Petroglyphs-Part 5

The creators of the petroglyphs left their simple etchings in isolated corners of Qatar – barely noticeable to passersby and of minor importance to historians. And, what will be left by the expats to investigate by residents 700 years from now? What will they discover? Deep holes sucked dry of fossil fuels and hydrocarbons, for certain.
Land rigs sunken into an earth drained of life, partially covered by the desert, rusted, decayed, and blistered by the brutal wind and sand. Kilometers of pipelines, once the arteries of unimaginable wealth, become nothing more than homes to sand spiders and scorpions.

Flare stacks, the fire breathing portals of excess gas, lean willy-nilly in all directions creating what might resemble ancient desert art. Poking out of the landscape of the future will be the decrepit remains of derricks, elongated steel pyramids from which monster-sized drills relentlessly bored into thick layers of rock to capture Qatar’s life blood, lie long abandoned, collapsed, and buried in the sand as the desert returns to its natural landscape.

And what about the legacy of the other million plus expats that lived and worked in Qatar during the heady days when just about anyone and anything could be bought because the money flowed like the liquid natural gas siphoned from its bowels. Hundreds of schools, the ubiquitous malls, hundreds of thousands of villas and apartments built quickly and shoddily will have suffered the same fate – desertion by the masses because when the last ounces of fossil fuel have been excised in 40 years or in 200 years, a quiet apocalypse will converge on Qatar with the diaspora of the expats, because, as Finn says, “ . . . we are something the locals can purchase,” and when the resources are gone and our expertise is no longer useful, the Qatari government will rescind our invitation, we will be erased from their history books, and we will leave what will again become an irrelevant peninsula, handing it back to its Bedouin fathers, barren and used up, and ready for the desert to reclaim.

And, like the petroglyphs my expat rider friends and I investigated in May of 2010, the abundant artifacts we leave behind, the legacy of our long gone transient culture, as evidence of our tenure will remain a mystery, a perplexing puzzle to wonder over, to whatever primitive culture finds its way to Qatar 700 years into the future.