Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Author:Mark Vanhoenacker [Vanhoenacker, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780525657507
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2022-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

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We park and the door of the plane opens onto one of the hottest cities on Earth.

The writer and traveler Zahra Freeth, who was born in 1925 and spent much of her childhood in Kuwait, once accompanied an official mission to investigate the eradication of locusts from the desert. She wrote that “the breeze from the moving car kept us cool enough; if we stopped, however, the metal sides of the jeep soon became too hot to touch.” Today, many parking lots in Kuwait, as in other desert cities, feature canopies that throw shade onto the resting cars beneath. The city’s airport also features overhanging covers for small jets, which I saw here before I saw them anywhere else.

My colleagues and I collect our bags and go through immigration. When we finally emerge from the terminal, it’s into a covered, shaded area, where it’s common to see fashionably dressed women pull in to drop off or pick up passengers, reminding me, as Kuwait’s cathedral, with its lively crowds and image of Our Lady of Arabia does, too, that not all Gulf cities are alike. Immediately beyond this covered area lies the glare of the unshielded world.

Like me, you may have first seen the Gulf on a bedroom or classroom globe, or on maps on news broadcasts during the wars, and you may appreciate that this geopolitically important body of water runs roughly north-south, and that Kuwait City is somewhere at the northern end of it. Yet at the northwestern corner of the Gulf, unseen—at least at the scale at which I first learned of it—is a bay. Kuwait lies along the southern shore of that bay. So, when you stand on the city’s waterfront, near Seif Palace, for example, and face out over the waves, you are, in fact, looking northwest, and the open waters of the Gulf lie where a foreigner, taking off their sunglasses to rub their eyes after a long journey, would least expect them to be: behind their right shoulder.

There are many examples of trading cities that grew up at the water’s edge. Kuwait’s existence, however, may be equally a function of the ocean of sand that surrounds it wherever water does not. On the city’s desert side, immediately outside its wall, was once a kind of inland port, where the camels of the Bedouin and of traders from the interior were moored like vessels. Its other shore was what the Australian author and adventurer Alan Villiers, who chronicled the maritime traditions of the “good city” of Kuwait in Sons of Sindbad, described as “one of the most interesting waterfronts in the world,” and the home of some of Earth’s most skillful shipwrights and sailors.

Children here once had their hands marked with ink before the break in their classes, so that their teacher might check, when they returned, that they had not been to swim. Indeed, in such a severe climate, Kuwait at first grew all but linearly along its shore, leading a missionary doctor to remark on the old city’s “peculiar length and narrowness.

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