Home

As I write this I am on way from Seattle to Bahrain via Amsterdam, on my way back to work from my second leave. After Bahrain I will take a cab into Saudi Arabia and get to my little apartment at about 2 am. It’s different now flying to the other side of the world compared to the first time I went over there six months ago … and not just because I’m in coach instead of first class. It’s different because there aren’t many surprises this time. The field of the unknown is much smaller and so is the excitement. Maddy (my 5 year old daughter) is starting to see the pattern, and almost seems to be getting used to it. We sat in the kitchen today and hugged each other. She felt my chin hair and asked why I didn’t shave my beard this time. She is so perceptive. The last two times I left I had a clean-shaven face. I wonder if she now associates my clean face with me leaving. She touched my nose with hers and then put her cheek next to mine and said “Home Sweet Home”. I had explained this new term for her when I used it earlier in the day. I said that it just meant that home was pretty sweet to me, ...like Agave Nectar … and she said “in warm milk” … I said “with whipped cream on top” … and so on until we had completed the recipe to her latest passion she calls “hot milk”; something my wife has been making for her lately. I had tried to make it a few times, but would always mess up on a detail or two. “But mom always gives me a bit of whipped cream to put in my mouth before she puts it away”. “Oops,” I would say as I opened the fridge and pulled the whipped cream back out.

Part of what makes home, “home” is more than just a place. For many of us it’s routine. This is certainly true for Maddy. This routine was difficult to adjust to when I first got back. It took me about a week to get out of my independent “bachelor” mindset and blend in. We spent more time getting in each other’s way. Like the warm up session before a symphony, there was a lot of dissonance. It was a shame the concert itself wasn’t much longer than the tuning of the instruments.

We went on a few short trips while I was home, but what Maddy missed most was the routines. Once we forgot to bring a CD set that had “Charlotte’s Web” on it read by the author. This is what she listens to when she winds down to get ready for bed. She’s probably listened to it 50 times by now. Nothing else will do. It makes her feel at home, I think. (I wonder if this is where OCD comes from … some sort of desire to recreate the familiar … to bring back a sense of home.)

Technology has come so far now that I am able to talk endlessly with Nikki and Maddy and even look at them and catch all the subtle facial expressions that do much to enhance communication, while I’m at the opposite side of the world. But I can’t touch them. I won’t be surprised if even that will be somehow possible in the future in some sort of virtual way, but I will miss it now. I still smell Maddy’s drool from when I kissed her cheek goodbye as she slept in her car seat in front of the airport. Images come to mind from my brief 2 ½ weeks at home. I still remember seeing a flash of my own boyhood face in the rear view mirror when I watched her smile to herself while she looked out the car window in some sort of wistful, quiet, daydream. The feeling and smell will soon fade and I know I’ll miss it. The images will be different when I come back. She will be older then, and a bit more of the innocence will be gone...

I have never thought of myself a “homebody”. Since I’ve had such a nomadic life there is no place on this earth I can honestly call home. But I’m realizing there is something other than a place that calls me back to itself. The invaded personal space; the sparse time to myself; the constant interruptions; the month-old goldfish crackers in the car seat …it’s all home. And even though it always takes time to adjust to it, and it never is completely perfect, I miss it horribly right now … and I haven’t even been away from it for a day.

True Myth

I found myself recently in an interesting perspective shift. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to understand the mind of the unbeliever. Most of my attention has been on the atheist point of view. Much of what makes it hard for the atheist to believe in God and Christianity is the idea of the supernatural. To many atheists, science, over recent centuries has done a lot to answer questions that religion used to. A classic example would be epilepsy. Before it was better understood by science, they would say, religion attributed it to demon possession. Now that science has answered this and many of our other questions, religion has less of a functional role in our lives. Science, being more credible, has completely taken over the role of “God” for many of these guys. So when those of us who still hold on to a belief in the credibility of the bible try to have a discussion with these guys, they find it incredulous that we still believe in things like creation, Noah’s arc, and the virgin birth of Jesus, etc. They would say we can’t let go of the past. Although many important questions aren’t answered by the atheist, they still feel they are on more intellectually honest ground than we are, and no further discussion can happen until we let go of our “myths”.

I developed a bit more of an appreciation for this point of view the other day while flying with a Saudi first officer who was helping me understand some of the Muslim sentiment regarding the importance of their two most important cities: Mecca and Medina. He was telling me Medina is important because that is where the “holy prophet Muhammad” is buried as well as most of his successors. It is where Muhammad fled to when the people of Mecca didn’t like his insistence that there was only one God and they should give up all their pagan gods. Eventually Muhammad was able to come back to reclaim Mecca when he had finally developed a large following during his time in Medina. Mecca is significant to the Muslim, not only because it is the city where Muhammad was born, but also because the Kaaba is located there. The Kaaba is a cube shaped, one room stone structure that is traditionally believed to have been built by Abraham and Ishmael. Set on the outside of one corner of the structure is a black meteorite that is solemnly kissed by all pilgrims who can gain access to it. All Muslims are to visit the Kaaba at least once in their lifetime, a tradition that actually started well before Muhammad. All the prayers of Muslims are to face the Kaaba. Near this shrine are some large preserved “footprints” that are believed to be Abraham's. My first officer used his hands to show me these footprints are roughly two feet long, and he explained that in the early days people were much bigger than us and have gradually gotten smaller. He also told me that the Kaaba has been long held by Muslims to be the middle of the world, and science has recently been able to corroborate this. Another part of the Muslim pilgrimage in Mecca includes circling the Kaaba seven times, walking fast between two mounds near the sanctuary seven times, marching three miles to Mina, then proceeding six miles to Arafat, listening to a sermon, and then marching back to Mecca where a sacrifice is offered in memory of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his son, followed by one more circuit around the Kaaba. Somewhere in this journey is a spring of water that my first officer claimed was the water that God gave to Hagar when she was dying in the wilderness after being sent away with her son Ishmael. The water of this spring has become “holy water” for Muslims and is distributed all over the Muslim world. He said it has a distinct taste that he doesn’t particularly like, but is evidence that it is special and unique.

While he was telling me this I watched him intently looking for any hint of disbelief. There wasn’t any. He really believed everything he said about the footprints, the center of the world and the spring and all that. I couldn’t help but think of the Midwest American myth of Paul Bunyan when he was talking about the footprints, and both the holy water Catholics use in their ceremonies, and the Ganges River in India, when he was talking about the spring. I realized that this must be the feeling atheists have when Christians profess their belief in the miracles of the bible.

One of the concepts that helped C.S. Lewis convert back to Christianity from atheism was the idea of “true myth”. The bible has plenty of fantastic stories that are used to teach a lesson or bring home a point. The literalness of these stories is a bit challenging to believe, but to discount the literalness would be to undermine the bible’s overall authenticity. Jesus referred to Adam and Eve, and Jonah as real people. Sorting out what is true and what isn’t is a difficult task for those of us who believe in the supernatural, but I feel that an appreciation for the difficulty of belief is important if one is to have an open and honest conversation with an unbeliever.

Respect

Three memories come to mind that I think relate. One was quite a while ago. We were boarding a flight that was to take people from Dammam (our home airport) to Riyadh (the capital city of Saudi Arabia). The rest of the flights we do in my airplane only have men as passengers. This is due to the fact that all the oil wells and pump stations we serve are only staffed by men, and transporting these men is primarily what we use the Dash-8 for. Riyadh is a different kind of flight. I’m not sure what department pays for it, but we usually carry a mixture of men and women on these flights. The women are often going to Riyadh to shop and the younger ones are going to college there and coming back home every weekend. I’m not sure why the men go. Maybe it’s for similar reasons. None of it seems to be actual company business, but I could be wrong on that. What is interesting is that the men and women are segregated in the terminal waiting room. Then they come out to the plane in separate buses and all end up intermingling in the plane. I don’t think they actually sit next to each other in adjoining seats, but there isn’t much more than an aisle separating them much of the time and I’m sure this intermingling is viewed as a sort of necessary evil.

I’ve said all this to create a bit of a background for my actual story. As the boarding process was nearing its conclusion my Saudi first officer, and I were wrapping up our preflight procedures and checklist and had settled into a very relaxed and amiable “catching up” of each others’ lives. Suddenly our very senior Saudi flight attendant came up to us and rather agitatedly told us he had asked an elderly lady to change seats out of an exit row, and she had refused. The exit row she was sitting at had an exit door that had no stairs and a 4 foot drop, so the flight attendant felt it was necessary to put her closer to the door with the stairs attached to it. My first officer immediately took it upon himself to try to calm our flight attendant down. He suggested that maybe we should just let this lady have her way, as she was old and was obviously not trying to rebel. We could all plan on doing our best to help her out of the plane if we had need for an evacuation, instead of embarrassing her in front of the passengers. This discussion, by the way, was mostly in Arabic, so I was only getting bits and pieces of it and relying largely on body language. Every once in a while I would get a brief synopsis, but what I saw in the body language was that the calming intention of my first officer was ineffective. Our flight attendant remained passionately incensed and demanded a resolution. Apparently he had gotten in trouble for the very same thing on another occasion, and wasn’t going to have it again. We were already about a half hour delayed due to a maintenance issue that required us to change airplanes so I was feeling a bit of a time constraint. I was also struggling internally with my feelings of obligation to both follow the rules, and support my flight attendant. When I noticed nothing was being resolved I felt it was time to step in and blunder my way through some sort of resolution. I asked the flight attendant if he wanted me to go and talk to the lady myself. He said yes, so I did. Since she was in the front row it wasn’t far for me to go. I went up to her and squatted down in front of her so I would be at her eye level and so as to minimize the attention I was creating. All that I could see of her were her hands and her eyes. Everything else was covered in black (as it was for the rest of the women on the flight). When I looked at her eyes, I could tell she was crying and quite shaken. I tried to explain to her why she needed to move, and that it was necessary for her to follow the orders of the flight attendant. As I was saying all this I made probably my worst cultural (and religious) blunder. My hand was open and facing upward as would be natural in the middle of an explanation, but then I instinctively rested the back of my open hand on her knee. I’m not exactly sure why I did it. I think it was partly to comfort her, and partly to get her attention, but looking back I’m surprised I lived to tell about it. Talking to non-relative women here is very taboo and must be strictly business related and in the company of others. Touching a non-relative woman here is downright obscene. Somehow I got away with it. I asked her politely to change seats with another gentleman close to her but she continued to refuse. Her crying, however, seemed to stop. I told her we wouldn’t be able to go until she moved. After a bit of a pause she finally did move, but very slowly and reluctantly. This involved the moving of four people, actually, to avoid anyone sitting next to someone of the opposite sex. When it was finally done, I got back into my seat, and I could tell that my first officer wasn’t completely happy with what I had done. In his view I had disrespected an elder and this was more of a wrong than disobeying our rules or supporting our flight attendant. We sort of agreed to disagree and got back to regrouping ourselves for the flight …but it wasn’t over. It wasn’t a minute later, and the flight attendant came back up to the flight deck even more agitated than before. He declared that he was quitting right then and there, and that we would have to find a replacement for him. The lady had continued disrespecting him and he was not going to have any more of it. My head was swimming. Was I going to have to kick this lady off of the flight? As my mind groped unsuccessfully for a solution, the first officer came to my rescue. Like talking someone out of a suicide attempt at the edge of a bridge or tall building, he smoothly but definitively gathered up all the charm and persuasiveness he could muster, and successfully dismantled the emotional bomb that was just beginning to blow in front of us. I was in awe. Despite the fact that I couldn’t understand a word he said, I watched as in a matter of less than a minute the flight attendant rescinded his intentions to leave and went back to his duties with nothing but a bit of residual muttering.

Not knowing what else to do I asked my first officer if we were now good to go, and he said yes. Without saying a word about what had just happened we started up the engines and took off toward Riyadh. Once we were in the climb I thanked him for what he did and said I was indebted to him. I admitted that I had been at a loss as to what to do and he had done exactly what was necessary. After we had been flying for a while he called the flight attendant on the inter phone to check up on him. Apparently he was okay. There was even some laughter in the conversation as he joked about now having to stare at this lady for the rest of the flight, who was sitting face to face with him. When we got to Riyadh, I helped the lady down the stairs of the plane and into her wheelchair, after the other passengers had gotten off, and she thanked me. The flight attendant was calm now and in good spirits, but was still bothered by what he had endured.

I realized that the tension in this situation was largely a result of a disrespect of status and position, rather than just being ethnically based. Other tensions I’ve observed, however, have been across ethnic lines. We had an Indian flight attendant yesterday as we flew what we call the “pump run”. This is a long day of flying where we cross most of Saudi Arabia along the east-west pipe line, hopping from pump station to pump station to transport workers in and out of each one. We were briefly pausing at Pump Station #6 to pick up a few folks and take on some fuel. The flight attendant stepped off briefly to talk to the ground staff, and when he did so, a passenger sneaked off the plane to have a smoke. He at least went out to a designated smoking area, but when he came back, the flight attendant reprimanded him and asked for his badge number. The man refused, and once again I was brought into the picture. The flight attendant explained everything to me, and I eventually realized I needed to do something about it immediately. I asked if he wanted me to talk to the offender right then, and he said yes. I went to the guy’s seat and explained to him that I needed him to obey the instructions of the flight attendant. He didn’t say much. Then I asked him for his badge number. He mumbled it, and I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times. After I got it, I thanked him and went back to my seat while the flight attendant looked his number up on the manifest and filled out his report. I was a bit nervous at this point as I knew we now had a somewhat agitated and defiant passenger on board, but since he had obeyed me and seemed to somewhat understand a bit more of the gravity of his offence we pressed on. What complicated the matter was that my first officer had taken advantage of the short break as well to do the very same thing, and he and the offending passenger had actually enjoyed the smoke break together. In his defense he had thought that the passenger had been given permission to do this, but he was, however, obviously agitated once he realized our flight attendant had been disrespected. He brought it up multiple times during the course of the next flight, saying that this is a problem with uneducated Arabs. He said that he has observed them disrespecting people of other ethnic groups many times before, and didn’t like it. He claimed that you don’t see this so much among the more affluent and educated Arab population.

My last memory that relates to this theme of respect, but a little more loosely this time, happened this week as well. We arrived at Haradh in the middle of a sand storm. The visibility had dropped from seven miles to half a mile in just the short hour it took to get there, and the wind increased from 10 knots to a 27 knot direct crosswind. This was all within our limitations, so my first officer expertly wrestled the plane to the runway and did a nice job of landing it as well. We pulled up to the pump and were asked how much fuel we wanted. Before answering we asked how many passengers we were to expect, and they said 30. Our next flight was only going to take a half an hour so we calculated how much fuel we would need to be able to land there under our max landing weight and then decided that since we didn’t have a full load of passengers (37) we could add another 600 lbs of fuel to give ourselves an extra safety margin, due to the rapidly changing weather conditions. All was well until the boarding was done and we were told that we in fact now had 37 passengers. Now we were faced with a tough decision. We would have to either off-load 4 passengers, or plan to circle over our destination and burn fuel for about half an hour before we landed. We presented these choices to the dispatcher at Haradh and he mulled it over for a bit. After talking to the dispatch team at our home airport, they elected to let the choice be mine. I talked it over with my first officer, and we decided the best thing would be to remove 4 of the late passengers. Well, the decision wasn’t going to be completely mine as this wasn’t completely satisfactory to the dispatcher and he began to negotiate with me. He said that there were 3 passengers on board who were contractors (which usually means they are South-Asian expats that are notoriously treated pretty poorly here), and he would rather ask them to get off, than the Arab passengers who had been late. It was explained to me that the Arab passengers were returning to their families and the expats were just being relocated to their quarters in Dammam. Not knowing the full situation, I reluctantly agreed, but said that we would still have about 200 extra pounds of fuel to burn before we landed. This was finally the resolution we all agreed on and we took off about half and hour late. While on the way to our destination we creatively came up with all the inefficient ways we could fly there, the final choice being to fly the complete approach with the gear down (which would require more power and therefore higher fuel burn for the same airspeed). This worked, but I kept thinking how absurd this would be to do in the US with the current cost of fuel. On the flight, my very sensitive Saudi Arabian first officer mentioned multiple times how bad he felt for the contractors that got kicked off. We both agreed that it would have been better to kick off the late arriving Arabic passengers.

This issue of respect is obviously not just a Saudi Arabian issue. We deal with it all around the world. We all carry biases whether we realize it or not, and even our attempts to not be biased often serve only to reveal other biases (as was the case with my second story). The statement “those people are usually racist” is itself a biased statement. I have long been aware of the disrespect that goes on here and I’ve tried my best to give all people I interact with all the dignity I feel they deserve just for being fellow members of the human race, but I never imagined that my job as a pilot would require me to intervene in the biased based conflict of others. It’s going to take a while to get used to this. I hope I can keep my social and cultural blunders to a minimum in the process.