Bahrain on Horseback

The young horse, as skittish as the young man, danced along the packed dirt track, tossing his head. The boy wore flip-flops, toes pointed up—good form—to keep from dropping them. I was barefoot. Neither one of us had a saddle. He caught my eye as we reached “the racetrack,” a strip of soft sand that ran alongside the island’s largest highway. Even if we had spoken, we wouldn’t have heard one another for the whoosh of the cars atop the embankment. The silent challenge was proffered. When a horse begins to gallop, you can feel it flatten beneath you, as the rise and fall of the three-beat canter gives way to a four-beat staccato that you hear rather than feel: hind, hind, front, front, hind, hind, front, front. The gallop is the only gait in which all four hooves leave the ground at the same time.

 I waited until he and his mount were a dot in the distance before giving my horse his head. He was dancing too. He knew why we had come.

This is one of my last memories of this place. 

When I left eighteen years ago, this part of Bahrain was all stables and farms, the highway the edge of our world. Now I stand in the last patch of green for several miles. Its owner plans to transform it into a housing development. The conversion of Bahrain’s last few acres of designated agricultural land is a matter of rubber-stamping, at least for landowners from powerful families—most of the farmers and stable owners do not own the land they work and do not come from these families. For the moment, though, it is still there. 

Nearby couches, their sponge stuffing exposed, sit seemingly at random, facing a charred patch of ground. Concrete-and-glass residential complexes, like spaceships, have landed where palm groves and rocky outcroppings once stood. Yet even with concrete developments like ramparts all around, groups of men still sit on these couches most nights—the closest they can come to nature. Though the land has changed around them, they would rather be