Eliminating Possibility

In March, we went through customs--lovely passport stamp, even had a real stamp added to it--and loaded onto the bus. We each had about a hundred bucks worth of dinars in our pockets, Amanda had no luggage because it had been left on the runway in Seattle, and Amman was dark outside the airport, almost relaxing after coming off what we all agreed was the single worst flight we'd ever been on.

Jordan isn't a big country, but it's a beautiful one, full of surprises. Petra, the red stone city, turns out not to be just the one building they show in all the movies, but several square miles of cave carvings, facades, and marble pillars. Wadi Rum has sand as soft as baby powder, and atop a rock formation there, I found a white crystal, perfectly heart shaped, that was exactly what I needed to find for my friend Rachel. And there are few things more entertaining than walking down a Middle Eastern street behind two beautiful women and watching the local men nearly break their necks.

In the morning, the Dead Sea bounced a hard light off the blackout curtains in my room that did very little to black out the light.

I don't know what I expected when I thought about the Dead Sea. I guess I wasn't anticipating the kind of surprise that came a few days later, when we were driving through the desert and I realized--this is the Wilderness, forty years of biblical history and nothing growing bigger than a couple blades of grass.

Walked down to the sea, watched people float, pack themselves with mud. One man said that if you have eye problems, and open your eyes in the water, they'll be cured, but that struck me as being along the lines of pouring gasoline over yourself and lighting it to cure acne.

But here's the thing about going to the Dead Sea, what ultimately stuck in my mind: once you've been there, you can't go any lower. At least not and stay above the surface of the earth. You are as far below sea level as you can get, and you can't get any further down.

So now what?

I don't know what the maximum altitude I've been in was. Probably a mountain pass somewhere in Colorado, even though I've been in the Himalayas and the Alaska Range. So there is still plenty of up to go.

But after visiting the Dead Sea, a possibility was removed from my life. I can't go any lower, I can't follow the curves of the earth any deeper below sea level.

And I don't know what to do with that thought at all. It sucks when something is no longer possible.