In my last New York winter before we moved to Abu Dhabi, I sometimes taunted my friends with the weather reports from my soon-to-be home. The weather icons on my iPhone showed nothing but perfect egg yolks: day after day of unblemished sunshine and warmth. “There’s no weather there,” I’d crow, as the grim slushy days of February dragged on and on and on.
Ah, hubris. Because of course, what I’d conveniently overlooked was the dense humidity of an Abu Dhabi summer, those days when it feels like you are living inside a clothes dryer: searingly hot and damp. Strangers are always surprised by the humidity. If I had a dirham for every time someone said “but it’s a dry heat, right?” I would be a rich woman.
Once I’d more or less adapted to the heat, I thought my weather-related adjusting was finished – but I had another lesson to learn. “Weather” here sometimes has nothing to do with things like temperature or precipitation. With the innocence of the newly arrived, I had signed up for a full-moon kayak expedition in the mangroves, thinking that in October, unlike October in New York, my plans wouldn’t be scuttled by a downpour or suddenly frigid temperatures.
Hubris, again. Abu Dhabi's non-weather weather upended my plans, but not in a way I was used to. It wasn't rain or heat. No, the weather that got in the way was sand. The kayak outing was cancelled due to a sandstorm. Before moving here, the only thing I knew about sandstorms came from Frank Herbert's Dune, in which sandstorms were huge sandy hurricanes, capable of destroying entire cities. Hollywood loves that sort of sandstorm, too – remember the violent sandstorm that engulfed Dubai in Mission: Impossible- The Ghost Protocol?
The sandstorm that cancelled the kayak trip was not a Hollywood monster storm, but it did clear the streets of traffic and pedestrians. I felt like I was driving through a snowstorm, except for the fine layer of grit filtering into the car windows, and the orangey haze suspended in the street light’s glow.
Some years later, in a kind of harmonic convergence, when the northeastern United States was being battered by Hurricane Sandy, there was also a sandstorm in Abu Dhabi. Palm trees bent almost to the ground, patio furniture blew around, and sand winnowed into every crack and crevice. Sandy was of course much more destructive than Abu Dhabi’s “sandy”, but sand does seem a bit like water, in that both find their way into everything, no matter what sort of barrier you put in the way.
My iPhone doesn’t have a symbol for sandstorm the way it does for rain or snow. What I get instead is a kind of curlicue that looks like a Sanskrit letter. Clearly the app wizards need to come up with a sandstorm icon for the desert places of the world. They’re being quite “weatherist” in their oversight, don’t you think?
Anyone would recognise the recent rains as actual weather, although people from other countries might not recognise our storms as exceptional (in New York, high winds and driving rain just mean November has arrived). But in a country where average rainfall in the winter is about 9mm, the fact that last December we had 13.5mm seems rather significant. Should we point to global climate change, perhaps? US Republicans would probably put their heads in a sand dune and say “absolutely not”, but I think the rest of us might think otherwise, especially given that as I write these words, rain is lashing at my window with tropical ferocity.
This weather reminds me of The Whether Man, in the classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth, who says "it's far more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be".
Climate change – and our strange recent weather – pose a version of the same question: whether human behaviours will create weather that we can neither control nor predict.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi