Learning to Drive (Again) in the United Arab Emirates

Look, I may not be what they call a car person, but I get it. I certainly get the visceral appeal of a beautiful car, all curved body and slick paint and purring engine. I understand the desire to go very, very fast and very, very far away—in 2017, boy do I get that.

So when Maserati invited me to test-drive its new SUV—the lightweight, elegantly lined 2018 Maserati Levante, which boasts the kind of specs and stats that makes actual, serious car people salivate—through the russet-colored sand dunes of the Emirate of Sharjah, it felt like as good a place as any to brush up on my driving skills. “Sounds fabulous,” my mother said on the phone before I left, “but who’s driving?”

So you can see what I’m dealing with. I have always liked driving, by which I mean that I have always liked being driven. What’s not to like? All of the forward thrust, none of the responsibility. You get where you want to go, but you can also read the newspaper or nap or really focus on listening to Radiolab. You could probably trace my lack of vehicular aspirations to my parents, who instilled in me a fear of “crazy people” on the roads: mysterious mental cases who were always looking to crash their cars into mine when I attempted to merge, who swung too close at the roundabouts, who stalled too long at the traffic lights, who would, it seemed, ultimately leave me and my vehicle in a heap of paint and bloody bent metal. “Look, it’s not you we’re worried about,” they’d say, twisting the stem of a wineglass in the air above the kitchen island. “It’s all those crazy people out there. We’ll leave some taxi money in the drawer.” (This was before Uber.) But then, that didn’t stop my sister, who drives very well and whenever she wants. So maybe it was about me after all.

I went to boarding school, so I didn’t find teenage rebellion in four wheels and the open road. Though the school offered on-campus driver’s ed, student cars weren’t allowed, so you’d only occasionally see that one small supervised sedan (the rare vehicle that wasn’t a taxi or a delivery person) making stops at awkward angles or lazily cruising through the one stop sign in all those thousands of wooded acres. I preferred to walk. Pretty much everyone else drove, or their parents did, and that carried me away on long weekends and summer vacations on through to university, which I attended abroad, and though American licenses translated. I gained mine through a benignly corrupt local driver’s ed program the summer before (in which most of the lessons revolved around sitting out the required hours in a stuffy classroom, hearing about road rage and priests who concealed crossbows in their trunks), and if you think I was going to drive in the U.K., you’re crazy. So I managed to be an adult woman of sound mind and body who had a driver’s license and who managed to never really use it, except to buy cigarettes, when I used to do that, and to fly domestic.

Again, none of this has stopped me from enjoying automobiles. For example, I am certainly not immune to the appeals of #VanLife. I am also well aware that every single, sensible, post–New York possible life scenario (like the great, welcoming West) involves at least some acuity behind the wheel. My partner and I own a car (or he does, and I’m on the insurance), which even in New York has proven itself to be useful: We have turned the backseat into a sort of personalized flight cabin for our golden retriever, in what my partner’s young nephew calls “the dog hair express.” John Steinbeck is someone who, too, knew a thing or two about driving with dogs. In Travels With Charley, Steinbeck makes great hay out of the inherently American requirement for movement. We are a country made up by those who moved, he says; those who left Europe, those who were forced to leave Africa, and those who came in search of a better life. He writes: “Every American hungers to move.” And in my household, we do. We shuttle across the city or state or coast or country for holidays or to visit with our families, and listen to audiobooks read by the famous rock stars who wrote them, and talk, and stop when we want, and delight in America’s myriad hidden pleasures—the kinds of things you only really find by the side of the road. (Curly’s ice cream in New Jersey; Cleveland’s canine-friendly hotels; Pittsburgh’s fabulous food and museum scene, where I bumped into Cate Blanchett in an elevator.) Add to this that I have always found talking about even the most serious topics in a moving car to be easier than talking across a dining table (I don’t know if it’s the forward motion, the changing scenery, or the fact that you’re not staring at each other, but the movement encourages opening up), and I’m practically a motor enthusiast. But none of this, of course, could have prepared me for the dunes.

The first thing to know about driving on sand is that if you’re a person who is not entirely certain in her motoring abilities, unstable ground is a challenging new wrinkle. You have to have the right tire pressure (low) and four-wheel drive, as well as a low gear and steady momentum. You have to be aware of your surroundings, you may not take any sharp corners, and you have to be prepared to floor it—if you stop short or slow down on any sort of incline, you will sink, and if you, say, spin your wheels in an attempt to see how stuck you really are, or to express panic, you will really become stuck. And then you will need to be dug out, and again, you’re in the desert. This becomes an endeavor that requires both total concentration and a certain Zen looseness: Sand, like everything else, is susceptible to enormous changes at the last minute. So this encourages the strange situation of racing an elegantly crafted 5,000-pound metal construction pell-mell up a sand mountain with little visibility on the other side and hoping that nothing gets in your way. As it turns out, happily, nothing did, and I unearthed some deep-seated piloting instincts and only required digging out once, by a hilarious Scot in a souped-up dune buggy with a developing sunburn and a taste for practical jokes. (“Don’t worry about the seat belt,” he said, before enacting on a white-knuckle two-minute high-speed race straight out of Mad Max.)

For those unfamiliar with the United Arab Emirates, it may come as a surprise that women are allowed to drive, let alone drive very expensive, brand-new luxury vehicles that they do not own around shifting mountains of very fine sand. But though they are neighbors, the UAE is a far different place than Saudi Arabia, whose King Salman ordered this September that women be given licenses. (A State Department spokesperson called this a “great step in the right direction,” though as Robin Wright pointed out in The New Yorker, Saudi women “still can’t get passports or travel outside the country without the permission of their primary male guardian,” meaning a husband, father, brother, or young son. A Saudi woman can also “not get a foreign education with government support unless she is accompanied by a male guardian . . . . Driving may be a small step, but it is certainly not a great one.”)

Comparatively, the UAE has made great strides for gender equality, and under its constitution, women enjoy the same legal status, claim to titles, access to education, the right to practice professions, and the right to inherit property as men. Women are also guaranteed the same access to employment, health, and family welfare facilities. Eight women serve in the UAE Cabinet, including Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, minister of state for tolerance, and Shamma Al Mazrui, minister of state for youth affairs. Dress is conservative, and for the Emirati women, traditional, but as a foreigner whose tourism the nation is largely dependent on, you didn’t get strange looks for exposed arms. I asked one of Maserati’s Dubai-based female associates over drinks at the Al-Wadi Desert whether she found the UAE to be “lady friendly.” She had been raised in Saudi Arabia and France and America, in turns, and was most concerned about what was happening politically in the U.S. (This was in early October, several weeks before the Saudi Crown Prince would imprison 11 of his relatives seemingly out of nowhere.) “I wouldn’t say that the UAE is lady friendly, mostly because that sounds creepy,” she said, listing some of the recent examples of government inclusion and outreach and opportunities for female advancement in the region. She lit a Vogue cigarette and thought for a minute. “I’d say that the UAE is driven by women.”

Which brings me back around to the point, and what I flew around the world to find out: Why did it feel so important in 2017 to get behind the wheel? I would posit that as driving is about progress, both technical and figurative, in this year of upheaval and public backward thinking, something about it feels necessarily political. When you limit someone’s ability for movement, you tighten your grip on their reality. To instead use those rights is to flex them—to increase that muscle mass and enhance that ability so that it does not become lax and flabby and such that you would not miss it if it were taken from you. Put another way: Forward motion is important. The world only spins one way and all that. It took cruising around an endless ocean of sand thousands of miles from home to make me realize what Joan Didion found in the freeways of Los Angeles or Jack Kerouac saw in On the Road, all of which I had completely taken for granted as a young, able-bodied person in a city that is largely powered by pedestrians and people-moving apps: You can be the type of person who prefers to be driven, in other words, but you should not be the type of person who is ignorant of how the machinery operates. There may be thousands of miles and a whole world of difference between powering up and coasting down the fine sands of the Arabian Desert and navigating Holland Tunnel traffic, but I’m beginning to think that if I can manage one, I can handle the other. And what is freedom if not having the option? This is a great, big, uncertain world, and you can be in the driver’s seat or not. Make mine for the road.