Taif

I imagine that as soon as a woman becomes a mother she automatically becomes the purveyor of wisdom and advice. I can’t figure out any other reason so much “guidance” is issued by mothers. My mother was no exception. One of her insights was, “Always be nice to the people you meet on your way up because you just might meet them coming down.” That message rang true for me a few years ago.

I was in Taif, Saudi Arabia, whose only claim to fame was that it was sometimes home to the royal family during the hot summer months. The town is in the far western end of the country at high enough elevation that there is an occasional breeze and cooling down during the hot summer months. The absence of humidity makes it rather pleasant there in the evenings.

The airport in Taif was nothing more than a cinder block building with a counter occupied by a single security guard. As is typical in Saudi Arabia, the noon day prayers had vacated the premises and provided workers with the excuse to eat and take a nap. The only person left manning the station was a young security guard with a few stripes sufficient to give him supervision of soldiers with even fewer stripes. I judged him to be about 18 years old, more than a few pounds overweight, olive skinned, dark eyes, and black hair. My fellow passengers had already passed the guard, gone through another room and were walking across the tarmac to the small Saudia jet waiting to take us to Jeddah. The guard motioned me to the counter and held out his hand for my documents.

I gave him my passport and my ticket but he beckoned for something more and barked at me in Arabic. He wanted something else but for the life of me I did not know what it was. Had this been Nigeria or Egypt then I would have crossed his palm with silver – but never in Saudi Arabia. We were rapidly approaching an impasse and I knew the temperatures were rising for the crew and passengers on the tarmac. There are some gestures that are universally recognizable and I refrained from using the first that came to mind and instead extended my thumb and little finger to the side of my face. He recognized that I wanted to make a telephone call and pointed me to a small office to the right of his counter. I phoned my sponsor in Riyadh and explained the situation. My sponsor asked to speak to the guard. The guard’s face went from a confident sneer to the saddest cocker spaniel imitation that I ever saw. He handed the phone back to me and my friend said everything would be ok. I hung up the phone and followed the guard back to the counter. He returned my passport and ticket and motioned me through a door behind him where my luggage was waiting to be loaded on the plane.

I glanced around the room and found it to be empty. I could see through a roll up steel door to the plane and saw a flight attendant impatiently staring in my direction. I looked back and my bag was on top of the table in front of the same security guard who was now smiling right at me. I noticed that he had a gold tooth prominent in what was now becoming a smirk worthy of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker in Batman. Without diminishing his smirk, the guard went through my suitcase and unscrewed my shampoo, my mouthwash, my toothpaste and every pill bottle that I had. He tossed everything in my suitcase and then smiled from ear to ear with his gold tooth glistening as he pushed the suitcase back toward me. I said nothing, reclosed all open containers and thought about that universal gesture that I had not used several minutes before. I carried my own bags to the waiting plane and sunk into my seat.

By sunset that evening I was enjoying a lobster dinner and on my way to downing a bottle of retsina wine in an open air restaurant in the plaka at the base of the acropolis in Athens. A pleasant dinner, accompanied by a good bottle of wine, goes a long way towards making one forget about disagreeable events which may have occurred earlier in the day.

A couple of days later I gathered my bags and hugged my wife back in the States. She said, “I’ve been worried to death about you. I’ve had calls from Saudi Arabia asking if you were still in jail.” I told her my story and assured her that everything had been resolved.

When I got back to the office I found a letter that had been in by briefcase, written entirely in Arabic, which I later discovered was my “letter of authority” to travel freely about the interior of Saudi Arabia. That was the letter being sought by the gold toothed security guard in Taif. I didn’t know what it was or that it was the document that the security guard wanted. I can still see that gold toothed kid with the Jack Nicholson smirk and Mom, I promise to be nice to the people I meet on the way up because I’ll surely meet them on the way down.