Into Thick Air

by Jim Malusa

  And they do it all on dates and hay, with no scheduled maintenance. It’s no surprise that, judging from my impromptu census of Wadi Rum, the Bedouin like their jeeps but love their camels. So long as I don’t look down, my ride is a pleasure cruise to the base of the butte.

  The boy and camel leave. Left to my own two feet, I find the canyon, noodle through narrows, and climb notches chipped into the rock. The canyon walls are warm on one side and cool on the other, depending on whether the sun has found them. I like the shady side, where I find a mint and steal a few leaves to freshen my water. The foot-long agama lizards prefer the sun, lounging contentedly. Fearless swallows with rufous breasts lunch on the wing, snatching insects out of the stripe of blue above.

  I stick to my date bars and a melted ChocoLazer. After I’ve finished my first quart of water, I emerge from a slot on the far side of the massif and climb atop a red dune for a view down Wadi Um Ishrin, the valley running south to Saudi Arabia. The panorama tugs at me, and I end up hiking the long way back, looping around the butte I’d slipped through. Unlike at Australia’s Uluru, no tour helicopters thrash overhead. Just the crunch of gravel underfoot until I stop for a drink and hear somebody singing. I slowly spin in search of its source, but there’s no telling in this land of echoes.

  I retrieve my bike from the rest house and find a camping spot. Nightfall drains the color from the sky, the stone, and finally the very blue sleeping bag that I plump with a snap and shake. I lie back in a monochrome world, with a reef of clouds edging over the rimrock, under the cool dazzle of the Milky Way. Just as I’d hoped, God doesn’t send snakes or hyenas.

  WHEN IT COMES TO FOOD, ignorance can be the traveler ’s best friend. Falafel is the mainstay of every café in Al Quwayra, a village of little shops selling big pillows for your floor and wrought-iron bars for your windows. It’s the same story in Egypt, and after gobbling the little fried balls for weeks, I don’t care to learn of their origin. If I learned that falafels were derived from some unsavory body part—say, if they really were fried balls—I wouldn’t be ordering seconds.

  “Hungry?” asks the cook. He works behind a tile counter stenciled with blue flowers, and his mustache is limp with steam and falafel oil. Fuel for the engine, I say—I rode from Egypt.

  “I am from Egypt,” he says with the mildly sardonic grin of a man proud of his heritage—and glad to have it behind him. He motions to the other customers. “And he is from Palestine. And he is from Palestine.”

  The Palestinians, with the blackened knuckles of truck drivers, look up from their falafels and say hello with their eyebrows. Nearly half of Jordan’s 5 million are Palestinian refugees, and I ask the cook, where are the Jordanians? He points out the window in the direction of the Dead Sea, to a limestone plateau 3,000 feet above the sandstone desert.

  I may be aiming for the lowest beach on earth, but the slow rip and shove of tectonics that excavated the pit also tilted the little country of Jordan until the rimrock of the Dead Sea valley rose a vertical mile above the shore. This shouldn’t be a problem so long as I maintain my blood sugar level, and by that I mean 50 percent blood and 50 percent sugar. I wash down the falafels with tea so sweet it gives me a toothache—and then it’s on the bike, legs churning, lungs burning, head turning to the south for one last look at the Mesozoic standing rocks of Wadi Rum.

  It’s a long farewell, and my feeling at the edge of the plateau is both panting success and a reluctance to leave behind the rusty dunes for this land littered with pale jagged rubble as friendly as eggshells. The winter rains have left thin patches of stiff grass for the goats. The Bedouin live in camps of patchwork tents and crowing roosters, where slow donkeys with white muzzles carry girls in rags and bundles of sticks of mysterious origin. There are no trees. The oak and juniper were hacked down by the Ottoman Turks for the railway to Aqaba—the same line that Lawrence of Arabia blew up when the Turks unwisely embraced the Germans as allies during the first world war. Today, any sapling not defended by a stone wall is fated to be kindling or goat chow.

  The road turns into the afternoon sun and rolls past farms where the earth has been worked into thin furrows like gray corduroy reaching almost to the lip of the plateau. There, on the verge of the Dead Sea Valley, villages huddle on terraces alongside pocket orchards of figs, apricots, pomegranates, and olives. Quiet places, except for the clang of a tire iron in a repair shop and the dinky stores marked by signs for soda pop. When I stop in Al Rajif on the roadside near a meek house with a bold view into the gash between Israel and Jordan, a young man pops out of his home to invite me inside for a glass of tea.

  His name is Qusem. His father, Mohammed, gladly takes a break from enlarging his backyard with a pick and sledgehammer. He wears a profound mustache, red checkered headdress, and ankle-length shirt. He gives me the standard Arab handshake, a give-me-five hand slap—a thick hard hand on a skinny arm, like a bucket on a backhoe. Qusem introduces me to the rest of the family. “He is Salem. She is Ahmna. She is Aisha.” The girls all wear head scarves. Each time I think he’s got them all, another brother or sister appears. “He is Khalil. And Khalid . . . ”

  I tally them up. Ten kids? Must be a town record, I say. Qusem translates and Mohammed flushes with reproductive success before setting me straight.

  “No, Mr. Jim—there is a family with twenty-two children.”

  Here’s my chance at last: “My wife is pregnant.” I pull out my wallet photos of Sonya, and win handshakes and congratulations on my Arabic and my fertility. Qusem says, “We are honored to have you as guest in our home. It is your home, too.”

  The kids stare at the guest from America. Thank goodness I brought enough balloons for everyone. Qusem is equally easy to please: he’s crazy for maps, and we spend an hour retracing my route over various charts. He works as a policeman but his degree is in geography; a photo of Qusem and his diploma is elaborately framed with black velvet, stained glass, and gold.

  Fake gold. The family had money enough to send only Qusem to the university, and on the walls of this home his graduation photo shares top honors with Mohammed’s six war medals, and two verses from the Koran. Mohammed gets a military pension nowadays, but Qusem says it’s not enough, and his fourteen-year-old brother is looking for work. I ask, what sort? Qusem gives me an incredulous look that means: you think he has a choice? “Any work.”

  The sounds of rush hour draw us outside. The goats are coming home, each herd accompanied by either women or children who trill and hiss and toss stones to keep them on course. I catch a glimpse of the mother only when she’s hanging laundry, and the tender bulge in her silhouette reveals that she’s pregnant with number eleven. I don’t know if she lacks the time or the permission to join us. Maybe both.

  Qusem invites me back inside. Big pillows embroidered with the minarets of Mecca sit on a swept concrete floor. Qusem checks to ensure we’re alone, then pulls from his wallet a well-fingered photograph of a young woman.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. The brief intersection of our lives means that both host and guest know that we’ve only this day to tell our story. Balancing piety and honesty, Qusem explains, “I am sorry, but this is old way. I cannot speak of my fiancée. This photo is only for me; nobody in family know.”

  And only now do I recognize the consequences of showing off Sonya’s photo. Some may see it as disrespect or bragging: here she is, boys, and please note that gorgeous head of hair. Others wish to share their pictures of loved ones to thank their good fortune, their lucky stars, or simply to thank God.

  I tell Qusem, she’s lovely—and thanks for telling me.

  “It is Muslim custom the woman she stay in the house, or working near the house, and she seen only by her husband, or children, or brother.” So when friends drop by in the evening, it’s the women in one room and the men in another.

  The ritual of showing me every photo in the house resumes.

  “This is a hyena,” says Qusem. “The Bedouin trap the hyena because th
e hyena kill the goat.”

  He moves on to the next photo—“Here is my uncle, on camel”—but I am stuck on the hyena. It’s dead. It looks like a cat-dog with a fantastic tail that begins as a mane behind its ears and runs the full length of its back. It is folded in a pathetic pose, and I feel ashamed to have feared the beast.

  Likewise, my host Mohammed looks strikingly similar to the men I’d seen on TV, heaving rocks at Israelis. Until he smiles, and his small black eyes give him all the menace of a sand elf. Tonight he isn’t sure I recognize goat soup as food, so he demonstrates by bringing my bowl up to his lips and taking a big slurp, as if to say: See, it’s fine.

  After dinner the men break out a deck of cards and a pack of Kareem smokes. I can’t figure out the game, and they quickly hit upon the reason why: I’m dressed all wrong. To play cards with Arabs, you should be dressed like one. Within ten minutes I’m a counterfeit Arab from head to ankle, complete with skullcap hidden beneath my headdress. They show me off, like a Ken doll, to the women and children.

  Considering the crowd, bedtime is simple. Males in one room, females in another. The sleeping mats and quilts are tossed down and, bang, everyone is out as if they were gassed.

  In the morning, after a breakfast of yogurt and bread, I make a gift of the maps I no longer need. The bike I pack up more carefully than usual, merely to linger. I used to think that traveling by bike made me one of the regular folk. Now I know it just helps me meet them. My hosts know that when I grow weary of falafels and sandstorms, I’ll be heading back to the incomprehensibly rich United States of America, where people buy Big Macs without leaving their cars. Mohammed and clan are staying put with their goats.

  All the kids get a shot at saying “Good-bye, Mr. Jim.” I top off my water bottle and straddle the bike. “Please come back to Jordan,” says Qusem, “and you will always have a place to rest in our home.”

  He asks nothing of me. With my foot I flip a pedal into position, slip into the toe clip and shove off. For a minute I imagine my return—the surprise, the handshakes, the stories into the night—then I round the corner and realize that I’m probably never coming back.

  THE ROAD NORTH DIVES into and climbs out of every cleft in the plateau. The descents pass in a rush, and I spend most of the day pedaling uphill, very slowly. This has its advantages. The olive groves are shade and peace. The donkeys are even slower than me. And there are views westward from the rimrock, down to a stone wilderness of golden domes and black canyons, the sudden drop into the Dead Sea valley. The sea itself, however, is still a few days north. It’s also the Israeli border—land of no foreign bikes.

  The next morning, from my camp on the rim, I telephone Mr. Ayoub of the Ministry of Information. I explain my little incident. He speaks candidly about customs and the no-bicycle rule: “I’ve never heard of such a thing. There is no rule on bikes.”

  He assures me that because no permission is needed, none need be granted. My trip, he assures me, will be trouble-free. Probably. Enjoy Jordan!

  I thank him, hang up, and finish my cup of coffee while I try to figure out if this is good news or bad. The absurdity of the no-bike rule makes it likely my experience was an isolated misunderstanding. On the other hand, it could happen again. With caffeine whizzing around my brain, it’s easy to imagine a lieutenant in starched uniform searching my illegal bike, finding the spy telephone and triumphantly announcing, “THIS is why we must ban bicycles!”

  This image amuses me until the valley below fades into an opalescent smear of heat and dust. The khamsin is blowing, the hot spring winds out of Africa. It’s late April, season of the first big heat.

  Back on the highway, traffic is light but confusing. The horns of Jordanian vehicles are all wrong. A matchbox taxi with a rhino-charge air horn, a cement truck with a shy buzzer, a bus that makes music like an ice-cream truck. Everyone honks and flashes their lights at me. They are so glad to see me. They are driving me nuts.

  So it goes for the next two days: the friendly locals, the ungrateful visitor. In psycho-physiological terms, I’m pooping out. If I were a month into climbing Everest, somewhere between Camp III and the South Col, I could blame my mood on thin air. I’ve no such excuse—just the feeling of relief when I reach the road into the Dead Sea valley.

  I cruise down to the first hairpin curve and stop to peer over the guard-rail to see what’s coming. Five minutes later I’m still there, bug-eyed and unbelieving. The highway dives off the limestone rim, slips between fins of sandstone, then vanishes. Far below are the vague outlines of what must be acacia trees.

  A 4,300-foot descent in eight miles is a cyclist’s thrill. I check my brakes and tighten the elastic cords cinching the tent and sleeping bag. Gravity does the rest. With the wind tearing at my eyes and my shirt flapping, I’m happy save for the knowledge it’s going to be a million degrees down there. I don’t want to sleep in the heat, not tonight, and I stop to make camp after dropping maybe a thousand feet. Meanwhile a damp dirt fog blows in from the south. It looks and feels awful, but my camp is serenaded by an owl and the songs of Bedouin bringing the goats home.

  I have my soup and potatoes and sit on a rock under a juniper tree and wish for a beer. The Dead Sea, the sunken Everest of my desires, is lost in the desert equivalent of a blizzard. The sun squats into the murk and quits for the day. Coasting down to the Dead Sea may not be the joyride I’d hoped for.

  IT’S 64 DEGREES when I wake to the songs of children from a passing school bus. I’m a lucky man, I think, to be given this cool and charming dawn. I change my mind when I sit up in my bag and look down into the valley. Although in the night the wind quit and hopeful stars blinked on, the morning sky is a viscid blur of dust. It’s the blasted khamsin, hot out of Egypt.

  Breakfast is an orange and a pita smeared with jam, a sticky meal I try to keep from transferring to the computer and phone as I beam off a story. I muse over my strange job and its paradoxical blend of the archaic and futuristic, while bands of yodeling Bedouin and their goats swarm over the slopes.

  Then it’s on the bike for the plummet into the big heat, past the wreck of mountains that look like sand castles mortally gouged by the first big wave. The road is so steep that a passing produce truck has lost some of its tomatoes. It seems a shame to let them rot, so I wash off the gravel and enjoy, particularly since the wind has now vanished as quickly as it came.

  I imagine that I can feel the air pressure building as I pass below sea level and keep dropping. Nobody was sure of the valley’s elevation until a pair of British explorers in 1837 noted an increase in the boiling point of water—proof they were “considerably lower than the ocean.” My only clue is the change in vegetation. By the time the slope tapers off into the valley bottom, the junipers are long gone and I’m more than 1,000 feet below sea level, passing irrigated banana plantations in a stony desert. The water comes not from rain but from the canyons that drain the high plateau and spill out into the valley bottom in broad beds of flood-flattened reeds. There are mom-and-pop farms with stick houses and all-purpose donkeys. There are big industrial farms with Sudanese and Egyptian laborers—more evidence that the world’s food is generally plucked by the world’s poorest people.

  From the shade of another immigrant, a Mexican palo verde tree, two young men pedal out on bicycles. It’s a relief to see their super-wow Egyptian rides, with plastic scorpions clipped to their spokes and paper roses attached to the front forks.

  My little thermometer says it’s just over 100 degrees when I pass the southern edge of what used to be the Dead Sea. Now it’s a grid of dikes enclosing the evaporation pans of the Arab Potash Company. Potash is, like wood ash, fertilizer. It’s Jordan’s number one export, four billion pounds a year, not including the stuff that blows off into my face when the trucks pass.

  There are no towns along the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea. The Israelis would not even let them build a road until last year, so sensitive is the border. Before I reach the true Dead Sea I must pas
s a military checkpoint. Nobody mentions the bike, but I am subjected to the usual grueling interrogation: How do you like Jordan? And won’t you have some tea? Will I visit their wonderful capital city of Amman? Why yes, I say: tomorrow morning I’ ll pedal to the main highway and catch a bus up and out.

  It’s a tough life for a soldier on the Dead Sea. Not enough guests, they tell me, and they must clean and oil their Beretta machine guns every day, or they’ ll rust in the salty breeze.

  I’m glad I stopped, because by the time I leave the wind has collapsed to nothing and the sun has emerged from the dust swirl, lending a hot but cheering clarity to my final miles. It’s 94 degrees at 5:30 PM—no problem on a breezy bike. The mountains abruptly rising above the shore are fractured and leaking, with water dripping down walls colored like a kindergarten fresco. When the road drops closer to the water, I park the bike and trot down to the shore.

  The beach is scattered with sandstone boulders with elegant curving strata, and the shore looks like an emergent reef of white coral. Nowhere in the world is water saltier than the Dead Sea, and everything is coated with a thick rime of nubbly crystals—the rocks, driftwood, even pieces of trash. A discarded yogurt container is like a cave formation, shining in its husk of salt. The sea is calm and absolutely empty, as boats are even more taboo than bikes along the border.

  There’s only one more thing I want to do. I ride on, passing one, two, three narrow canyons and thin creeks coming out of the mountains. Then the big one, Wadi Mujib, with what would be called a river in Arizona, twenty feet wide and gushing between sheer five-hundred-foot walls. Swallows are cutting through the shadows, and frogs are cranking up for the evening. There’s just time enough for a swim in the Dead Sea, and a rinse in Wadi Mujib.