We emerged from the Syrian/Jordan border crossing in the white haze of a dust storm. I had my headphones in and the music changed the tenor of the landscape from majestic, mysterious beauty to morbid post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The crossing had gone smoothly, and my passport is beyond full, so they’ve started stamping in strange places, on the top and in the margins. What I remember most about this whole process is looking out the window at one of the guards that had sidled up to the car and checking out his well-worn, pearl-inlay sidearm. He would run his thumb up and down one side of it, absently, lovingly. So very Texas.
Our driver stopped at the Duty Free shop in the middle and picked up a bunch of cigarettes, which he then delivered to a small shop on the Jordanian side. A little side business never hurt anyone.
A little while over the border (these are Middle East distances, which are farther than, say, Europe distances, but don’t touch the vastness of the highways stretching across the great American West) turned a corner and Amman emerged through the dust storm, rolling hills made geometrical by the blocky, concrete houses covering every possible surface. Traffic intensified to a proper Middle Eastern fever pitch, but it is a highly organic mess, with its own internal structure and rules. Once you know these rules and devoid yourself of driver-related ego (hey, that’s my lane!) then it makes more sense than driving in the States. In fact, driving back home becomes stultifying and other drivers seem dangerously oblivious.
I headed to Jerash and hung out with Alan Walmsley’s team at their deluxe dig house. They’re unearthing some really interesting classical and Islamic archaeology over there and they were happy to let me bother them with methodology questions. I’ll be headed down to Madaba in the next couple of days, to familiar stomping grounds, but for now I’m hanging out in downtown Amman, trying to finish up some work. I added a bunch of photos to my Flickr stream from Syria, etc:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/colleenmorgan
Colleen Morgan 