[img]1926|right|Mr. Schwada||no_popup[/img]I knew I was back in L.A. when – driving home from LAX – I heard Frank Stoltze, one of the city’s journalistic treasures, making a pledge drive pitch on KPCC.
I knew I wasn’t fully back when I was welcomed home by Jeffrey Taylor, a great designer of political mail, who promptly said: “You smell like curry.” Maybe not curry but Middle Eastern spices. Hard to get the stuff out of your system after eating grilled goat, ful maddamas and tempered peas for days on end.
Halfway around the world, on the edges of the Empty Quarter, where Bedouins live and mad Englishmen find refuge, on the shores of the Arabian Sea, sandwiched between troubled neighbors like Iran and Yemen is the quaint country of Oman. That’s where I had been.
When it’s 2 p.m. here in L.A., it’s 2 a.m. in Oman. That’s how far away Oman is.
Once called the most charming police state in the world, Oman is a place where politeness and civility are enforced. Lese majeste is illegal. You cannot curse your neighbor over his caterwauling cat without consequences. Like jail-time.
And you certainly cannot insinuate that His Majesty Sultan Qaboos ibn Said is misgoverning the country without risking jail-time.
Bedouin hospitality is great. But the flip-side is a nation without public dissent.
Dissent and caterwauling about politics had been at the very heart and soul of my existence for the past eight months, as the press guy for the Carmen Trutanich for City Attorney campaign. I don’t think an hour went by during those months when I did not commit an offense that would have been imprisonable in Oman.
Oman was a refreshing change from the daily grind of L.A.’s political season. Pick up a paper in Oman, like the English language Muscat Daily, and you could find nary a negative thing in it about HM (his majesty).
Trutanich and Feuer, Zine and Galperin, Cedillo and Gardea (the former in each of these pairings was a client of mine) were 12 thousand miles away as I walked, trekked, drove my way around Oman. Fifteen hundred miles of driving. Maybe 50 miles of walking. The daytime temperatures – in the 100’s.
In the boondocks of Oman, while getting lost in the labyrinthine alleys of an ancient village where Jesus reincarnate might have found himself at home, the struggle with the heat was tiring. But it was a good tiring.
Every drop of sweat squeezed another sub-cutaneous, molecular-level drop of L.A. and a frustrating campaign season out of my body. The broiling heat, the bite of spices, the God-tortured mountains, the sand dune deserts the size of Connecticut, the ancient villages improbably clinging to the side of gorges or enduring alongside cooling mountain streams, the white-nosed donkeys braying under the shade of a wind-blasted tree, the exotic sound of the muzzein calling the faithful to prayer at 4 in the morning, the old men with bizarrely-coiffed beards selling live goats in the souk – all of it was cathartic. They pushed L.A. out of my mind.
Now I’m back. No regrets. Ready to work. See you around the souk.
Mr. Schwada, a longtime print and television journalist in this town, may be contacted at john.schwada@gmail.com
