“You know you’re gonna be in water…”

If you were to look in my weekly planner, there are only two entries for yesterday, and neither look especially noteworthy at first glance: “Hike”—and “Dinner.”

The other day, the boy who figured prominently in my last blog entry, the boy who joined me for lunch during his weekend of punishment last Saturday, the boy with whom I subsequently bonded, came up to me and said, “I am trying to plan a hike for Friday and Miss Wendy said I need five adults to come along. Would you be willing to come along?”

“What kind of hike?” I asked. “You know, it’ll be cool and I need five adults.”

Even though outdoorsy adventures are not really my thing, I obliged. If this guy was planning something positive and productive I needed to join the group. When I mentioned to another colleague that I had agreed to go on a hike through Wadi Mujib, she kind of smiled and said, “You know you’re gonna be in water the whole time on this hike!” Sigh. Such a warning raises two of my greatest fears in doing outdoor challenges: (1) in rushing water I know I will lose my glasses and (2) in rushing water I know I will slam my head against a boulder and dramatically perish. However, I promised the young repentant that I would accompany him on this trek.

Yesterday morning 32 of us set out on our journey. It is through neighboring Madaba, past Mount Nebo, down down down the hairpin curves that lead to the Dead Sea, past the resorts, and about 15 minutes later we arrive at the entrance to Wadi Mujib.

One of Jordan’s most spectacular natural features is this immense Wadi Mujib (a wadi is Arabic for valley, and what we have here is part of the great Rift Valley, that vast earthquake-crack gash in the earth that extends from Jordan down to Kenya. Jordan is just lousy with wadis!). Wadi Mujib has been dubbed, with a canny eye on tourist dollars no doubt, as “Jordan’s Grand Canyon.” The moniker is well-earned however—it delivers awe-inspiring views like its Arizonan cousin. Of course, there is also that added bonus that many things Jordanian appear in the Bible: I learned that this area was known as the ‘Arnon’ in the Book of Numbers.

So yesterday your very own ‘Jordan Johnny’ tackled this adventure hike down the Mujib river. “Welcome to the Lowest Adventure on Earth!” is the sign that greets you as you park in the lot by the entrance to the Royal Society for the Conservancy of Nature center to begin this challenge from the lip of the Dead Sea—the famed Lowest Point on Earth. As we left the Visitor Center, heading toward the gorge and the river, I read some of the wall texts introducing one to this area. I noticed one of the observations was from Jacob Burckhardt, a famed 19th century German historian I had studied in college. He said of the Wadi Mujib in 1812:
The view which the Mujib presents is very striking; from the bottom where the runs through a narrow strip of verdant level about 40 yards across, the steep barren banks rise to a great height, covered with immense blocks of stone, which have rolled down from the upper strata, so that when viewed from above, the valley looks like a deep chasm formed by some tremendous convulsion of the earth, into which there seems no possibility of descending to the bottom.


So we head down a ladder and immediately one finds oneself in the water. 95% of this hike is in water knee-deep, and at other times, chest-high waters. I think the best way to describe the hike is that you are white-water rafting and you forgot the raft. Cascades and boulders are at every turn. The last 1500 meters of the journey (see how I am trying to convert to that blasted metric system!!) passes through the Mujib Siq, an ominous, narrow cleft through which the river runs over a 20 meter waterfall. This unique canyoning adventure involves swimming and balance and climbing over rocks and waterfalls—you know, standard fare for me on a Friday. This wild and majestic valley probably is at its peak in April when the wildflowers bloom in Jordan—I will have to remember that next year, but the cliffs of limestone with their ancient sharp swirls still intrigue. Since the chasm is often just about 20 feet wide (who am I kidding with the Metric System!) and the 300 foot walls are so steep that they appear to meet, the rushing waters seem to reverberate in this alluvial chamber.

The students are deliriously happy acting like frogmen landing on a fantasy Normandy Beach, and I spy my buddy Hamzah sitting in the middle of a waterfall yelling, “This is amazing.” It is beautiful, there is no denying that, and I enjoy the physicality of the experience. Of course, it is not my first choice for a weekend—I am still the urban prowler, and next week’s weekend trip to Istanbul is still my preference for a great weekend. But as I negotiate these rocks, trying to figure out how to pull myself up over the shelves of rocks, or the tricky clefts of the boulders, or through the water sprays, I like the problem-solving nature of this adventure.

What I try and do in my classroom is just as hard for many of my students as this physical challenge is for me. I am asking them to analyze and evaluate and decide and connect and reflect in ways that are difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible, but once they start, they find how exciting it is.

Yesterday as I came down through the Siq back to the entranceway, some of the coming down was harder than going up. I had trouble deciding where to place my feet, worrying about the slickness of the rocks, doubting that I could solve this problem. I needed another adult to hold on to my hand a few times, and once I made this leap, it really was not as treacherous as it had looked. I know! The metaphors of it all!!! What ultimate delight in just gritting ones teeth and doing it one step at a time.

As we came back there was no way around that waterfall and my two biggest fears. I watched everybody else as to how they turned their bodies—no one else slammed into the rocks on the side, and my glasses were held on by those outdoorsy glasses-holders I had bought for a whitewater rafting trip back in 2003 (see how organized I can be—I could locate such a thing yesterday morning!) when my NEH group when on another such outing, however with the rafts.

The 20 foot slide down the rocks through the waterfall was great. If I had not been with 27 other students I might have climbed back up and done the whole thing again!

So like wet dogs we all climb out of the Wadi Mujib and head home—and I had an impressive scrape on my knee to prove the kind of daring I had demonstrated that day!

I had been invited to Friday night dinner at the headmaster’s house earlier in the week and I learned it was to honor the Korean Ambassador to Jordan and his wife. Now, I don’t exactly travel (yet!) in such diplomatic circles where one addresses fellow dinner party guests with “His Excellency,” but their son is coming to KA in the fall. There were two other KA faculty there, and an older couple, a Korean couple that have long been dear friends of the headmaster and his wife.

The conversation was lively, and during the dinner portion of the evening the headmaster asked his longtime friend to share some of his life stories. “As the senior member of the dinner party, I ask that you tell a little about your life,” he said to his friend who had been a noted surgeon for many years. He explained about growing up in what is now North Korea, and how he had left for the United States in the late 1940s, and how after the Korean War, he could not contact his remaining siblings in North Korea. He finally visited with them 40 years later, but their lives had not been as prosperous and happy as his had been. He described what their diet had been like in the 1950s, a kind of pitiful living off the land. At one point he said, “It’s as if they were living underwater, just trying to come up for air.”

He had no idea the kind of metaphors flying around that day!

By the end of the evening, Meera, the headmaster’s wife, had thanked everyone for coming, and said to us, “We are a table of many nationalities tonight. But one of the interesting things about this dinner party is that each of us is far from our original home; each of us has made sacrifices to go somewhere new and start over….Here’s to surfacing above the water.”