Spring Break

The water is now steel blue under cloudy, variegated skies, but things change so quickly. By the time I finish writing this post the colors will have changed. Yesterday a bald eagle swooped over the deck and down toward the shoreline. Last night the rain fell hard; this morning we looked out over the waters and saw a rainbow.

We’re in a beach house on the Oregon coast with lots of good food and good books. Each day we’ve had some sunshine and some wind and rain, and we’ve been here just long enough that the days have become indistinguishable.

My girls went down to the beach this morning, bundled against the wind in bright jackets. One flew a kite while another made sculptures in the sand. The kite flier came home with a perfect, hinged clamshell the size of her cupped hands.

And so we have come to a place of rest in this, our tenth month living in Oregon. We’ve nearly completed our first cycle of seasons: picking summer berries and raking leaves and building a snowman as the opportunity arose. We’ve seen the daffodils and suspect that tulips are soon to follow. Last September we visited the coast and spotted whales swimming south, and now we see them again, completing their migration cycle and moving north.

And yes, the ocean’s water has changed already, more blue now with green translucent swells. The sky has become a single, solid blue, with clouds rimming only the horizon.

We have two more days at the coast, and two more months to complete our full year as Oregonians. Today and tomorrow we rest, and for each small memento, each shifting season of life, we are thankful.

Daylight Saving Time

I’m the only one in the house who’s up this first March Sunday of Daylight Saving Time. As the sun rose this morning, I watched the outline of a large bird—could it be an eagle?—flapping strangely against a top limb of the tallest cedar. It looked like he held something in his talons, and I wondered, did he have to finish the kill from the treetop? Then the bird of prey rose and with a slight flap moved outward along the branch, until I saw what had been underneath him: his mate.

Amidst the complaints of my friends about the government messing with our circadian rhythm by forcing us into Daylight Saving, I secretly rejoice when the time comes each March to lose an hour of sleep. For me, that loss is well worth what is gained. Now we will eat dinner later, enjoy spring evenings, let the kids stay outside later as the weather turns fair.

My writing time in the wee hours of dark mornings won’t be interrupted by the sun or by the children who rise with it. Without any prompting from the clock or the government, our days will continue to lengthen as the clouds begin to clear, making way for the more direct rays of our summer sun.

I believe it was our last year in Jordan, spring of 1999, when the Jordanian government decided to permanently abolish Daylight Saving Time—something many of my friends would love to see happen in the U.S. It seemed like a good idea beforehand.

We didn’t move our clocks ahead that March, and my third daughter was born in an Amman hospital at the beginning of April. We put her in a fabric Moses basket on our bedroom dresser, because her nineteen-month-old sister still needed the crib. When the baby began to stir and fuss for a four a.m. feeding, I would rise and nurse her, and by the time I laid her back in the Moses basket it would be daylight outside. Broad daylight at 4:30 a.m.

We closed the shades over our windows in self defense. I tried to keep my eyes closed during those early feedings, squinting enough that I could see not to drop the baby and hoping to fool my body into letting me drift back into much-needed sleep. It didn’t work.

So I began to pull on clothes after the early morning feeding. I laced up my sneakers and locked the door behind me, and I walked the hills of our neighborhood in Amman. The streets were empty, but the morning light felt as bright as noon. Occasionally I would pass another soul on the street, and we would nod or whisper a greeting in Arabic, passing the peace from Arab to American and back again. I walked each morning, and as the days lengthened toward solstice, the sun came up earlier. I don’t know how the rest of Amman slept on those mornings. In June, as planned, we moved back to the States for good.

The Jordanian government changed its mind in 2000 and reinstituted Daylight Saving Time. The energy savings wasn’t as great as they’d thought it would be—that was the official reason—but can’t help wondering how many others were awake at 4:00 a.m. the spring of 1999 in Jordan, watching the sun between the slats and listening to the insistent birds.

This morning's sun is not yet above the trees. The eagle (if it was an eagle) and his mate are gone. If I listen carefully, even with the windows shut to keep out the spring cold, I can hear the morning birds singing.

Deleted Scene: To Kurdistan

Here's another scene not included in Through the Veil. Todd and I, along with two other research team members, traveled to the far northeast of Syria, to the Kurdish homeland. We stayed in a small town right on the Turkish border with Syria and spent a few memorable days researching Kurds in the lush agricultural region between the Tigris and Euphrates in northern Syria.

The cross-country bus trip from Damascus to Qamishle took about ten hours. Among the passengers was a mother escorting her daughter to be married in the Kurdish homeland. The proud mother led the entire busload of strangers in a pounding, undulating, ululating wedding song. A man sat across the aisle from me, stroking his moustache and staring. Was he a member of the secret police? If I told him to stop staring at me, would he grab my arm at the next stop and pull me off to an underground interrogation room?

Todd stood in the aisle between me and the staring man; I pulled my scarf tighter about my face. I looked out the window and hoped the leering man would be less interested in the back of my head.

The bus stopped for thirty minutes at the Palmyra oasis, the ancient Tadmor of the wilderness. I bought a slab of dried apricot paste at a small grocery and tore off a hunk, chewing as I got back on the bus. Our bus pulled out onto the highway again, and the desert flowed past in dunes and grainy expanses punctuated by periodic villages and mosques. The leering man had moved to the rear of the bus.

Our route across the desert ran past dozens of villages. Each village was made up of a single family: cousins and second cousins and relations who couldn’t trace the exact connections, except that they belonged to the same tribe. These villages were Muslim, all of them. By afternoon, the minarets cast shadows across their villages in long stripes.

A somber child waved to me as our bus streamed past her village. I waved back, feeling like the little girl at sea who glimpses a mermaid from the ship's deck. Something in my chest stretched tight as I turned my head to watch the child and her village grow smaller in our wake. Then she was gone.

We pushed to the northeast, toward Turkey and Iraq, to the edge of ancient Assyria and the cities of the Medes. I fell asleep, my head against the window, feeling the rhythm of the wheels turning and of the wedding song. When I woke, we’d gone from shifting desert scenery to lush green fields, just as Dorothy goes from black and white to full technicolor when she touches down in Oz. The bus slowed and jerked, then turned awkwardly to pass a tractor. The farmer wore a Yassar Arafat style checkered headdress, a koufiyye. As we passed him I saw English words on the side of his green and yellow tractor: John Deere.

When the bus finally stopped at Qamishle, passengers spilled from the bus door and scattered to waiting relatives—each to his own tribe—in the golden light of late afternoon. The Kurdish bride climbed into the cab of a pickup truck along with her mother. The leering man was gone.

Last to get off the bus, we climbed down to reclaim our suitcases from the belly of the bus. There was something familiar in the light warmth of the sun and the faint sound of children at play, some memory resurrected in the scent of cut grass. Instead of the Damascus smells of diesel and burnt Turkish coffee, we breathed in the sweet smell of spring in a fertile valley.