Arabian Son: 21 Stories

Living in a house on 11th Street in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Tim Barger grew up in the 1950s thinking that blinding heat, humidity and howling dust-storms were normal. By seven he had already experienced several locust plagues and was looking forward to the next one. Arabian Son is a collection of stories about Barger and his friends’ misguided attempts to amuse themselves in an oil camp lean on amenities and devoid of movies and TV. Crawling through hedges frosted with DDT, climbing hundred-foot radio towers, spelunking through a subterranean maze of air conditioning vents, ten-year-olds, they made the most of the world they had. Neither they, nor their parents, had the vaguest idea that Aramco would soon become the anchor of the global petroleum economy. The boys riding their bikes off of rooftops into dense hedges only knew that they were laughing themselves silly. They could not have realized just how soon their Dhahran would recede into the rear-view mirror to vanish into progress.