Universal language of a crash

By JOE BENNETT

OPINION: There are few things more agreeable than the noise of two cars crashing. The graunching of metal sounds so emphatic and expensive. More agreeable still is the promise that comes with the noise - the promise of drivers shouting at each other.

Wordsworth said that the first ingredient of poetry was the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Car crashes produce exactly that.

An accident is such a wound to the wallet and the ego that it simply has to be the other person's fault.

And as a neutral observer you can stand at a discreet distance and enjoy the row in exactly the state of tranquillity that Wordsworth considered the second ingredient of poetry.

The accident I have just witnessed took place in Ras Al Khaimer. Before I came to Ras Al Khaimer I had not heard of it. Now that Ive seen it, I am not surprised.

It is the most northerly of the emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates, and the poorest. It is poor because it has few significant oil wells. Like most of the UAE it is supported by the prodigiously oil-rich Abu Dhabi.

I didn't know what to expect here, but I didn't expect rain. It's tipping down. And though this is apparently one of the more fertile emirates, it doesn't seem prepared for rain. Drainage is either inadequate or absent. Within an hour of the rain starting, the city was awash.

The monstrous tint-windowed 4WDs that people like to drive here for reasons of virility, for once are justified. Their vast tyres carve through the water to the pot-holed metal beneath, sending up great plumes of spray to drench the foot-bound poor.

Not so the ordinary sedans. Their skinny urban tyres go water skiing. Which is why, I suspect, on Al Montasser road, the accident happened.

I was standing under an awning eating a cheese bread that a fat Pakistani baker had just made for me. He knocked the thing up from a lump of dough within seconds, fed it deep into a gas oven on a wooden spatula the size of an oar and drew it out again less than a minute later cooked. It was occupying my full attention when I heard the crash.

A grey Nissan and a yellow taxi had collided. The damage was not great nor was the accident anyone's fault, I think. It was merely the statistically inevitable consequence of dense traffic and impossible conditions. But it was still a joy to behold.

The Indian taxi driver was wearing drab Western clothes. Getting out of the car he stepped into four inches of water, which did little to soften his feelings. He waded forward to inspect the damage to his front left bumper.

The driver of the Nissan was more circumspect. A tall African Muslim, he removed his sandals before getting out, and hitched up the hem of his dish-dash, the long white cotton robe that many Muslims wear in these parts.

He was also wearing a white pillbox hat and an Adidas track top that clung to his body and caused the dish-dash to flare out below like a frock that my mother might have worn in the late sixties. He splashed through the water, inspected the damage to his front right panel, then launched a verbal assault on the little Indian.

I slowed down the consumption of my bread because its continuing existence seemed to me to justify my gawping presence.

And I couldn't help reflecting on my situation. Here I was sheltering from the rain watching two wet men argue about a crash in one of the driest countries on the planet. Almost nothing grows here. Yesterday I went up some remote wadi near the border with Oman.

There, foreign archaeologists have found communal graves 4000 years old or more. And among those stark and barren mountains you could sense how things had been for all but the last 50 of those 4000 years.

Just an occasional date palm, a few scrawny goats scrambling among rocks, and the odd cluster of mud-built hovels now mostly abandoned and crumbling.

And above it all, a huge magisterial silence of rock and sky. It was the sort of wild and ruinous scene that Wordsworth wrote rather too many poems about.

The Indian was a full head shorter than the African but he gave as good as he got. I suspect he was shouting in Hindi and the African in Arabic, but they seemed to understand each other perfectly. And I understood them perfectly.

They were both saying that an accident is such a wound to the wallet and the ego that it simply has to be the other person's fault. I finished my cheese bread and left.

- © Fairfax NZ News