A Desert with Salvia and Shells

I was sitting for dinner in the Chadar Ohel (dining hall) this evening with five fellow girls at the institute, and we were joined by a couple of the volunteers. The volunteers are a mixed lot, living on the Kibbutz for anywhere from a month to several years, and are as diverse as transient traveling workers and soul-searching ex-bankers. The Kibbutz provides them with several hours of work, something like laundering and washing dishes, and the rest of the day they're free to chill, relax, do whatever. Well, a good-looking volunteer, in a casual attempt at conversation, naively asked us girls what it is we are up to at the Arava Institute. We immediately commenced, in a rapid narrative flow of information, interjecting and cutting one another off excitedly, to talk at him for nearly 20 minutes about the varied classes, activities, field work, and trips of the past week. The poor kid was completely overwhelmed. So...yes it has been akin to a full-scale innundation. The Arava Institute attracts the preeminent desert ecologists, horticulturists, archeologists, geologists, and physicists to teach our classes and they attempt to condense a semester's worth of material into a four-week summer program. The result is an incredibly stimulating, at times completely exhausting, intellectual romp up, down, and over mountains, dunes, trees, and geological epochs.

One of our most exhausting classes was the deceptively-named "experimental orchards", morning field work coupled with an afternoon lecture, by the distinguished dendrologist, Dr. Elaine Soloway. She took us to her plots across the road, for what should have been a leisurely stroll through the trees, but actually consisted of scrambling about in scorching heat to see upwards of several dozens types of trees, being driven halfway to insanity by the incessant buzzing of flies, and fruitlessly attempting to furiously scribble down the endless flow of information. Elaine took a break occasionally from her stream of tree facts to interject fierce and frequent diatribes against the state of the modern world. Especially on the imminent collapse of civilization on account of agribusinesses who she blamed for everything from rampant allergies and birth defects to a world-wide annihilation of genetic diversity. I had a feeling she and Michael Pollan would get along swimmingly.

Elaine's main crop is date palms. They became Ketura's main source of income after the Kibbutzniks decided that twenty years of pesticide-pouring, water-purifying, plastic-coating, equipment-purchasing in an attempt to grow lettuce in the 120 degree heat at 30 cents per 2.5 pounds might not be the most profitable business venture. They purchased salt and heat-loving dates trees instead whose fertilizer comes in the form of wild asses nibbling weeds at their base. In the name of 'biodiversity' (she really means world peace), Elaine also develops species that global desert-locals have depended on for milennia; Argania from Morocco, who the Berbers have used for thousands of years as a source of oil, grazing feed, and termite-proof wood for carved goods (though it was the World Bank Organization's brilliant "recommendation" that they cut down Argania and plant citrus trees in their place...a short-lived recommendation as the Argania were the only trees to survive the Atlas drought in the 90s); Meem, "the pharmacy of Indian villages" with 10-degree-cooler shaded enclaves, soap-producing leaves, and fruits that kill locusts by scrambling their appetite; and the Lay Lob, which in the time of Jacob was brought as a gift to the Pharoah for its properties (divine-smelling incense and herbal remedy for the West Nile virus) made it more valuable than silver and gold.

It can be somewhat of an upwards battle for Elaine to produce her crops...she had to fight the Ministry of Health for five years to convince them that her Sinai Caper, used by the Bedouin Israelis for thousands of years as jam, licqour and salt, was edible. They finally caved when she found a reference from an obscure half-mad British explorer 150 years ago who footnoted that the locals ate the plant. Her orchards encompass an abundance of other projects; preserving the last individual of a certain species in the region (in the case of the Myrrh species that Queen Sheba brought as a gift for King Solomon), domesticating water-thrifty perennial plants that thrive with under 50 mm of annual rainfall, and monitoring plants with medicinal value. She's even developing salvia--(supposedly) for it's anti-strep properties ;-).

That afternoon, as an unintended fourth of July shout-out, we talked to one of the Kibbutz founders and screened a movie she made about the early years in the 70s. The first people were American relics of the 60s, hippies with big dreams, bigger bell bottoms, and long hair, spilling over with ideas for a new beginning, roughing it out on a patch of land and living simply, needing nothing. There's a huge pomp and circumstance exchange with smartly dressed, stern-faced soldiers who hand over what was previously an army base to the dred-headed dreamers, as musicians who would go on to be the founders of Israeli rock jam in the background. It's quite the juxtaposition. The early years stuck close to the hippie, socialist ideals; the first community play was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and children were raised communally in day care centers as opposed to homes. The Kibbutz continued to evolve as it got older, but a lot of idealism held sway. Nowadays, pluralist religious practices still reign (the dining hall is Kosher, Shabbat Services are held in an egalitarian, bare-footed, bellowing, clapping jam-band fashion), money is still allocated in Big Brother chunks, and nothing is privatized.

I was less than thrilled for Thursday's schedule..(un) official rock-day. I had tried to do the readings the night before, and they were sprinkled with words straight out of A Clockwork Orange...a la "metamorphosed plutons" and "orogenic calc-alkaline. I just gave up. Day-time activities commenced with a "desert reflections" a silent walk through the mountains of the back yard in an attempt to stimulate creative response. Quiet time commenced, and I almost immediately tripped and squealed, inciting angry glares from my classmates, and for much of the walk was too busy furiously swatting away flies to pay attention to anything other than zzzzzz. After frustratingly climbing up 100 feet of rock face and killing the final fly, the noise finally desisted and I was able to look out over the landscape. I'll give it to this place, not that I could do it any justice, but it's god-damn beautiful. A smooth stretch of valley bordered on either side by upheavels, swells, and breaks of multi-colored, motley-textured bulging rock bits, sliding in and out of gravel and soft dunes, occasionally punctured by tufts of dry saxual bushes. In dozens of kilometers in most directions, the landscape is astonishingly empty and underdeveloped. Three self-contained kibbutzes, several modest orchards, a lone road and power wire, but mostly undulating desert. '"The human footprint seems so ephemeral", I thought to myself, "dwarfed by the larger long-term geological processes shaping the region." That was when I noticed a non-biodegradable plastic bottle of Eden water nicely nestled in my rocky outcrop, enjoying the view with me...

When we got to class for lectures, Tuba band camp had started in the next room. They spent the morning tuning...really, just lovely music. Luckily, rock-day went uphill from there. Our crash course was taught by the premier geologist of the region, Dr. Hanan Ginat who introduced himself as bilingual, a native Hebrew speaker also fluent in geology. It was, par for the course, a whirlwind of facts. Apparently, Israel, and the Arava Valley, is the site of all manner of interesting convergences; its the strip between the Red and Dead Sea; the triple point for Mediterranean, Sub-Saharan, Arabian, and Iranian ecologies; the meeting point of the Sinai, and Arabian tetonic plates; one of the most extreme deserts in the world (with 15 mm of rainfall per 3000 mm of potential evaporation); a confluence of landscapes that includes valleys, salt flats, high regions, mountains of Edoms, small dunes, flood plains, and alluvial fans; and the so-called "politically forgotten" spot of Israel where Jordan and Israel share the valley and all sort of quiet collaborations go unnoticed.

The Southern Arava and resulting mountains used to be a single mountain, 20 mya under the Tethys sea, that started tearing down the middle. Because of the dearth of plant life and extreme wind, the sedimentary layers of the rip are completely exposed. Hanan took us out to an overlook from Mount Ayit where we could see the geological processes in action...to the East Jordan's mountains of Edom, the oldest layer, the orange sedimentary base of the valley (softening to dunes), the mid-aged gray-speckled granite base, topped by pink and red sandstone strata, and crowned with tufts of yellow marine rocks. Over on the young mountains of Israel, we too stood on marine rocks, as I figured when I picked up a piece of limestone with an embedded sea shell.

After checking the night sky when we got back to the Kibbutz, bright search-like Venus to the East and red twinkling Mars to the West, we decided to get our heads of the clouds. A couple girls on the program and I bought a bottle of wine and we dressed up for toga night at the Kibbutz pub. White sheets, bare feet, flowers in our hair (in my case, in my increasingly dreaded hair). The Kibbutz is getting to me, I'm bound to wake up a full-blown hippie any day now...