I pictured sweaty men in fedoras stuffing drugged cotton balls up his nose or sticking large syringes into the rope-like veins that pulsed along his neck. Perhaps these smells reminded him of his life on American racetracks. Or perhaps he was considering the scents I exuded-Old Spice deodorant and breath mints, ibuprofen and middle-age angst. He turned his scimitar head andregarded me with one ebony eye. What was Qaboos’s definition of crazy? Crazy as in dangerous crazy? Or crazy as in crazy fun? Or was it a word that rhymes with crazy. Then he added, “Arabians little crazy.”Ĭrazy. I relate all this so you can grasp my tentative state of mind when, just as we prepared to mount the horses, Qaboos announced: “Horse little crazy.” He said this nonchalantly, as if he were saying this horse is white. Was swimming somehow analogous to riding an Arabian horse? Were the same muscles engaged? But I was afraid of another wearisome back and forth, so I just leaned back in the seat and listened to the Arab Bieber, who was growing on me. “Yes,” he nodded emphatically, but offered no explanation for why he was asking. Qaboos steadily drummed the steering wheel, as I guessed what he meant by phrases such as “You fly in water?” After a long interrogation and some pantomiming, it turned out that he was asking if I could swim.
He turned up the volume, filling the truck with an Arabic version of “Despacito,” and we sped along the main road, past the moonlit silhouettes of the jagged mountains that define this part of the Omani coastline. Our communication was further confused by his insistence on playing loud music as we drove. But as we talked, I realized that when he said here, he sometimes meant there, right could mean left, near was more like very far. Certainly, his English was better than my Arabic, which consisted of 20 or so words, only six of which I could properly pronounce. “I am Qaboos,” he said and off we went through the darkened streets.Īs we drove to his stable in Barka, about an hour up the coast, I discovered that Qaboos often mixed up words. That morning, before dawn, an aging pickup rumbled up to my guesthouse in Muscat, Oman’s capital city, and out stepped a handsome young man in his 20s wearing riding pants and tall black boots, his hair freshly cut, his mustache neatly trimmed. Qaboos and I had met through a daisy-chain of connections and acquaintances after I’d told a friend that one of my lifelong desires was to ride Arabian horses in the birthplace of the breed. It had taken me a while to grasp all of this information, which Qaboos had delivered in broken English. some years back to boost its Arabian bloodstock.Or so I gathered. His name was Scarzo, a former racehorse that the stable had imported to Oman from the U.S. “From Amreeka, like you,” said the trainer, Qaboos.
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