The Land of Confusion
Life was pretty confusing for me as a kid in Sand Land. I have very few memories from that time; I barely spoke the language (though I could read and write), and, as I often couldn’t understand what was going on around me, I spent much of my childhood in a world of my own imagination. We moved around a lot, and so my treasured childhood possessions often ended up in lost luggage or abandoned, leaving nothing to remind me of that time…
But a few memories stand out in my mind: Frozen Suntop Juice boxes with collectible stickers, warm, U-shaped za’atar rolls they served for lunch, and a mysterious, trapezoidal concrete building I liked to climb.
“Can’t you see this is a land of confusion?”
– Genesis, 1986
A Few Words About a Mysterious Trapazoidal Structure…
I don’t recall what the structure was used for; it might have been concrete bleachers, bathrooms, or a storage building. It was made of solid concrete, which wasn’t particularly remarkable at the time and place, but what was noteworthy about it was its sloping sides. They looked something like this:
I recall some details, such as it being adjacent to the outdoor basketball court, and that you could see the dirt soccer fields and jogging track from it. Having poor proprioception, I couldn’t swear to direction or orientation – the sun always hung oppressively in the sky with recess being in the middle of the day, and it was always dry and dusty.
I didn’t play basketball, wasn’t very good at soccer, and wasn’t particularly social, so I usually looked for ways to spend my time by myself. On a whim, I decided to try to climb the sides of the building. My first few attempts failed, but I worked out that with a running start, as long as I maintained my momentum, I could sprint most of the way up, catch the lip of the roof with my fingers, and pull myself up the rest of the way.
I don’t know why this memory has stuck with me all this time, but as the years marched on, I began to wonder just how accurate it was. After waking up one morning thinking about it, I decided to look into it…
Putting Together the Pieces
I knew the city’s name, but hadn’t realized until I looked closely at the map that it was divided into an old part of town and a new industrial city, built only a few years before my family’s arrival in the early 80s. I have other fond memories of my black BMX bike, and my father would sometimes drive us down to the long, concrete promenade that ran parallel to the ocean.
We lived in a new subdivision, and every house looked much like the rest, so finding a particular neighborhood was out of the question. Though how many elementary schools might there be, given that some were for expats, and the one I went to was for nationals, and was a boys’ school (though most aspects of life in that part of the world are segregated).
After an aerial search on Google Earth, I eventually located what I think was the school. According to the scalebar, 90 pixels represented approximately 20 feet, which, if true, is a remarkable resolution of ~0.067 meters/pixel or about 6.7cm/pixel. So I measured a known object (passenger sedan) for scale, and sure enough, the dimensions worked out to be about 2.66″ per pixel, which is remarkably good!
After carefully reviewing large areas of the map, I finally found what I was looking for:
The details loosely align with my memory; however, I recall there were two soccer fields (side by side), both dirt, not grass (which was rare and very expensive at the time). If you wind back the clock to 2006 or earlier, you can see that my recollection was accurate (i.e., dirt soccer fields):
The more recent image seems to have a scale of approximately 2.7″ per pixel, which is remarkably good. This would give the mystery building a footprint of approximately 80′ long by 40′ wide.
Filling in the Blanks
The names of both the district and the elementary school were also familiar to me after reading them, as well as other secondary details, such as the thoroughfare, named for the King whose visage appeared on the local currency at the time.
All that to say that I was as reasonably sure that this was indeed the location I spent many recesses, sipping an orange Suntop and daydreaming before being thrown back into the endless boredom of the classroom. The only thing I can liken it to is the Adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon, if Charlie only understood about 25% of what was being said…
Vindication, However Limited
Although I tried to find pictures of the grounds, most outdoor shots featured the soccer field and faced west (away from the structure/basketball court), so I suppose I’ll just have to be happy with what I found. It’s quite remarkable when you think about it in its entirety:
- The structure still existed 40 years later
- Sufficiently detailed satellite photos were available and [publicly] accessible
- The names of the district, the school, and the thoroughfares were familiar to me, once I’d read them
- The memory turned out to be true, not some invention of my overactive imagination…
For instance, one of my childhood friends who had a similar ancestry to mine used to make up stories about how Kermit the Frog would sneak into your bedroom at night and shove needles up your butt, then collect your diarrhea in a glass jar (yes, really), which was accompanied by the song of the same name.
It’s fair to say that I had a very strange childhood…