So what will these girls do when they get to middle age?  Botox and surgery of course.  The irony is Arabic women are known for having nice skin from lifetimes of protecting their faces from the sun with their veils.

But sunbathing in dirt!  As if to admit, "We have to do this to ourselves, no matter how adverse the conditions, no matter how foolish it may seem."

Today, as the dust has largely blown away for the time being, come even grimmer reports.  Apparently it's from Iraq, brought by a northwesterly wind (an ill wind indeed), and goes away only briefly before returning later in the week if weather forecasts hold.  A friend who spent some time in this part of the world tells me he's seen this go on for up to eight days.

Worse, it's not natural.  For a couple of days I had myself convinced I was experiencing some harsh but hallowed truth about the Middle East.  I justified the depressing shitty brown haze I was seeing out the window (on the worst days obliterating my view of Lulu Island and the Gulf) as something that just happens here.  When I posted something about it on facebook, my friend Anne challenged me to read Herodotus, and then sent me this excerpt from The English Patient:

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.

There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days—burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic. Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some winds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that come with the cold. The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.

There is also the ——, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. And the nafhat—a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen—a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.

Other, private winds.

Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transporting stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of darkness.” Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.”

There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.”

Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second you are surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire.

I've never read The English Patient but this is a capital passage and it makes me want to check it out.  

But for our dust, natural's not in it.  It's a relatively new phenomenon according to expert and anecdote alike -- and getting worse.  It's the result of the draining of marshes in southern Iraq combined with drought and other factors, such as power outages cutting off irrigation and the damming of rivers in neighboring Turkey.  So it's a man-made disaster taking place, that we here in the UAE are taking in, literally.

The above-linked article (credulously quoting a Kuwaiti researcher) attempts to also fix undue blame on the movement of troops and vehicles in the war grinding sand into dust.  It's added to the problem, but most other sources I found put troop deployment further down on the list.  As another expert from the World Water Council thankfully pointed out in the same article, we're talking about billions of tons of dust here -- I was disappointed by that bit of sensationalism on the part of The National.  In any case the drainage of the Mesopotamian marshes has been taking place for decades.

Here's an article from five years ago that describes an ecological catastrophe of historic proportions.  These marshlands, fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, may have been the birthplace of civilization as we know it, and the way they were systematically destroyed under Hussein ranks for some on the scale of all-time 

environmental rapes and pillages with the deforestation of the Amazon.  Now, I don't mean to let the war off the hook, not at all.  If anything it would prevent the social and politial steps necessary to restore the marshes, put any vision of the long haul on the back burner.  Save the environment vs. feed your kids and stop terrorists from blowing everybody up, your choice.  Meanwhile Iraq is now 90% desert and at this rate the remaining arable land will be gone in 20 years.

It was just such poor land management combined with severe drought that created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.  And sadly this is an even older story.  All historians agree that erosion and desertification caused by overfarming and overgrazing has taken its toll throughout history; they only argue the extent of it.  It may have led to the fading or collapse of Minoan and Harappan civilizations, and others worldwide including certain prehistoric Native Americans.  This science blogger, apparently not one to hedge his bets, believes the Sahara desert is an entirely man-made disaster.  So, bitter a truth as it seems, destroying our environment is not some post-industrial, postmodern nightmare and we can just make it go away.  No, it's something humans have pretty much always done.  We're good at it.  How perfect that the deforestation of cedar trees appears as a mythical tale in the Epic Of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest stories known, hailing from that very same ancient place that is now being turned to dust.

Notes:

• There could be a positive in all of this dust.  Here's an article on how some research shows windborne dust from erosion may actually add nutrients to the Persian Gulf's ecosystem.
  
• After my friend mentioned Herodotus, the next morning I saw this terrific article about a writer who follows his historic footsteps, even into war-ravaged Iraq.