Every Day I Have the Blues

At 11:30 last night, my friend in Be’er Sheva emailed me, asking if I wanted to come down for Shabbat. My cousin’s wife looked on Eged’s nearly useless website and saw that there was a bus leaving Jerusalem at 9:30 this morning. I packed my things, got up early, and made it to the bus station at 9:45 with time to spare before the bus was set to arrive. I waited. Two cars came by and rolled down their windows to ask if I was going to Kiryat Arba. This is not unusual for Israel, as it is common to tremp when one needs to get somewhere; tremp, from the German tramp, i.e. to be taken for a ride. But Be’er Sheva is a ways past Kiryat Arba, so I declined the rides and waited, not knowing that there were buses from Kiryat Arba to Be’er Sheva because the website doesn’t list connections or have a map of the system.

Not my stop, but a good example of why I hate the bus system. Can you tell what bus stops here?

I rested on the edge of the barricade as the soldiers paced behind me. A checkpoint near here was declared “an obstacle to peace,” and yet when it was dismantled peace did not come and people were killed. A few years ago, some kids were run down here while waiting for a ride. A pile of stones marks the spot, and a concrete barrier and armed soldiers protect the bus stop, though everyone waited for their rides 15 feet or so down from the protection of waist-high cement. An army lookout sits on the mound on the other side of the highway and the soldiers remain. People and buses came and went, but not my bus. By 10:20 I was getting anxious. I called the house and apparently the website now said the bus was not running today. Instead, I crossed the street to catch a bus to Jerusalem to get a bus from there to Be’er Sheva.

Soldiers guarding the bus stop, which is behind me, protected by a barricade. A monument on the left, and people waiting on the right not by the bus stop for a bus or a tremp, whichever comes first.

The bus, with the clearest windows of any bus I’d been on so far in the Territories, and with a clear view of the ultimate Barrier on the hillside, took us to the train station on the outskirts of Jerusalem where we switched to a non-bullet-proof local bus, and went from there to the central bus station, passing walls of Tzipi Livni billboards and one for a noodle house on the way, up in advance of the forthcoming national elections. I grabbed some Chinese food from a stand in the food court, where the girl told me I was wasting money getting the small instead of the large box because the large was only 5 shekel more, despite me not being that hungry. Also randomly in the bus stop was my brother and a bunch of kids from his yeshiva on their way down to Hebron for Shabbat, this week being the week Jews read of Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs, in which he would bury his wife Sarah. I do intend to go down there, but I’d prefer to go at a time that is not a romanticized mob scene.

In the central bus station in Jerusalem. Notice the man praying in the candy store by the liquor.

On the bus south to Be’er Sheva, this time on the “right” side of the Green Line, the name rang true. Fields of green dotted with sparkling white homes on rolling hilltops under open skies. Highway overpasses and train tracks and power lines and crop dusters—it was hard not forgetting I was in Israel and not central California or the Midwest. Green became tan as the desert took over, clouds drifting gently along. Count Basie played and sang me the whole way down, trumpets clamoring and piano keys tinkling along roads of majesty.

Heading east.

The Negev.