XA Burbie Post Heroic Extraction - a photo on Flickriver

            Olympus XA. Fuji Superia Xtra 400

In the end I'm really just so pleased with the emotion expressed in this image. Let me go quickly with the backstory.

Just before summer we usually have a weekend campout at a rather rustic beachside facility deep in the Qatar southern desert. It is for the church youth group (the teenagers). So each year there is a requirement for 40 or so offroad vehicles to ferry the kids in the first day and out the second. This is the second time I participated but the first time I actually had the Suburban in a good condition so that I could actually be a driver. Got Burbie all cleaned up and loaded up. I was thinking the kids would hate it because of no AC and no USB ports but actually most thought it looked really cool. The drive in was fun, complete with the local guide almost losing his mind that I was going to drive in without having four wheel drive. All good all the way in.

Most of the drivers head back home and then drive in the next day to collect. A group of us decided we would rather camp. We did some goofing around on some nearby dunes and set camp for the night. The weather was mildly stormy with quite a lot of thunder but not much rain. But the desert was damp which is very unusual.

The next day we had friends with us who were new to the desert. We had a few hours to kill. Jonny and I decided to go duning all the way down to the Inland Sea which is right by the Saudi border. My one request: we stay out of the sabqa. The sabqa is flat areas between the dunes. Basically a salt pan but often with a thick deep gooey layer of claylike mud just beneath the surface. When you break through it can be almost impossible to get out. And with the rain the water was pooling on top of the sabqa making it softer.

All went well until Jonny decided that he had to get to one last hilltop -- one with a view of Saudi. Of course, it was the other side of a very broad piece of flooded sabqa which seemed to be partially flooding from an incoming tide plus the rain. Long story short, we both got stuck. Jonny briefly, me fully and solidly. Since we had guests Jonny had to head back to take them to camp. I begged his sand boards off of him (I had a shovel). I could see that if I didn't get out the car would flood and be lost forever. It seemed pretty hopeless and the work was thankless, sandy, soaking, agonisingly slow, and of dubious hope of success.

Well, I did eventually manage to get back to a more solid area where the main pair of wheel tracks were. I was nearly paralysed from exposure, stiff, couldn't get the sand off. I don't have any pictures of this time because my phone could literally not be operated by my hands. A desperate bonsai dash got me to the other end of the track and very nearly stuck again. A second dash on a different track got me back on solid dune. The rain was coming down gently. Thunder was rumbling and thin lightning tendrils touched down here and there. I heaved the clay-coked sand boards out and tried to bang the worst out of them. I then tried to get as much of the clay mud out of my formerly clean interior. I was moving like a zombie; thoroughly soaked, thoroughly exhausted, wet and sand were on my skin, my clothes, the controls and interior of the car. There was nowhere to wipe to get rid of any of it. The phone was unusable. It was also wet and sandy with nothing to wipe it dry with. With my clumsy numb fingers I pulled the Olympus XA out of my pocket. I slid it open and pressed the shutter button. Burbie was out of the mud but she wouldn't make it home that day. The wire you see dangling in this picture leads to the fuel pump. The thick suction of the mud had pulled hard at it and unbeknownst to me, in a few more kilometres the pump would short out. But on firm ground, in a sheltered cove. Actually, as I found out the next day when I went with Jonny on the rescue, the most beautiful of spots. But that's another picture... 

Qatar southern desert. Late spring 2017

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Taken on: May 26, 2017

Tags:

1991

400

Burbie

ColorNeg

ColorPerfect

Coolscan 9000 ED

Desert

Film

Fuji

GMC

Inland Sea

Linear Scan

Manual Focus

Negative

Nikon Scan

Olympus

Pocket Camera

Qatar

Sam Agnew

Sand

Scan

Southern Desert

Suburban

Superia

Xtra

Youth

iso400

smashandgrabphoto.com

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Sets appears in: • Olympus XA • Fuji Superia 400 more » • Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED • ColorNeg • Off The Beaten Track • Dunes and Inland Sea « less

Groups appears in: • Sand • We love Fuji Superia more » • Q A T A R • The Doha News Flickr Group « less

Camera: Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 9000 ED (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 9000 ED
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6.12 (Macintosh)
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