Everyone asked the same question: ``Why did you come anyway?" That's what David and Julie asked when I met them in Palmyra. All their relatives urged them to cancel. Their answer was the same as mine.
I even had a second chance. My Lufthansa flight for Munich took off from San Francisco. I promptly fell asleep for forty-five minutes. When I woke up, there was one of those maps that show the location of the plane, and I expected to see us somewhere over Oregon. Instead we were circling over the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of California. I looked out the window and saw the fuel spraying out of the wing. We were dumping our fuel. The landing gear wouldn't lift up, and the drag on the plane would be too great for the fuel we had, so we were returning to the San Francisco airport. The fuel weighed a lot and made landing more chancy, not to speak of the possibility of fire. The pilot was very calm when he described all this, but when he announced that we had landed safely, you could hear the immense relief in his voice. The key part had to be flown in from Germany, so the flight was postponed a day.
Someone who was less of a rationalist and a materialist than I might have seen a message in this: Don't go! But I understand statistics. I got on the plane the next day.
In the mid 1980s when I began to feel my first twinges of mortality, I made up a list of the top twelve or thirteen places I hadn't been that I wanted to see, and I began chipping away at the list--West Africa, Indonesia, Greece done properly. Then a few years ago I began feeling more urgent feelings of mortality, and seeing signs of decline, and I made up a list of the three places I'd better see soon, or I wouldn't be up to it. Physical difficulty was not the primary determinant. I think when I'm seventy, if I'm still in good health, I'll be able to trek in Nepal. No, it's primarily the hassles, the bureaucrats and corrupt officials, the systems that break down--problems I have less and less patience for as I get older. In western China when I had to battle the teeming masses for several hours to get train tickets, or in Tibet when I rode in the back of a filthy truck, I first thought ``I'm too old for this," and then I thought, ``This is why I'm taking this trip now and not later."
The list of three consisted of western China, the Middle East, and Peru. I went to western China in 1998 for seven weeks. The Middle East was next.
I don't like to travel ignorant. When I first went to England after college, I looked at Windsor Castle and realized I had no idea what had happened there. I knew there were some Georges and some Williams and some Edwards. I knew there was a Henry VIII who had six wives. Or was it Henry VI who had eight wives? So as we continued to travel, I'd spend a morning in the US Information Office in every capital reading the encyclopedia on the history of the next country.
The trouble with the Middle East, in more ways than one, is that it has so much history. I began as soon as I returned from China to read about the Babylonians and the Hittites and Ebla and Mari and Ugarit and Urartu. I reread the historical parts of the Old Testament. I found obscure books on Anatolia in the Roman era in the Stanford Library. I read the Qur'an, and a biography of Muhammad based on traditional sources. And so on. It was nearly three years before I felt ready to go.
The best time of the year for where I wanted to go--Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Yemen--was the autumn. I could start in Turkey and do that before it got too cold, and by the time I got to Syria and Yemen it would no longer be too hot. So in February 2001 I used my United Star Alliance frequent flyer miles and got reservations on Lufthansa from San Francisco to Munich to Ankara, Turkey, leaving September 20 and returning November 5.
On the morning of September 11, Cynthia woke me up and said I'd better turn on the TV. A few minutes later, I got a call from my ex-wife Laurel telling me that our younger son Thomas, who works on Wall Street, called and said he was all right. (Actually, it was a much closer call than I had imagined. He didn't hear the first crash, but he saw the paper floating down and thought it was a tickertape parade. He looked out the window and realized it was a fire. He got his camera, which he always carries with him, and went out to see how close he could get. (www.geocities.com/thomas_hobbs/pics/wtc /index.html) He was standing across the street from the east side of the South Tower when the plane hit the south side of the South Tower. He had four or five seconds to run for cover from the debris--it took that long to fall from that height--where the debris could be things like steel beams and plates of glass. He was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, thinking it might have been wiser to use the Williamsburg Bridge--who would bomb that?--when he heard and then saw the South Tower collapse.) I called my mother to say Thomas was all right. She was in tears as she watched the news. She remembered Pearl Harbor and said this was worse. Through her crying she said, ``You're not going to the Middle East, are you?"
Cynthia's attitude was a little more complex. From the start I had imagined her traveling with me. When I pictured myself in Petra or Nemrud Dag, she was there by my side. But she was not enthusiastic about the Middle East. She didn't like the status of women there and didn't want to experience that. There were a few things she would like to see, but there were just lots and lots of places that were above the Middle East on her list. My hopes went up when she took a class in Arabic with me, and at one point said that once learning a language, it would be good to go where they spoke it. But then in January she got a job at a start-up, where although she got two weeks vacation a year, it was the custom that no one would actually take a vacation. I tried to get her to see how much vacation would be acceptable. She could join me for the parts of the trip that interested her the most. We discussed it often, neither of our views ever changing, and then we stopped discussing it. It became the elephant in the corner no one ever mentioned. By the time September rolled around, we were quietly resigned to being apart for seven weeks. So when the attacks on September 11 happened, not very much changed in our discussions. If I asked, she would say, no, she didn't want me to go, but she was sure I would, even when I wasn't so sure, and she was resigned to it.
My kids were also sure I would go, although they reminded me of several times I had cancelled a trip. When we went to West Africa, when Thomas was ten and too young for such rigors, we had originally planned to go by bus from Mali to Nigeria. But tough travelers we met along the way painted such a dire picture of Nigeria--dead bodies rotting in the streets, women raped by customs officials, an American man strip-searched before he could enter a bank to change money--that we cancelled that part of the trip and went to Ivory Coast instead. In 1993 when William was living in Cairo, we all planned to go visit him. But one morning Islamic terrorists blew up a bus across the street from the office he worked in, and he called us to tell us not to come. We cancelled. In 1997 when Thomas was traveling by bus through Latin America, he called and asked me if I wanted to hike Darien Gap with him--on obscure trails and rivers along the only unbuilt portion of the Pan-American Highway. I got the shots, the guidebook, and the plane ticket, but when he reached Panama City and got a little more information on the route, he learned that guerrillas infested the area and often kidnapped and killed people passing through. We cancelled, and he took a plane over that part.
But all those cancellations were to protect my children. The Middle East was just me.
I sent email to three friends from the Middle East, asking about the advisability of the trip. Would it be like taking a vacation to Japan a week after Pearl Harbor? They were all quite encouraging about it, and doubted I would have any problems in the areas they knew. This corresponded with my own feeling. In other places I've been at times of revolution or chaos--Cambodia in 1966, the Republic of Georgia in 1991, Albania in 1992, Pakistan in 1998--the situation on the ground was just fine, despite dire US State Department warnings.
When I got to the Middle East, others expressed surprise that I would go there at this particular time. At the travel agency in Damascus where I bought my plane ticket to Yemen, after I had paid for the ticket, I asked the clerk if he thought it was advisable to go. He said, ``No. Maybe there will be no problems. But everyone who looks at you will wonder why you came at this time, and they will be suspicious."
Faraj, my driver in Yemen, and I discussed the issue one evening at dinner. He told me his wife had not wanted him to drive an American around the country. ``Why did you?" I asked.
``Because no one else would."
Then he asked me why I had come to Yemen at this time. I wanted to say that to not come would have been to say that this was not a war against a small number of terrorists, but a war against Arabs, or a war against Islam. (In fact, this was the message of the Bush administration too. In the national memorial service on September 13, there were a number of religious leaders who got up and made statements, and the very first one was an Arab-American, representing Islam, and he began by reciting a sura from the Qur'an, in Arabic.) The way I expressed this to Faraj was to say, ``If I hadn't come, that would be saying that Arabs are dangerous people."
He, an Arab, replied, ``But Arabs are dangerous people."