Facing My Fears in the World’s Largest Sand Desert

We were three single Americans with a whiskey handle. What reception would we wake to if we fall asleep on the wrong sand?

In the center of Abu Dhabi—a pulsing network of man-made islands on the Persian Gulf—everything in view is brand new. Glass and metal towers flash the sun at each other. Freshly-paved highways glisten like videotape. Just outside the city, the desert, ancient and unchanging, waits at the periphery, sometimes encroaching in titian drifts, threatening to submerge skyscrapers and self-driving car test tracks as if they were ancient ruins.

Drive two hours south, into the dunes, and soon the epic silver skyline fades. Salt flats, lonely gas stations, and farmers’ co-ops are sporadic flecks of white on a desolate orange landscape that extends without interruption toward every horizon. Unpaved, one-lane roads branch off the main arteries into small communities of migrant farmers—handfuls of little houses scattered on the sand. Their world feels like another planet to me.

It was mid-March in the United Arab Emirates and I was visiting Laura at her new job in the arts department on Abu Dhabi’s NYU campus. On the weekend, we piled into her friend Sami’s smart car and the three of us took the highway out of the city to the Empty Quarter—the world’s largest sand desert—for an overnight camp. We wanted to experience the beauty and strangeness of a void, the lack of artificial light, the haven from overheard conversations, radios in cars, televisions in airports, newsfeeds on our phones. I had never been to an empty place.

I am an American woman; a small, brunette, brown-eyed thirty-something of Eastern European descent, with regrettably minimal upper body strength, a slightly off-kilter right front tooth, and a medium amount of political angst. When I travel, I am just two things: An American, and a woman.

There is little I can do (nor care to do, in most cases) about being a woman. When it comes to being American, I recognize the privilege, especially of being a white American and the mobility that comes along with it. But sometimes, I secretly hope to be mistaken for a Canadian or a Brit—especially right now, as I travel in the Middle East, at the onset of the Trump administration’s 2017 travel ban. So I try to be unobtrusive, to blend in, to keep my voice down. I observe the customs I’m aware of, eat what is served, and say ‘thank you’ (or ‘gracias,’ or ‘kaadinchhey la,’ or ‘terima kasih’). And when I don’t know the words, I smile: a strategic indication that I am friendly, and harmless. All told, I walk the thin line that self-aware Americans do abroad: the line between respect and trepidation.

When we reach our milestone—the stretch of UAE desert near the Liwa Oasis—we start eyeing the dirt roads that peel off the highway, looking for a favorable place to park. The perfect score, Laura explains, is a spot where our car won’t be seen as an intrusion, and no one will come looking for its owners.

We turn right onto an unkempt lane with no sign. A chicken darts nervously in front of us. At first, the houses look abandoned. Soon, it becomes clear they are not: Clothes lines. A goat. A sustained, unsmiling look from a man standing by a pile of rubble. There is a distinct feeling of unwelcome, and when the road ends abruptly in what would be a field if there were anything growing, we make a U-turn and leave as discreetly as possible, with our eyes down.

The desert isn’t marked in a way we understand, if it is marked at all. It’s not evident what sand is owned by the government, and what belongs to private parties. An American friend told me a story of desert camping once: She, her husband, and their young daughter left from their home in Oman, and they did what we were doing. They found a road, found a place to park, picked up their packs and walked across the dunes, only to be awoken in the middle of the night by Saudi police.

Unknowingly, they had crossed the border, the burnt orange dunes of one nation indistinguishable from the next. When the guards met her daughter—just a toddler, with bright red hair—their hostility dissolved. Her husband spoke Arabic. They could show they were a family; they had wedding bands on their fingers. They were told to relocate, and the situation diffused.

We were three single Americans with a whiskey handle. What reception would we wake to if we fall asleep on the wrong sand?

A few miles later, Sami pulls off the main route again, this time to the left, onto a lane that dips down from the highway and rolls out before us until it disappears in a heat haze. Along it, there are power lines, crumbled cinder block abodes, and dunes that rise up on both sides like a parted Red Sea. With the highway maybe a mile behind us, the compacted sand road becomes a loose sand road, and our tires immediately start spinning in place. We’re stuck.

I briefly envision us unable to dislodge our vehicle in this desolation, devoid of cell signal, dying of heat stroke. But not two minutes pass before a man with a beard and a white kumma, a traditional Omani cap, approaches out of nowhere and shatters my anxiety daydream. We have no language in common, but our tourist predicament is clear to him—for all I know, he encounters it weekly. Soon he and Sami are pushing the front of the car while I steer in reverse, wheels careening around until they find solid earth to grab. We’re dislodged. The man shouts back and forth with another man back at the house he came from while we clumsily express our gratitude. It seems like we’re the butt of a joke, but it’s a good-natured one. He waves us off.

Sami parks fifty feet from the incident, beside the peaceful-looking ruins of a one-room house with shattered windows. I would have preferred to go somewhere where we’d not been noticed at all, but he’s taking the man’s generosity as a good sign. If there are neighbors, may they be amicable, he figures. I defer.

We pack out of the car and walk across the road toward the nearest incline, over trash and wire jutting out of the ground.

Scaling the dune, our feet slide back with every step, like running up a downward escalator. Gradually, all the detritus of civilization gets sparser, falls away. When we crest the precipice, it looks like the stock Apple desktop images: dune after dune after dune under a cloudless sky. The car and the road disappear from sight.

After only a matter of minutes of trudging through the heat, at a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, when absolutely no signs of civilization can be seen or heard, we settle. We build our city. I tear open a bag of store-bought firewood. Just as we successfully ignite a fire and put our food over it, the wind picks up—really picks up—and we spend the next hour, maybe more, confined to our tiny tent feeling humbled by the scale of the desert and a little stupid for not having a contingency dinner plan in the event of a minor haboob.

To our relief, at some point the sandy gales abruptly stop, and give way to total silence. We emerge dazed by the existential awareness of our insignificance, and covered in a fine copper dust.

Night has fallen, and the barren world is brightly moonlit. This is what we came for—a reprieve from humanity laid out before us, endless and Martian and tamped down with an unrivaled quiet: There was no bird to send a call. No highway whir, no appliance hum, no breeze to rustle a leaf, and no leaf to be rustled. Not even an airplane would pass overhead. It was peaceful.

It was alien.

In no time, it was deeply, utterly terrifying.

The only fears we are born with are a fear of falling and a fear of loud sounds. Other fears—of spiders, of water, of things that go bump in the night—we are conditioned by instinct and by environment to acquire.

As Americans who watch the news, there are all kinds of fears being suggested to us, no matter our age: fear of mass shootings, of terrorists, of migrant caravans, of epidemics, of crime; fear of the other.

Nine years ago, in Turkish Kurdistan during Ramadan, I felt people’s eyes watching me walk in the streets after dark, where local women weren’t allowed. Our van’s driver told us that men had approached and asked him where my friends and I were staying, and that he declined to tell them. Tourists had been kidnapped from a hotel a few villages away the previous year. People had been killed in explosions at border checkpoints that very week.

I don’t remember having trouble sleeping then. I must not have acquired those fears. But now, in my thirties—despite being a “world traveler” who lived for twelve years in New York where I was supposed to have disposed of my biases and nervousness about moving through the world—I suddenly find myself haunted by a low-level, diffuse apprehension about, on any given day, political tensions, global warming, Zika virus, gender-based violence, and being crushed to death in the rubble of a collapsing New York City subway tunnel.

For the most part, all that anxiety is background noise. But in some moments, it crosses a line and morphs into front-of-mind fear, complete with galloping heart, triggered by something happening around me.

On this camping trip, where almost nothing is happening around me, that something is a flash of light. Some hours have passed since our shambolic failure at cooking dinner over an open fire. The wind has stopped; the air is still, and we are under the open sky, sprawled on the sand, picking out constellations or making them up. Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I see a bright pixel of light flicker on and go out in an instant on the horizon—or is it the edge of the nearest dune? It could be thirty feet away, or three thousand.

My heart pounds. My skin bristles. My breath speeds up. Some of these thoughts, I realize later, have roots deep in my subconscious. 

Explanations, none but bone-chilling, barrel through my mind. I listen so hard for any clue, for menacing intruders tucking their lanterns out of sight. I start regressing to fears unfiltered by rationale. There is nothing to be scared of here, I tell myself—in fact, there is literally nothing here—but at the same time, I can’t halt it. I am actually terrified. My heart pounds. My skin bristles. My breath speeds up. Some of these thoughts, I realize later, have roots deep in my subconscious.

What if we are arrested by hostile police, I think. What if we are kidnapped for ransom? What if we are robbed, slashed with scimitars and left for dead in this parched wilderness? I strain to hear them, whatever anachronistic shadowy figures I’m trying to stop myself from visualizing, making their way toward us. I hear nothing at all.

The amygdala is the part of our brain that signals us to be afraid if we encounter a threat. It catalogs fears, instinctive and learned, and pins them to memories we keep filed away in a different part of our brain called the hippocampus. When the amygdala recognizes something that it associates with danger, the physical symptoms of fear are triggered. I’ve never encountered desert marauders. So why should I feel threatened by them now?

Scientists have found that we don’t actually need to experience a traumatic event firsthand in order to develop a fear based on it; we only need to have witnessed it—in a movie, or on the news, or even in our own imaginations, as we listen to someone else recount a threatening episode. Hollywood and hearsay are enough to instill us with real, visceral fears.

Scientists are also finding that traumatic events involving people who are “other” inspire deeper, longer-lasting fears than traumatic events with people who look the same as us. We are biologically predisposed to buy into divisive messages about people outside our own communities from governments, media, and each other. The fears some Americans harbor—the fears that drive conservative immigration policy and cuts to social welfare programs—are born of stereotypes, but they are reinforced by brain chemistry. They aren’t actually related to other people; they are our own, ingrained in us.

On the wide open sand, our tent the only familiar object, I feel distracted and vulnerable. Laura and Sami don’t, but they didn’t see the light. While I try to appear present for the conversation, I am scanning the ground for scorpions, and our periphery for signs of the lamplight again and again.

As the night wears on (and no dune lurkers reveal themselves), my guard drops just a little. We stretch and dance, drink, and describe our childhood homes. Mine was a dark old house with a big porch in a patch of pinewoods beside a pond full of ducks. We had gnarly apple trees my dad said were planted by Johnny Appleseed. I was afraid of falling through the ice on the pond in the winter, and of the dark recesses of our basement, where I was sure there were spiders, snakes, even robbers. What are the quotidian fears that come with growing up here, at the edge of the Liwa Oasis?

As I let the sand swallow my feet, ankles, legs, I meditate myself into sedation. It was inhumanly hot today. My body and my brain are tired.

When we decide to crash, Sami sleeps outside our zipped tent door, face to the stars. And we all sleep well, somehow, the sand almost body-temperature, caving to our weight like a cradle.

*

In the morning, I wake up first. It’s still and tranquil, and the ground is glowing. I step out into a pink and blue pre-sunrise, hike up to the dune’s edge, and look west, toward Saudi Arabia. A herd of camels are specks against the ghost of a lake that had been there before, now a shimmering salt flat. At the flat’s perimeter, there’s a one-story house, like the house where we parked.

In the daylight, I can see plainly, we were never unsafe.

While my eyes are on the house, in the dawn haze, its porch light flips on: a benevolent bright white pixel, hundreds of yards in the distance. I laugh. My light, the great midnight menace that had scared me half to death. Someone’s porchlight. The farmer with the camels. A neighbor of the man who helped us free our tires on the road.

What changed for me between Kurdistan at Ramadan, and last night? Why was I so scared? Maybe America. Maybe the news, or how much attention I pay to it. Maybe it’s just that I’m older now; scientists say that simply an accumulation of stress over time can heighten those responses. Whatever the source, with no other sensory input, this quiet, empty place became a vacuum of my anxieties. Emptiness was the room into which they were invited. To match the landscape, the threats my amygdala referenced were ancient, primitive ones: Venomous animals, hostile foreign tribes. Portable fears, already with me, no matter where I am.

Now the dunes look calm. All of their shadows are drying up in the sun. I am taken by the beauty of it, and a little hungover from fear and guilt. In the daylight, I can see plainly, we were never unsafe.