Note: A piece on NPR that I heard while driving home caused me to remember an incident I haven’t thought about in a long time. The piece was about the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, one of the definitive travel memoirs, and it got me thinking about the difference between being somewhere and actually experiencing it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t see the young man, it was that I really wasn’t paying attention to him until he blended out of the crowd of similarly attired young men milling about and started speaking to me. I was on my way nowhere in particular, but I was moving quickly and with purpose because I wasn’t at ease, neither with being where I was, nor in my own skin. But that’s another story.

It was a typical August afternoon in Amman: hot, dry, sunny and clear. It was the end of the workday and traffic was beginning to snarl throughout the Jordanian capital, which is spread out across miles over hills that offer unexpected vistas of low, white, limestone block housing and the occasional radio and television transmission tower.

I was new at this — at all of this. I was twenty years old and beginning to appreciate the fact that I was completely out of my element. I had landed in Cairo barely a week earlier and left the chaos of Egypt behind to see as much of the world as possible before I had to be back for the beginning of the semester. Amman was my second stop, and a welcome relief from the sweltering heat in Aqaba, the port city where I’d arrived by boat a few days earlier. Even by Jordan-in-the-summer standards, Aqaba was suffering from a heat wave, with the temperature refusing to dip below 100 degrees even after midnight.

Amman, in the hills, was cooler – in the 80s – and a pleasant enough town to walk around. And walk I did, whenever I finished my sightseeing for the day and got bored of the hotel room that was barely large enough for the bed. I walked here and there, up and down hills, seeing but not really seeing anything — something I’ve come to appreciate over the years.

The culmination of my traveling-without-seeing experience came not the first day in Amman, nor the second. I was out for one of my afternoon walks through the part of town where I was staying, the cushy Sheisani district. I had found myself pulled by mere curiosity toward the Housing Bank Centre, a cross between a modernist interpretation of a ziggurat and the Hanging Gardens of Bablylon — in other words, a stepped skyscraper with lots of plants hanging over its various balconies.

The Housing Bank Centre complex was what we call a multi-use space, an office building with a shopping mall at its base. I wandered through the area and discovered that the complex was far more interesting from the outside than it was on the inside, and I quickly bored of being there and headed for the door.

It was outside that the young man stopped me and asked me the oddest question. “Can you get me inside?”

Over the duration of the first week that I had spent in the Middle East, I had quickly discovered that the two years of Arabic that I had taken at my university in Washington, DC, had not prepared me in the slightest for communicating with anyone in the Arab world, so our communication was awkward at best.

“Um, you can go inside right there,” I said, pointing to the door I had just come out of, while trying at the same time to determine if the guy seemed a little out of it.

“No, I need to go there,” he said, pointing to a different door. “They won’t let me in.”

I followed his finger to the other side of the building, and realized that he was pointing to the Forte Grande Amman, which was in the same complex.

“You want to go in the hotel?” I asked, still confused.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why … why can’t you just go in the hotel?”

“I want to go to Israel,” he said simply.

I looked back at the hotel, and then back at the young man. He was about my own age, I guessed, and he was looking at me with a level of expectancy that made me completely uncomfortable.

It’s also worth pointing out that this was 1995. Jordan and Israel had signed a peace treaty barely ten months earlier, and the respective embassies in both countries were still looking for permanent housing. The Israeli diplomatic corps in Jordan had rented out a floor of the Forte Grande Hotel in Amman and was using it as a makeshift embassy while searching for more permanent accommodations. They weren’t having much luck — at the time, sixty per cent of Jordan’s population was of Palestinian origin and no one wanted to lease space to the Israelis.

I understood. “Do you have to go to the Embassy? I mean, with the treaty, you can just go across to Israel, can’t you?”

“No,” he said simply. “I’m from Iraq.”

“And you want to go to Israel?” I asked. This guy was crazy — Iraq was still technically in a state of war with Israel. They’d never let him in — he didn’t have a chance in hell.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

He shrugged. “To work.”

I backed away slowly. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not staying at this hotel, and they probably won’t let me in either.” As I spoke, I backed away even further and, having finished my utterly weak excuse, I turned and walked away. Down by the corner, I glanced back to see the young man, hands still in pockets, shoulders slumped, waiting for some other Western-looking person to walk by so that he could try to gain entry to the Israeli embassy.

In my mind I had convinced myself that the young man was up to no good, that he was going to go try to attack the embassy, or that he was going to go to Israel for the purpose of joining the Palestinian resistance. I had no idea at the time that Israel is one of the top destinations for human trafficking, and that this young man was probably one of hundreds — thousands — of migrant workers hoping to gain employment in Israel’s construction sector, which was booming after the influx of nearly a million Russian Jews. After five years of sanctions, he had probably fled his country so that he could find some sort of gainful employment and send money home to support his family.

I guess all of this, of course, because I don’t know any of this for sure. I don’t know this because I turned and walked away. Even within the following year, I would find myself feeling ashamed and regretting my decision to turn around and leave him standing there on the street. I should have talked to him, found out his story. And then I should have tried to get him into the hotel. It wouldn’t have worked, but I should have tried.

I wonder whatever happened to him. I wonder if he ever made it to Israel, or if he became one of the millions of Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, barely scraping by. I’ll never find out. But every so often, I remember that interaction, and I remember how bad I felt about it afterwards. I’ve been lots of places, and I’ve seen lots of things, but that young man taught me something. I’ve learned to listen to people when they talk to me, because those are the experiences that I remember the most.

And I’ll never get the chance to tell him that.