A midnight crossing into Saudi Arabia
Thirty-seven years after leaving Saudi Arabia, I landed late at night in Bahrain, a small island kingdom tethered to its neighbor by a 16-mile ribbon of concrete across the Arabian Gulf. The plan was simple enough: hire a taxi, cross the King Fahd Causeway, and check into our hotel in Al-Khobar before exhaustion overtook us.
Had I booked us into King Fahd International Airport near Dammam, our Saudi hosts would have been waiting with smiles and paperwork neatly in hand. Instead, I chose Bahrain because I wanted to see the causeway built long after my family left the kingdom.
No one met us in Bahrain that night.
An ominous border
I once read an article that listed the King Fahd Causeway on an ominous list of the world’s scariest border crossings, alongside crossings in Colombia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
If I had I read the article before we left, I might have made a different choice—and my homecoming story would have begun very differently.
But this is where it begins. Curiosity be damned.
When I left Saudi Arabia with my parents, younger sister, and baby brother in 1972, there was no land link to Bahrain. For years, we had flown to and from the island on our way to visit my grandparents in the United States and England during mandatory vacation leave.
The oil company that employed my father considered Saudi Arabia a hardship posting, so we were required to leave every year or two for R&R. We could go anywhere—even Beirut—but we had to go.
The causeway was now nearly twenty-three years old. Old enough to be infamous.
The last chance for pork
To pass the time in the long, snaking immigration line for non-Bahrainis, we chatted with a few bleary-eyed expatriates returning from leave.
“This is your last chance to eat pork,” laughed an American woman behind us, reeling off Manama restaurants like a farewell toast.
Pork would be haram—forbidden—once we crossed the border. I wasn’t worried. We had eaten pork chops earlier that week. We would survive.
When our turn came, the immigration officer stamped our passports without ceremony. No drama. No ominous pause. Just in-transit stamps and a wave toward the exit.
Our luggage appeared quickly on the carousel. Chris—ever the gallant husband—wrestled with my two “Passage to India” steamer trunks, his affectionate name for the overstuffed suitcases I insist on hauling around the postcolonial world. Because I expected to dress modestly, they were packed with long-sleeved blouses and floor-length skirts that covered my arms and ankles. Despite their weight, the cases’ tiny wheels allowed me to sprint through the Nothing to Declare exit and into the pleasant night air.
It was early March, one of the best times to visit the Middle East. The suffocating wall of humidity would come soon enough.
A burly man in a dark Western-style suit approached us. We told him we were headed for Al-Khobar. He gestured toward his car and grabbed two of our cases. He spoke no English; we spoke no Arabic. Still, the arrangement was clear. He would take us across the border.
The border crossing
The white sedan sped onto the causeway. There were few cars at that hour. Our driver’s dark eyes flicked toward us in the rearview mirror, making me uneasy. Our polite attempts at conversation quickly fizzled into an awkward silence.
I watched girders and streetlights flash past and imagined the tranquil Arabian Gulf beneath us.
My thoughts moved ahead to Ras Tanura, the place I had once believed I would never see again. I grew up in this oil town, built in the 1940s by the Arabian American Oil Company on Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province coast. I arrived as a baby in 1960, and my family left in 1972.
Now it was March 9, 2009. Saudi Arabia was still closed to tourists—and would remain so for another decade. I was returning because my father’s former employer, now known as Saudi Aramco, had invited retirees and one hundred of their now-grown children—“Aramco Brats” like me—to a 10-day reunion.
Without an invitation and a special visa that took months to process, I could not have returned. The application required us to check a box identifying ourselves as Christian or Muslim. There were no other options. As a woman, I was also required to be accompanied by a male relative, so I was relieved that my husband, Chris, had agreed to come. He was uneasy—American news coverage was saturated with al-Qaeda’s terror—but I sweetened the deal with a promised stop in Egypt afterward. Who can resist the pyramids?
Our itinerary was ambitious. We would revisit Ras Tanura, fly to Shaybah in the heart of the Empty Quarter, wander the Hofuf camel market, and travel to Riyadh and the oasis towns of the Eastern Province.
The Ras Tanura I remember
Adventure was always just beyond the heavily irrigated lawn and garden hedge.
As a child, I had found the desert endlessly fascinating and the sea intoxicating. From the moment we rose until dinner, my sister Janet and I roamed the Ras Tanura compound, bound by the high perimeter fence enclosing the beach and desert between our home and the refinery.
Adventure was always just beyond the heavily irrigated lawn and garden hedge.
I was a tomboy. I asked for a hammer one Christmas and spent hours gathering driftwood to build the shell of a rickety fort between the dunes. One day, Janet and I found a waterlogged wooden pallet. We pushed and pulled while I barked orders like any respectable 10-year-old Old Salt.
“Heave. Ho.”
With our combined ninety pounds and sheer force of will, we dragged the heavy pallet to the water’s edge and launched it into the calm, crystal-clear Gulf. Lying prone across our raft, we paddled hard, our spindly arms slapping the water as the shore grew smaller behind us.
I don’t remember having a plan. From our floating platform, we could still see the sunlit bottom. My eight-year-old sister captained the raft, using her legs as rudders while I held my breath and dove for shells. Then it was her turn. Curious fish, some half our size, flashed silver in the sun-drenched water.
We felt safe. The Gulf was as calm and tepid as bathwater, yet it held coral reefs, exotic shells, and was home to sea snakes, stingrays, and razor-toothed barracuda. Someone once told me that most of the sharks stayed on the Iranian side. I took comfort in that, although I now know it wasn’t true.
Our car jerked to a stop at a security checkpoint, interrupting my reverie.
Men with assault rifles peered through the windows and barked questions at our driver in Arabic. Like two gazelles caught in headlights, Chris and I stared back. So much for my fifth-grade Arabic class. I did not understand a word.
After a tense few moments, we were waved through. We stopped at another checkpoint. And another. Each time, guards leaned in, assessed us, questioned the driver, and dismissed us with a flick of a rifle barrel.
The Saudi Arabia around me bore little resemblance to the one I remembered. Friends who had remained wrote that the American way of life inside the oil camps had changed abruptly in the late 1970s. Security tightened. Outside the compounds, the mutaween—the religious police—enforced strict codes of behavior, even on Westerners. Friends told of American teenage girls being harassed by stick-bearing mutaween for failing to cover their hair while shopping. Even an abaya, embroidered in gold, or a hijab pushed back to reveal the hairline could attract their attention.
A homeland shadowed by violence
The region itself had been transformed by the fall of the Shah of Iran, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and the arrival of American troops on Saudi soil. By the 1990s, extremist violence had reached the kingdom.
I wasn’t aware of the 2004 attack on Khobar’s Oasis residential compound, where militants killed 22 people and injured 25. The story received little attention in the United States despite the deaths of an American and several Europeans.
Before September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia had evoked images of oil wells, sheiks, and Lawrence of Arabia. Afterward, it meant something else entirely.
The man behind the attacks was a Saudi, and his family’s construction company had built palaces and mosques, including the Grand Mosque itself. Nostalgia suddenly felt fragile—almost naive.
After September 11, I stopped telling people where I had grown up.
“Oh, I don’t really have a hometown,” I would say.
Many Aramco Brats did the same, inventing safer answers. Some claimed their parents’ hometowns. Anything to avoid the silence that followed the truth.
My thoughts were interrupted again when the car swerved and screeched to a halt outside a nondescript building. Our driver twisted around to face us.
“Paceports.”
“What?”
“Paceports,” he repeated. In the darkness, a broad grin spread across his face, doing little to reassure me.
We dug into our bags and handed him our passports with a sense of foreboding. He snatched them and motioned for us to get out. As I did, my long skirt snagged on my bag. By the time I freed myself, he had disappeared inside.
We ran to catch up, following the echo of his footsteps through grimy, barely lit corridors and deeper into the building. My jet-lagged brain registered danger. Was this a nightmare?
At last, we burst into a harshly lit room. Three uniformed officials sat behind clouded plexiglass. Apart from our driver, we were the only people there.
I approached the nearest booth. The official motioned for me to look into a device and then press my fingers onto a small scanner.
“Yadfae!” he barked.
I pressed down with all my strength. Disgust flickered across his face.
“Yadfae! Yadfae!”
I tried again and again. Finally, he leaped to his feet, came around the counter, grabbed my hand, and slammed my fingers onto the cold glass.
“Poosh. Poosh.”
The wall clock ticked loudly toward midnight. The other officials watched stone-faced from their booths. Chris stood behind me, helpless, his face ashen.
Midnight Express revisited
My mind flashed to Midnight Express, the terrifying film about a young American imprisoned for smuggling hashish into Istanbul. The stereotypes crowded my mind, uninvited and unhelpful.
We had no contraband. We were not even carrying Tylenol. The Saudi Embassy in the United States had vetted us for months. Surely a missing fingerprint could not pose a threat to national security.
I pressed harder and was waved aside. It was Chris’s turn. He fared better.
At last, the official snorted, shoved our passports toward us, and waved us off. Our driver motioned for us to follow. We fled back into the night, chastened, exhausted, and wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.
Thirty-seven years after leaving, I was back in Saudi Arabia—home, and not home at all
خلاص Khalas. Finished.
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