Early Rising

     We really didn't need to set an alarm clock (except in order to avoid what happened next). At exactly 4:00 a.m. I was suddenly awakened by a loud clanging of a bell and Dr. Mare yelling at the top of his lungs, "Rise and shine everybody! Rise and shine! The bus will be leaving in a half an hour! Everybody, get up!" This, accompanied by continuous clanging of a bell would continue for five minutes as he counted down the remaining time we had left! Then he would jump back in his jeep and depart, leaving all of us in the girl's camp groggy and grouchy! OMG! This was how I was going to wake up five days a week for the next eight weeks! This used to be exactly how my mother would wake us kids up on school days when we were growing up. She'd come into our rooms, flip the light on, and say, "Rise and shine!"  Then we'd have a half hour to get dressed, make our beds, eat breakfast, and get out the door. I never dreamed that anything could ever be worse than that bright overhead light shining in my eyes before I had a chance to wake up. But this! This was definitely worse! There was no bright light; it was still dark, but a clanging bell!? He had to be kidding! (J had told me that people on the dig were always plotting how they might "accidentally" bump off Dr. Mare, something I was already beginning to understand, and it was only the first day!) While I absolutely hate getting up so early in the morning, I am a rather disciplined person, and so will do what I have to do, and now, that meant not being late. Mornings were chilly, even in mid-June, in this dry arid desert region, and so as soon as you got out of bed, you wanted to put on the clothes you had laid out the night before (your pants, a short sleeved t-shirt, a light, long sleeved outer shirt, heavy socks, and your boots), and then quickly make a run for the bathroom! All you're really going to do hygienically this early is brush your teeth, and that you do in your room with water from a bottle containing your own personal supply. You just wet your toothbrush and paste, brush your teeth, rinse, and then spit right outside your door! How convenient is that? And hair? If it's long, you pull it back, or you put it up. I had cut mine short for this trip, and so I didn't do much of anything. That pretty much describes the morning routine, not only for that day, but for all the days. Nothing in regards to that ever changed, except for who might deicide she absolutley could not go out to the field that day due to some form of sickness (whether it be emotional, mental, physical, or feminine). And this would definitely begin to happen with much more frequency as the weeks progressed (which would eventually make everybody else really mad!). Also, before we left the camp we had to grab up all the gear we would need to take with us out to the dig site, which would always include several quarts of drinking water (so as to stave off dehydration), sunglasses, sunscreen, a hat, work gloves, your camera, any extra snack food you might want, a roll of toilet paper, and, oh yeah, of course, your own pick and trowel, personal plumb bob, and tape measure, as well as any other sundry items for which the need might change from day to day. This, you would stuff into your back pack, don your jacket (if you were smart enough to bring one because you actually believed the information given you about the flux in desert temps!), and then ever so soon, like clockwork, at exactly 4:30 you'd board the bus that would come around to take everybody back down the road to the main camp for first breakfast, which would already be in progress. Once there we'd have about ten minutes to get any water we'd need (if we hadn't adequately filled up the night before), scarf down some runny goat's milk yogurt (which to me always looked exactly like baby's throw up, having that same color and consistency, and sickening sweet smell. I was never ever able to eat it, though plenty of people loved it, declaring its health value as being unparallel to anything else), eat a cold boiled egg (or several, as these were plentiful!), and then return to the buses, find your favorite seat (by the window was always popular so as to better be able to catch a few more winks on the way out to the field!), store your gear, and not be responsible for keeping the 4:45 a.m. departure from leaving on time!

Missing My Daughter

     When we got back to our rooms, we sat outside for a little while, gazing up at the stars. I thought about my daughter back home, and how my marriage to J had changed both our lives. Now here I was without her for two whole months on the other side of the world. I cried as I looked up at the moon and counted backwards the time difference of seven hours between us, wondering what she was doing on this particular afternoon, and whether she was missing me as much as I was missing her. I truly hoped she wasn't. She was a very happy, loving little girl who off and on desperately wished for a father, keeping on her night stand the only two pictures that I had ever taken of her "real" dad holding her. She especially liked the one where he was laughing. Sometimes she believed that she loved him more than anything, while other times she hated him for not being there to see her, and tuck her into bed and kiss her goodnight. All I could say to her was that I was so sorry, that it was my fault, and that I loved her more than anything.

     I had met her father when I worked as a teller at the Bank of America on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA. (The Queen Mary had been built in Scotland in 1937, and had luxuriously carried the rich and famous across the Atlantic, before it carried troops during WWII, and then afterwards ferried war brides and children back across the Atlantic. After 516 trips, she finally came to rest in 1967 in the Long Beach harbor.) Much of my job had been to exchange foreign currency and traveler's checks for the thousands of tourists we got from countries all over the world who had come to California to visit the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose, as well as other popular places in Southern California like Hollywood and Disneyland. This did much to inspire in me a further determination to one day travel the world myself. But for now, besides exchanging currency, I was cashing payroll checks for all the employees who worked on the ship, many of whom were foreigners. Angel was from a small town outside of Mexico City, and had come to the states to get work and to live. As a legal alien, he had gotten a job as a hotel employee on the Queen Mary, then worked as a bus boy in one of the restaurants, all the while teaching himself English before being able to work his way up into the wait staff, and then into management. Because every employee on that ship pretty much knew every other employee, as we all ran into one another at some time, or eventually served each other in some capacity, so it was that I had met Angel three years earlier. We had been dating steadily all that time when I accidentally got pregnant. Although I was once again terrified of having a baby on my own, I had loved him, I was a little older, and I was determined to have this child. Understanding that we would never be able to get married due to pre-existing circumstances, I decided to move back home to West Virginia when Christie was four months old. Now, as I sat here in Jordan, all that seemed like a lifetime ago, and I thought about how Christie (who was eleven) and J were not getting along so well. Being a father did not come naturally or easily for him, and so tension and jealousy were more often than not creating the atmosphere that existed in our house. I knew that while she might be mad at me for leaving her (though I did not really feel that she was), she would at least get a reprieve from the power struggle that was defining her life at home.
     Tonight though, J and I were sitting here, far away from a world that seemed to barely exist from this long distance. Here, J was happy and in his element. I recalled how he had rescued me from going crazy over  graduate classes, and then from a cold house during that first winter after we had met. Later he rescued me from bill collectors and a surmounting load of debt. He seemed to be at home in messes and tough situations, as his whole life, he often though somewhat reluctantly shared stories about, had been one of survival. And being on this dig, for me, was definitely something I would require his help to survive! After about an hour of sitting mostly in silence (we were both unbelievably tired), we finally wound down enough to be able to sleep. Besides, our alarm was set to go off at 4:00 a.m., and that would be here before we knew it. After we each had made a quick trip out to the toilets, using a flashlight to light the way along the dark path (there were no street lights, only the stars), we then lay down together on our mattresses and very quietly made love. J fell right to sleep, but I lay awake a while longer, remembering one more thing. It was a vision that I had back in 1990.
     I had only been dating J for about three months. As I had gotten into the habit of doing, one afternoon, as I was practicing deep meditation, I saw myself standing in a raging fire. Flames were all around me, though they did not feel hot, nor were they hurting me in any way. After I had been standing there for an indeterminate amount of time, two spirits carried J into the flames. Holding him directly over my head, they released him down into my body, so that we stood there together as one, he inside of me. What was so amazing to me was that I could really feel this. My entire body, from head to toe, shuddered in ecstasy for the duration of this whole part of the vision! We stayed like that for how long, I didn't know (only seconds passed in real time), before those same spirits came back and somehow related to J that it was time for him to go. He told them that he was not ready and didn’t want to leave, and so they allowed him a little more time before they returned, lifted J back out of me, and took him away. Even then he did not want to leave, but I had somehow understood that it was time for us to part, and that everything would be okay as I remained standing alone in the flames. After that vision I knew in my heart that we would be married (it took 3 1/2 more years for this to happen), but that our time together would be short. Why short, I did not understand; however, I immediately related the flames to passion, a word derived from the Latin, passio, which means "to suffer." But since it seemed in the vision to be a fire that did not consume, then maybe it would be a fire that would refine, or purify, changing me into something different than what I was. In any case, nothing I had ever experienced seemed any more real to me than that vision had seemed, and I had been thinking about it ever since. Now 4 1/2 years later, I still thought about it, and what it meant, and why I had received such a vision in the first place. Thinking about this, my marriage, my daughter, and about being here, I eventually drifted off to sleep.

Touring Abila

     For the evening, we had scheduled a walking tour over the site, an area which included two hills, or tells, including Tell Abila, the area where J had been digging over several seasons. Areas A and AA contained the remains of two churches, and several other public buildings, and the remains of the city walls. We continued our walk down into a saddle area that housed the larger ancient city, all of this dating back about 5500 years, from around 4000 BC to AD 1500, including the Islamic, Byzantine, Roman, Greek, Iron, and Bronze ages.  In this area were the remains of several 7th and 8th century churches, paving stones of Roman roads, a cavea of what might have been a Roman theater, a possible Odeon, and several gates, and crossing the saddle were the remains of a bridge which led back up another hill. This entire area was bordered by olive orchards, the Wadi Qualibah, which was the spring and source of water for this once thriving ancient city, and tombs and tomb complexes. Walking back up the hill to area D, where columns with limestone capitals belonging to a 6th century Christian Basilica stood majestically reconstructed, we all took a break and sat down to receive a small devotion delivered by J. Out over in the fields we could see shepherds grazing their sheep. This seemed to set our minds on things more holy, things above us that were invisible, rather than things below that had once been hidden but which had now become visible. As I sat there listening to him, I reflected on the idea that what each of us is searching to find, whether it be lost cities, lost faith in God, or just lost parts of ourselves, lies below the surface of what we can actually see. Below what we allow others to see. The discipline of archaeology has been said to be one of destruction.  One must literally destroy each layer of dirt as it is uncovered in order to dig deeper into the past. As each chronological layer (or archaeological period) is uncovered, someone has to make the decision whether or not to continue digging deeper, or to let that history forever represent what story gets told. Someone has to decide whether or not it's worth going deeper. However, once the decision is made to continue digging, the previous season's excavations can never be repeated. What was uncovered will soon be gone. As I sat there listening to J and observing the stones and rubble and loose dirt that lay over the earth's surface all around me, and the restructuring that had taken place and was yet to take place, I began to catch a glimpse of how a person might learn to love all this. It made me think about our own stories, and what gets told and what stays covered under layers of dirt. It made me wonder about what I might uncover during this long, hot summer, and whether it would be worth what I was going to have to endure to dig it up. And how many seasons of my life would it take? In the closing of his devotion, J prayed, thanking God for this opportunity, and asking Him to bless this season's dig, and to watch over and protect everyone on it over the next eight weeks. I added to his my own prayer: Dear God, give me the courage to walk down whatever road you open up before me. As the sun was setting in the sky, we walked back to the buses, and drove back to camp.