Norther Exposure

I was sick for a few days this week and it took me a while to post this. Photos will be forthcoming.

On Friday the cousins and I drove up to the Golan for the weekend. A couple errands in Jerusalem and a pizza later, we were on our way. First we drove west, into the West Bank, and watched the markers noting we were at 0m, 150m, 300m below sea level in the Dead Sea basin. The barren rocky bluffs of the Judean Desert rose up on all sides, flecked with manicured Jewish towns and haphazard Bedouin encampments. We saw Jericho in the distance, road-side lawn ornament sales, and palm tree-filled desert oases. Before hitting the Jordan we turned north. Every so often we passed rows of green houses and date palm groves, small villages, some Jewish, some Arab, a rusted hull of a tank, left to the sun forty plus years ago, and the odd camel dawdling by the highway.

The farther north we traveled, the more lush the landscape became. From bleak white rocks to scrubland, to grasses grazing the most pitiful cows I’ve ever seen. The neat green rows under the tan, brush-covered mountains and the Arabs riding in the back of a flatbed reminded me of California. Some ways up, the highway runs just off the Jordan River, really just a trickle, and by extension the border with Jordan the country. Over fences and access roads were Jordanian towns and fields, just out of reach. A sign on the side of the highway had posted times for Shabbat services. We stopped at Mehola where one of my cousins-in-law is doing her national service, a community of both new suburban homes and older, smaller, weathered ones. Changing standards, I guess.

Crossing back into Israel proper, we continued north, across the Jordan (on such a small bridge, I didn’t even notice), and along the banks of the Galilee. We stopped to touch the water, and as we walked to the receding water’s edge, I couldn’t help but envision Jesus walking here along the seashell-covered sand. On the other side of the road were banana trees enveloped in netting, and above them the mountains from which Syrian tanks descended on Israel in 1967. Up the winding road into the mountains, and we arrived at Nov, a mostly agricultural moshav where friends of my cousins’ live.

We had Shabbat dinner with some of them in their gorgeous new house. I was trying to imagine what he must do to be able to afford to build a house like this, and then he dropped the bombshell: the plot cost 100,000 shekel. The existing homes like the one we were staying in cost 120,000 shekel. That’s about $35,000. I couldn’t believe that we were in a place where I could just about afford to buy a house on my savings and credit alone, no mortgages needed. The caveat being that in order to prevent people from just buying cheap vacation homes here, one would need to live there for a year before being able to buy a home. While many of these homes stood empty for a decade or more, being built to house some of the influx of Russian immigrants in the ’80s, this was now a very popular place to live and there was a wait list to get in. Our dinner host’s parents moved there and all their children stuck around to raise their own families there.

On Saturday afternoon, we took a walking tour of the town. We saw the rows of flowers and myrtles grown for sale domestically and for export to Europe and big pens of cows raised for the dairy, which gave the whole area its inescapable smell. The residents swear they’re used to it, but I don’t think I could ever. The plains stretched into the distance, tractors and big skies, in a panorama that could easily be mistaken for America’s breadbasket states. This is the agricultural heartland of Israel. It was really awesome to see people so attached to the land, so invested in working the land and tilling the soil. I’m a romantic at heart, and I find it affirming to interact with people so in touch with their environment.

After a very pleasant afternoon and evening, we drove back to Alon Shvut, stopping at the kosher McDonalds in Beit She’an. Micah and I just had to stop there, the American in us finding the concept unendingly funny, and I ate my “double royale” and “chips” with a smirk. And then the long drive home. The weekend was great, and Nov is a lovely place where I could own my own home, but with one catch. On our way out we stopped to say goodbye to our friends. They were on their way out to spend the night elsewhere, anywhere, because “you get trapped sometimes and don’t leave for months, and you need to get out.” Maybe I will just buy a vacation home.