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... II. The Framework ...
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Right after the first Gulf War, I was at an EAGE Convention in Florence, Italy
(European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers). Friends told me Saudi Aramco had a need for some
technologies we had been developing, and they arranged for me to take an overnight train to Bonn, Germany,
in order to go to the Saudi Arabian embassy on the 29th of May, 1991 and get a visa. Then I went to Athens,
Greece to continue a planned vacation in Greece and Israel. It turned into a true adventure to get to Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia. Egypt and Israel have an agreement, and so it was possible to fly from Israel to Egypt.
However, the military provided a cab ride to purchase a ticket to Bahrain, the plane had mechanical problems
and parts were flown in from Bahrain allowing time for a camel ride around the great pyramids. I finally arrived in
Bahrain on June 8th, 1991 at about midnight, and made it across the causeway into Saudi Arabia in time to go to
work the next morning. There was a lot of smoke in the sky from the oil well fires which were still burning in Kuwait.
It was very interesting to learn that during the war one of the scud missiles from Iraq had landed in the parking lot of
the Saudi Aramco headquarters. It did not explode. There are three buildings which house Saudi Aramco, and all
of their maps and technical reports for all of the fields in Saudi Arabia were located at this one site. Over the next
couple of years, we participated in scanning thousands of large maps, so that digital copies could be distributed to
different locations around the Kingdom in order to make sure one missile could not shut down the Saudi Arabian
Oil Company operations. Figure 28 highlights key stops on this trip,
which upon reflection I realize was a spatial integration of science and religion by means of common locations.
Figure 28. Map showing relationships of locations referenced in the 1991 Trip.
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