A very un-Sarah sort of Saturday

You never realize how afraid you are of heights until you're walking backwards off of a sixty-meter cliff attached only to one springy blue rope.

WHAT?

Let's put that in perspective for those who aren't used to the metric system:

The Statue of Liberty, from toe to torch, is 46 meters tall. (The base, however, is another 47 meters.)

The Cape Hatteras lighthouse is 63 meters tall.

The Bald Head lighthouse is 33 meters tall.

Whitewater Falls, the largest waterfall in North Carolina, measures 125 meters.

A 60-meter waterfall is equivalent to about six Courthouse Falls (Fallses?) stacked one on top of another.

So how did I get into this precarious position on such a perilous precipice?

Well. In the UJ cafeteria a week or two ago, my friend Hanne asked a group of girls from our Arabic class if we might like to go on a wadi (canyon) hike. Her mom is visiting for about half a week, and she wanted to take her mother out to do something fun. She described this hiking trip she had found online, with a Jordanian guide, taking us through Wadi Feid and seeing twelve waterfalls in the process. Let me tell you, I'm a sucker for waterfalls. It's one of the highlights of going up to my grandmother's cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains every summer. (The aforementioned Courthouse is my absolute favorite.) So this trip was a no-brainer. Hanne, her mom, and one of the other girls, Kelly, left right after class on Thursday to go down to Petra and spent Friday touring there. The rest of us took a taxi down from Amman Friday night. We checked in at our hostel, ate dinner, went to bed, and woke up at 4:30 the next morning to get up and out. Four. Thirty.

So, we packed up, checked out, and walked outside, where Hakim, our guide, was waiting with a driver and a pickup truck. You know those moments you get every once in a while, looking around you and all of a sudden wondering, "What in the world am I doing?" Okay. Saturday was a string of those. The first notable moment came at about six AM, after the sun had risen, as I was sitting in a pickup truck that was winding around dirt/gravel roads on mountainsides, snuggly in the back seat with three other people, two in the front seat, and three in the truck bed. Driving, driving, and then our car stopped. We were told to unpack our backpacks and remove anything that would suffer from water damage, repack them with sandwiches and water bottles, and suit up in our harnesses and helmets.

Wait. What? Harnesses?! I privately thought that this might be a little bit more than I had bargained for, but went on without saying a word. We embarked. It's sort of hard to communicate this story because cameras are just a little bit susceptible to water damage. We had to leave all of them in the car. Walking into the canyon during the first few minutes of our trek, I realized just how alone we really were. Cell phones (also not too friendly with water) were left behind, and there was no reception anyway. Cameras were stowed in the truck. If we wanted to tell our friends and family about it, we would have to send telegrams and letters written with fountain pens. These thoughts were bobbing around my head throughout the day, and in the absence of physical photographs, I decided to take mental ones.

Photograph: the elephant graveyard.

We descended from a hill into the canyon. It started out wide and barren. We picked our way through the rocks on the ground and stopped every now and then to stare up at the canyon's wall rising above us. The rocks had stripes that looked painted on, they were so perfect. It was still early in the morning, and the sun wasn't able to reach the canyon floor. The sunlight touched the tops of the red canyon walls to our left. I felt so small in there, and it was so strangely quiet, that it reminded me of the elephant graveyard from the Lion King - minus elephant skeletons. LIke Whoopi Goldberg would leap out in hyena form at any second. Surreal.

Somewhere in there, a trickle of water showed up, and a little bit farther downstream, plants joined the party. As we walked, the stream widened while the canyon's walls narrowed. We walked toward what looked like a big cliff - really, it did look big from that side. I panicked. We weren't next to the edge and couldn't see how far down it was. I knew that we would be learning to rappel at some point. And I was so terrified. It seems my fears were obvious; Hakim, upon seeing my red eyes and sniffly nose, asked if I had allergies. I didn't lie. In retrospect, I'm surprised he didn't laugh at me. It turns out that the first waterfall is actually really small - maybe five meters - and we didn't have to rappel down. We did some rock scrambling, and it was lovely.

I should explain to you what I knew about Wadi Feid before goin

g in. Hanne gave us a link to the company's website. Whereas the descriptions of other hikes include the number of rappels - "7 rappels, rock scrambling, expect wet shoes," for example, Wadi Feid is described "rappels, scrambles, fully wet." But how many? How much? The website lists it as a one and a half day hike. Hmm. Seems like we need more information. So I searched Wadi Feid online and found further information:

"A strenuous trip with with never-ending cascades and waterfalls. Abseiling skills are necessary and an ability to swim in cold water; this is certainly not a trip for novices, even with an experienced guide! ... Please note that two ropes of 70m are essential here, the waterfalls 10 and 11 are both over 60m high."

Why didn't this deter me from going? Why didn't I let myself back out? Well, of course we must not be seeing all of the canyon. I checked with the other girls, and most had never rappelled before, either. And we were only doing a day trip - I'm sure that there's a place to leave the canyon after waterfall 8 or 9, and we won't go near the big ones. Sure. It'll be fine.

But back to the canyon. We hiked on past the first waterfall and came quite quickly to the second. Yes, rappelling. Yes, me, crying. I was third or fourth in line on this one, and listened to Hakim's instructions and encouragement to the people in front of me. To one of my friends, he paraphrased Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the best-selling book in the universe, due largely to the fact that it has two words printed on its cover: DON'T PANIC. I laughed at hearing that. And really, I tried. I tried my best not to panic. Honestly, it's hard for me to remember that first rappel. I remember awkwardly walking off the edge, not wanting to put my weight on the rope, not wanting to move my body away from the wall, relying on my friend on the ground to tell me where to put each foot, making my surely ungraceful dismount. I don't have a photograph from this one. Or, more accurately, I have a photograph, and it's very blurry.

This rappel was followed immediately by two more, each probably under ten meters high. I swear, in the moment, they seemed huge. The waterfalls after that run together. Each came with a few tears, and each was a little bit larger than the last. The next one that I remember clearly, well... that's the second snapshot.

Photograph: blood.

Most everybody else is waiting at the bottom of the waterfall, Hakim included. Lauren, Liz, Ibrahim (our second guide who mysteriously appeared halfway through the hike), and I are at the top. Liz begins to descend, but slips just a few feet down. Slips hard. She hits her head, and Ibrahim starts frantically pulling her back up. She looks like she's in shock, blood running down the back of her neck. Vivid. We use a lot of the bottled water cleaning her up, and Lauren and I descend, shaken. My least favorite waterfall.

(Liz is fine. The cut turned out to be quite minor. She and Ibrahim descended by a side trail instead of going down the rope, and we all continued on bravely. Liz got extra care throughout the rest of the trip, and she's completely okay now.)

Next waterfall... again, losing track. We spent a lot of time at the top of this one, due mainly to the fact that it was fifty meters tall. It takes a long time for a beginner to get down fifty meters of rock face. All of us had worst-case scenarios running through our heads all day - earthquakes, injuries, cliff slips, medical helicopters hovering over to airlift us out... it was bad. Even after I made my way to the bottom of the waterfall, sniffling and crying and panicking the whole way down, I found myself fantasizing about those helicopters, wondering whether I would leave if a way out were offered to me. Let's call that the second big "What am I doing?!?" moment.

We continued. By this point, the guides had realized that I was the fraidy-cat. They started sending Liz and me down first on the waterfalls, so that we could relax at the bottom instead of freaking out at the top. There was a thirty-meter fall that Hakim sent me down first - he was belaying at the bottom. The next waterfall, he set up the ropes and belayed from above... and let me find my own route down. This particular waterfall is a little bit of a rogue. It starts falling on the right side of the rock face, pools a little, runs down a channel/ledge across the cliff, and finishes its plunge on the left. The best path we could find consisted of a fairly straight drop down the rock face, a graceful hop over the stream, a landing on a second piece of rock below the stream's cut-through, and a rappel into a pool of water below. "Graceful hop." At least others were graceful. I lost my footing, swung on the rope, crashed into the waterfall itself, and screamed at the top of my lungs. After said crash, the first thing I remember shouting up to the people at the top of the cliff is, "I'm alive!" The minor slip behind me, I continued down.

We came, soon enough, to the big one. The sixty-

meter sheer drop. It's the third "WHAT am I doing?!" moment. Hanne's mom went down first, and despite any of my protestations, Hakim sent me down second. I'm grateful. Standing at the top of that waterfall was a horrible feeling. Every instinct I have compels me to NOT do things like that. But I did. And I'm proud of it. Realizing that talking to people helps them relax on the way down, we struck up a conversation about basketball. I have to admit that I was concentrating so hard on the wall that I spaced on quite a bit of the conversation, and by the time he was quoting an interview between Ali G and some NBA player, I was out of earshot. The waterfall had three main stages, and I was entering the second: silence. I was too far down to hear the people at the top, and too far up to hear the people at the bottom. I was, to put it in a single word, alone. Just me and the rocks, the rope that held me up, the song stuck in my head. ("I Believe I Can Fly" - so radically inappropriate in the moment. Flying is exactly what I don't want.) It's hard to say whether the silent stage was the worst or the best. It was difficult - but perhaps the part where I learned the most. The last stage was when I could hear the voices from the bottom, the words of encouragement, the realization that I was so close to being done, to having accomplished something on that wall.

So, snapshot: tea and fear.

Ibrahim's cousin had somehow appeared out of nowhere and started a fire at the bottom of the falls, heating a small kettle and brewing tea for everybody who came down. Such a classic Jordanian thing, this tea. So there I was, shaking from my descent, more from my nervousness than any physical strain, holding my hot tea and watching the next girl come down. She's a tiny dot on a huge flat rock wall. I imagine what I must have looked like, floundering down the wall, stopping partway through to cling to the rope and sob. I realize my legs want to give out and sit on the shore of the pool, watching the climbers descend, shouting the best words I can think of. It feels so good.

The next waterfall was even larger than that one, but broken into two pieces. Hakim told us that it was a forty-meter section followed by a twenty, but he was lying. The second part was at least thirty, although I'm glad I didn't know that before I went down. By this point, I wasn't crying at the top. I could do it, I had done it, I knew that I could do it. We all just wanted to be done and out of the canyon, we were so tired. I went down second, after Liz. We finally ate our sandwiches at the bottom - starving, it was at least 5:30 in the evening by this point.

Oh, yes. The time. Our original schedule had us leaving the wadi at 4:00 and being back in Amman by 8:00. But. Hakim apparently didn't know that we were beginners. Oops. And there were seven of us. So we didn't even all get down the last waterfall until close to six. It was perfect timing - had we been even half an hour later, I'm afraid some of our group might have had to spend the night at the top of the falls. We set out to finish the hike in complete darkness. For some reason, I had assumed that the canyon would end at the bottom of the twelfth waterfall, that we would be done and hop into the truck right there. But no. Hakim said that it was a one-hour hike out of the wadi in daylight and hurrying. We had five flashlights for ten or eleven people, and it was quite impossible to hurry. Yesterday we realized that it took us two and a half hours to get out of that canyon.

Photograph: black.

I'm sure the canyon is beautiful below the waterfall. But I couldn't describe it to you. We dodged under trees and branches, we climbed along the edges of boulders, we hopped across the stream. Swinging the headlamp around, it was at some points impossible to see the bottom of whatever drop lay on one side, and to tell the truth, I think that I'm grateful for this. Who knows where we were? I'm just glad Ibrahim knows his way around so well. That man must have night vision. As we rose out of the canyon, we could see dots of light on the horizon. The Jordanians told us that it was Palestine. So small and so dark. When we stopped for a break partway through the trek back (we were giving up hope, we were going to have to sleep in the canyon), I turned off my headlamp and looked up. Stars. So many stars. I'll be going on an overnight trip to Wadi Rum next month, and I can't wait to see all the stars. I can't remember what the sky looks like without light pollution - maybe I've never seen it that way. It'll be beautiful.

We finally made it up to the truck where - you guessed it - the driver was making us tea over a tiny campfire. We rested. All of our water was gone, and most of the sandwiches, but we drank our tea and were grateful. We were given an opportunity to change into dry/clean clothes and repack our bags. Realizing that it was 8:30 and we said we'd be home at 8:00, we all checked our phones. My count? Nine missed calls. My family called me. Rasha called everyone on the trip. Rasha called a CIEE employee, who in turn called everyone on the trip. And everybody was relieved to find out, at last, that we were okay.

The last "What am I doing?!" moment, which is really more of a "What did I DO?" I did that. I started at the top of a huge canyon and ended at its bottom. I got up at 4:30 in the morning for one of the craziest days of my life. I lowered myself down huge cliffs with completely literal blood, sweat, and tears, and I feel so great about it. Even now, I'm not sure whether I enjoyed rappelling. I know that I enjoyed the day - but for the sake of clambering down cliffs? Or did I just enjoy the prideful sensation of knowing this: I. Did. It. I achieved something that I would have never gotten myself into willingly. My stubbornness backed me into that trip, and it got me all the way through it to the end.

And one last snapshot: grime.

We didn't get back to Amman until after 1:30 in the morning. I took off my shoes, which at that point were still so gross that they probably shouldn't have been allowed in the house. I took off my shorts and eased on pajama sweats - because no matter how soft they were, my legs were still tender. I look gross. I have scrapes and bruises from my knees down to my ankles. Some of them turned a little bit yellow, which is just a smidge disconcerting. I had dirt caked in a rim around my ankles at my sock line. There are bruises on my hips from the harness and a sore spot in the middle of my back that I honestly can't explain. I love it all. I love seeing those scrapes and feeling those bruises and knowing that I accomplished something.

Really, there's one more snapshot. But this one is a real one.

Lauren found this somewhere online. It's the sixty-meter single drop waterfall. Tiny thing near the top of the photo is a person rappelling down - and please take note that you can't see the bottom of the falls. It's big. And I did that. A better way to phrase it: WE did it. I may never rappel again in my life, but I'm so glad that I did it this once.