Fleeing a war zone 3: from the Jordan to Amman

We stopped on the road to Amman

Across the desert we’d gone

Our passports in order

We went over the border,

And arrived 5 hours till dawn.

Synopsis: I’m a Family Practitioner from Sioux City, Iowa.  In 2010 I danced back from the brink of burnout, and, honoring a 1-year non-compete clause, traveled and worked in out-of-the-way places in Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, and New Zealand.  After 3 Community Health years, I took temporary gigs in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Canada, and Alaska.  Since the pandemic, I worked telemedicine, a COVID-19 clinic, a VA clinic, and spots Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.  Taking vacation from circuit-riding rural clinics in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota, I went on vacation to Israel, and found myself in war zone.  Israel closed its airspace.  Grey Bull Rescues orchestrated our evacuation.

I’m Jewish.  I will not be writing about religion or politics.  See my post https://walkaboutdoc.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/why-i-dont-write-about-religion-politics-or-sex/

Before we left Jerusalem, Grey Bull advised us to transfer everything visibly Jewish, including skull caps, fringed t-shirts (tsitsit), and jewelry, to our luggage. One of our party has Hebrew tattoos and decided to wear long sleeves. A wedding ring went into a backpack.

After hours clearing passport control, we zipped through customs. Nobody set off a metal detector, and x-ray didn’t show anything suspicious. 

Despite plenty of bottled water, not everyone drank enough.   

Eventually, I had to seek the restroom: concrete block buildings with holes in the floor.

After Customs we waited in aging Jordanian busses with NO SMOKING signs in Arabic and English, reeking of cigarette smoke.  Once I found three men in Jordanian uniforms standing outside the door and one was smoking.  In Hebrew I said “There’s a baby in the bus” but I couldn’t remember the word for smoke, so I pantomimed rocking a baby in my arms, point to the cigarette, gesturing that smoke was going in through the open door.  Horror gripped his face and he quickly moved away.  

Just a little after sunset we started the trip to Amman.  

Despite the darkness I marveled at the road-side geology. 

And despite the darkness I saw a vibrant roadside night life, with brightly-lit stores large and small, and restaurants from tiny to opulent.  Younger teenagers hanging out under street lamps.  All, I think, joyous in the relief from the summer heat.

The huge city of Amman boasts big city traffic, lots of high-rise buildings, and a major medical community featuring signs consistently in English and mostly also in Arabic.

We got out of the bus at the Rotana hotel, where the state-of-the-art metal detectors and luggage CT stood in marked contrast to security at the border.

The Grey Bull representative advised us that the restaurant would be open till midnight but that check-in would be overwhelmed for a while.

The elevator challenged me only because I underestimated it.  To my embarrassment I had to ask a staffer (well-dressed, polite in the extreme, obviously intelligent, with fluent English) for help.  Yes, restaurant on 3^rd floor, but I should have pushed the restaurant button, not the floor 3 button. 

The place exceeded Las Vegas for fabulous food presented in industrial quantities with artistic grace.  Marble floors, marble tables, open seating broken up to quell noise overload.  Tasteful lighting.

From experience I knew large quantities of high-quality food tempt me to overeat at times when I shouldn’t, and despite my hunger I didn’t. 

In 16 hours I went from hugging the ground and listening to the thump of missiles dying in a fight between good and evil to dining at the most luxurious buffet of my life.

Winston Churchill observed that there is nothing quite so exhilarating as being shot at to no effect. 

Contrast is the essence of meaning.  

Fleeing a war zone 2: At the Jordan Border

At the Solstice, please expect heat

In the bus, please stay in your seat

We can’t leave the border

Till all is in order

Then the trip through customs is fleet.

Synopsis: I’m a Family Practitioner from Sioux City, Iowa.  In 2010 I danced back from the brink of burnout, and, honoring a 1-year non-compete clause, traveled and worked in out-of-the-way places in Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, and New Zealand.  After 3 Community Health years, I took temporary gigs in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Canada, and Alaska.  Since the pandemic, I worked telemedicine, a COVID-19 clinic, a VA clinic, and spots Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.  Taking vacation from circuit-riding rural clinics in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota, I went on vacation to Israel, and found myself in war zone.  Israel closed its airspace.  Grey Bull Rescues orchestrated our evacuation.

I’m Jewish.  I will not be writing about religion or politics.  See my post https://walkaboutdoc.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/why-i-dont-write-about-religion-politics-or-sex/

When the last of the suburbs and Bedouin camps had passed the window, the road steadily descended.  I looked at the rocks with my penchant for amateur geology, reading the story of unimaginable forces twisting miles of rock, epics of volcanoes and floods and mass extinctions.  We got to the desert floor, where the stripping-away of the limestone leaves the naked volcano footprints , bleaching under the sun, down to the Jordan valley, an extension of Africa’s Great Rift.

Grey Bull Rescues coordinated the tangled mass of logistics inherent in moving hundreds of people across borders and oceans. Israeli passport control uses amazing, automated machinery with facial recognition software.  We tucked our pink-slip exit visas into unstamped passports

We waited in line in narrow shade next to the building.  Parents fanned tiny babies, and I worried for them in the heat.  When I smelled cigarette smoke, I looked to the upwind end of the line.

A man in his 20s spoke on his cell phone and puffed.  I left our group to confront him.  I pointed at his cigarette and in Hebrew I said please.  He offered me one.  I shook my head and pantomimed a baby, pointing downwind.  He smiled and nodded, crushed out his smoke, and never stopped talking.  

I returned to my group and we boarded the bus while the sun beat down from that highest of angles that comes only with the summer solstice.  The air conditioning helped, adequately on the shady side.  The Grey Bull volunteer (ex-military) warned us not to get off the bus until told to do so.  And we listened.  Even when the impatient bus driver opened the doors to raise the temperature, trying to drive us out of the bus.  

I worried for the babies in the heat, and so did their parents.  

We waited hours at the Jordan side of the crossing.  The heat of the day rose and we sweltered and we finally went into the passport control building, the space overwhelmed by the mass of humanity trying to get out of the missile target zone, the aging AC doing its marginal best but also overwhelmed by the crowd’s body heat.

The sun had started its long slow descent when the Jordanians issued a single visa number to the 350 of us. 

One by one we came through 4 lines to the passport counter, exquisite black marble with exquisite red granite trim.  The uniformed supervisor stood and smoked under the 3-language NO SMOKING sign with the universal cigarette in the red-slashed circle.  The facial-recognition cameras appeared to be prior generations.  From the passport building to Customs we had a lot of baggage handlers with no identification trying to take our bags from us.  I had to grab my bag handle from one of them.

I shouldn’t have been worried.  Muslim courts traditionally have been hard on thieves. The guys were just trying for a tip.  

Fleeing a war zone 1: Jerusalem to Amman

From a war zone it’s easy to see

The sense in deciding to flee

Thanks, Iron Dome,

For helping me home

Through the Iranian Qassam missile spree.

Synopsis: I’m a Family Practitioner from Sioux City, Iowa.  In 2010 I danced back from the brink of burnout, and, honoring a 1-year non-compete clause, traveled and worked in out-of-the-way places in Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, and New Zealand.  After 3 Community Health years, I took temporary gigs in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Canada, and Alaska.  Since the pandemic, I worked telemedicine, a COVID-19 clinic, a VA clinic, and spots Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania.  Taking vacation from circuit-riding rural clinics in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota, I went on vacation to Israel, and found myself in war zone.  Israel closed its airspace.  Grey Bull Rescues orchestrated our evacuation.

I’m Jewish.  I will not be writing about religion or politics.  See my post https://walkaboutdoc.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/why-i-dont-write-about-religion-politics-or-sex/

Saturday evening we went to sleep with the expectation of being called to busses at 9:00 AM but we were awakened to 4:30 AM with notice to leave the hotel at 7:00 AM 

We breakfasted at 6:00 AM and the 11 of us rolled our suitcases away from the youth hostel. 

We had clear, cloudless blue skies and perfect temperature, the streets quiet before the Jerusalem traffic wakes up, on our way down the hill.  We stopped at the ATM and the convenience store.

After a half-hour walk we came to a parking lot, the evacuation’s marshaling point, surrounded by construction and green space.

By 7:30 AM the crowd of 350 Americans fleeing Israel had gathered in the shade.  We could pick out the teenage Orthodox women in white shirts and long black skirts and teenage men in black trousers and white shirts and fringes dangling from undershirts. 

Other young people with conservative or not so conservative clothing, and a few families with very young babies.  Our Sioux City group separated out at the edge of the crowd.  

The sun ascended higher, the temperature warmed and the traffic noise picked up.  Two young New Yorkers with tsitsit approached the 4 men in our group with beer on the breaths and tefillin in their hands.  The Bible commands donning those phylacteries daily, but most Jewish men only did so when studying for their Bar Mitzva.  We agreed to do the ritual right there in the car park, one of us for the second time ever, the first the day before in the bomb shelter.  He’s a remarkable man, previously a combat medic in the Panama campaign, who has brought insight into the nature of Jewish suffering and mission.  

When they had gone, with half of us seated on the curb, still in the shade, near a cluster of Arab-driven taxis (full-sized passenger vans), the air raid warnings came to our phones.

By this time we’d all downloaded the Israeli app that divides the country into more than 1000 zones, and gives different levels of alert.  One says that you need to seek shelter in the next few minutes.

And there were 350 of us and not a shelter in sight.  So we watched off to the south, high in the sky.  The missiles leave a contrail.  At first there were only one or two, then there were 3 in parallel lines, followed by many more and all headed to Tel Aviv.  

When an Iron Dome missile hits an aggressor there’s a very bright flash, much like the flash of fireworks or the bright light of a welder or a sparkler lit in the day.  Bright despite the bright morning and the clear blue sky.  

Then came the other warning, saying Those Missiles Are Coming Right For You, Get The Hell Into A Shelter.  The sirens sounded.  That’s the warning we got.  It even includes instructions on what to do if you’re out in the open: lay face down on the ground and cover your head.

And I remembered the duck-and-cover drills from 3^rd grade.

So I went recumbent between two of the white passenger vans and looked up at the sky and watched the action till our combat veteran reproved me, gently, so I rolled over, covered my head with my hands, and looked at the pavement and listened to the explosions.  

Most of the crowd stood and stared at the sky, a brief, multi-million dollar spectacular of contrails and flashes, followed by chest-thumping booms.

The section of asphalt that I watched bored me, but I studied it until one of our party said, “It must be all clear.  The construction workers are going to work.”

Afterwards we stood or sat on the curb, and we chatted while the day warmed, the sun strengthened and the traffic picked up.  We moved with the shade, to the other side of the parking lot, until about 9:00 AM when the 6 nice new busses with AC pulled up.

We left Jerusalem in heavy, big-city traffic, passing through Arab East Jerusalem.  Crossing the city limits came as an emotional relief.  While Iranian missiles are notoriously inaccurate, the chance of getting hit went way down outside of a target city.