Squegee Nation: The Strange Stories of a Man Without A Home
“Millwork ain’t easy,
Millwork ain’t hard,
Millwork ain’t nothing but an awful boring job….”
–From “Millworker” by James Taylor
The only thing worse than showing up early for a party is arriving when you aren’t expected. Despite the kibbutz agency’s assurances, no one told the volunteer coordinator I was coming. The kibbutz — located just 30 minutes north of Eilat — was expecting someone, just not me. Instead, they were expecting a French guy whom I obviously was not, as my accent indicated. In fact, the guy never showed, so I ended up taking his room.
I would have felt badly about taking the only room with just one other person (most had three) if the volunteer coordinator hadn’t made me feel like I hadn’t called and had shown up during a lull in a kibbutz-wide domestic dispute. Besides, I was old and tired. At 32, I was one of the oldest volunteers in the place besides Buffalo, New York native Mike Diamond. Maybe that’s why I was assigned to his room.
The nice thing about arriving unexpectedly was there wasn’t any work for me on my first day because they didn’t know where to put me. It was a sacrifice sleeping in while other volunteers woke up around 5:30 so they could eat and start work, but I was up to the task. Even though I didn’t have a job, I still almost messed up my first day on kibbutz because I slept so late I nearly missed orientation. (Even if my position was voluntary, over-sleeping was no way to impress the people who were housing and feeding me for the next two months. People are cordially invited to leave kibbutzim all the time.)
The orientation session showed how things work at Ketura, the jobs residents and volunteers did, and all the kibbutz’s important locations such as the dining room, the aspika (store), the cowshed, the agricultural fields, the melon processing plant, the bomb shelter and, of course, Jordan. Israel’s border with Jordan was just a few feet beyond the edge of Ketura’s crops, and volunteers were warned not to stray. Apparently, Jordanians don’t take border incursions lightly. I would have thought if they were so concerned they’d have built a fence between the countries, but this doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.
The orientation didn’t cover what I thought was the most important issue that every kibbutz resident and volunteer should know: How and why the agricultural commune/cooperatives that populate much of Israel’s rural areas (and some of its urban centers) came to be. After all, they weren’t the result of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland getting together after school and saying, “Hey gang, let’s put on a country!” But I wouldn’t have known it from the information presented during the half-day “get acquainted” session. I did learn where to get laundry done, where to catch a bus to Eilat and even how much I would be paid for volunteering (isn’t this a contradiction in terms?), but nothing about what I really wanted to know.
I had to do a little digging to figure that out.
Although I’d grown up hearing about Israel’s agricultural collectives in Sunday school, my teachers weren’t big on details. Fortunately, “Insight Guides: Israel” Fortunately, “Insight Guides: Israel” is. According to the book, the first kibbutz was founded on the shore of the Jordan River in 1909 by Jewish pioneers from Eastern Europe who wanted to establish the ideal socialist society. It began modestly with about a dozen men and women, but turned a profit with a surplus. Within a decade there were 40 more kibbutzim.
Keeping with the spirit of communalism, everyone shared everything early on. Cars, tractors, washer/driers, children. Well, not children, exactly, but kids were raised communally and not in their parents’ homes. Ownership of private property was banned, many kibbutzim disdained university educations and some even saw marriage as a bourgeois institution.
Eighty-seven years later, the founders might not recognize the movement. These days members may be married, live with their kids, have their own TV sets and, horror of horrors, their own kitchens.
“Insight Guides” makes it seem as if the places have gone from ugly trailer parks near swamps to holiday villages. I wouldn’t call Ketura a holiday village, exactly; it wasn’t a trailer park either. Instead, it looked more like a university campus in the desert with a big dining hall, but no classrooms. Volunteers live on one side of the dining hall in a compound of single-story, two-bedroom cinder block buildings. Each building had a bathroom and none-too-attractive foyer. Most work areas were also on this side of the campus. Members, meanwhile, lived in their own non-descript, slightly larger cinder block homes with small living room/dining room/kitchen areas and a few bedrooms, depending on family size. Volunteer housing formed a buffer between the dining room and the work areas nearby, while family housing sprawled into the distance on the other side of the dining hall, making the member area look like suburbs.
To cover costs and keep with the times, the collectives have made drastic changes. Some shut their communal dining rooms, a few began charging for meals, and still others started for-profit enterprises to cover costs. In addition, some kibbutzim paid salaries to make up for labor shortages. Others added high tech to their mix of services because they believed computer programming was steadier and less labor intensive than agricultural work. At the same time, volunteers became much more important. Where volunteer programs once were a source of new recruits for the communities, they were now viewed as a source of cheap, dispensable labor that can be brought in during high demand and dismissed at the end of the agricultural season.
I never could get anyone to explain Israel’s fascination with the squeegee or how it became a nation filled with squeegee men and women.
I never could get anyone to explain Israel’s fascination with the squeegee or how it became a nation filled with squeegee men and women.
I learned of the country’s love of squeegees during my first day on the job. I’d been assigned to the kitchen where I spent the day slicing vegetables for steaming. I should point out that it’s never a good idea to have me work in a kitchen. This wasn’t always the case. I used to love Home Economics and doing the odd bit of baking for my family, but that was before the Friday the 13th chili incident at Wendy’s. One ugly Friday night in 1981, I managed to spill two trays of chili all over the counters in three minutes. I was not fired, but management stopped putting me on the work schedule. The manager was so desperate to get rid of me he didn’t even ask for my uniform back. Ever since, I’ve been skittish about working in food service. I’m too slow, too careful and more precise than necessary. Of course, I didn’t bother to tell Shlomo, the man who made work assignments, because I didn’t want him to think I was a slacker.
One of the few things I hate more than working in a large scale food service setting is clean-up. It’s boring, takes forever and requires a lot of scrubbing of surfaces filled with caked-on food. It’s also a lot of detail work, and I always miss details unless I move at a snail’s pace. That’s not the way things work in a kibbutz kitchen, though. Instead of wiping a counter to make sure they’ve gotten every last scrap, kibbutzniks break out the hoses and blast every bit of counter space as if they were in Chicago in 1968 outside the Democratic National Convention and they were using water cannon on protesters. The goal is to wash every atom of food off every surface and into drains of varying sizes where screens catch every morsel so that we can throw it all out. What happens, however, is that everything gets soaked. Then it’s time for mop-up. Instead of using mops to swab up the mess or towels to dry the floor, kibbutzniks went to the broom closet and broke out squeegees on broomsticks so they could push all the water into each of the drains. After a while the whole operation looked like a combination of water ballet and the base cleaning dance that occurs during baseball games when ballboys come out between innings and sweep the dirt.
Before they could get serious about cleaning the floors they had to make sure that all of the counters were clean. At this point, the logical thing would have been to use sponges to push everything into the drains, but not here. Instead, they broke out more squeegees. Not the big-ass ones they used on the floor, though. No, each counter had its own implement. One required a tool similar to what car owners use on windshields, others were small enough for side mirrors.
The squeegee madness didn’t end there, however. No, there was more to come.
When I washed out of the kitchen (as I knew I would), I was sent to the date processing plant. As luck would have it, there’d been a small earthquake centered in Eilat (30 minutes south) five days before. The temblor didn’t do much damage, but it knocked over several six-foot-stacks of pallets loaded with dates, spilling them all over the floor of one of the facility’s walk-in refrigerators. The spillage would have been easy to clean if the plant had ordered someone competent to do so immediately; but the managers didn’t. Instead, they brought in two guys who immediately realized they were in an area where supervisors rarely tread. So, they spent two days playing chess, reading and occasionally scraping dates when they thought the manager was coming. Worse, the spill was in a high-traffic area. As a result, the problem worsened every day as workers walked over the mess in work boots, grinding and mashing the dates into the cement floor as they went. By the time I was sent to the back room with Jerome, a junior who played basketball for Oneanta State University in New York, we found a nasty, smelly, fermenting blob that I’m surprised wasn’t moving on its own.
And what did the plant give us to clean this mess up?
Squeegees on sticks.
“They can’t be serious,” I said when I surveyed the scene. A man 10 years my senior was standing in a room with a wall-to-wall carpeting of dates so ground into the floor
that it was hard to tell where the mass ended and the gray cement floor began and he was handing us sticks with blades of rubber on the end and telling us to make it all better in eight hours. Never mind that it’s hard to get squeegees to efficiently clean windshields under the best of circumstances (if you aren’t a gas station attendant).
I knew Israel was a land of miracles — where waters part to let people pass, where small guys with short-man complexes can kill giants and where a pious man who wasn’t smart enough to smote the last two mosquitoes on earth could still build a boat on dry land and have it float for 40 days and 40 nights without taking it out on a maiden voyage — but this task strained even my credulity. When I told the supervisor the tools weren’t up to the task, he told me not to be ridiculous.
“All you need is a little bit of elbow grease,” he said as he leaned into the stick and winnowed the herd by dislodging a few of the slower, dumber dates on the mass’s edge. He also pointed to a shovel leaning against a wall on the far side of the room before he left us to our own devices. (The shovel had so much gunk on it we would have needed a stronger squeegee than we had just to clean it).
Even with the elbow grease we could find (it was in a small can on a back shelf and there was only enough for one day, but by some miracle it lasted eight), it still wasn’t enough to budge the blob. So, when our supervisor checked on us two hours later, we restated our case and showed him we needed something thinner and stronger than a squegee blade to gain leverage and get underneath the mush. He finally gave in and asked a technician to make a tool that would help. We told him what we needed, then went on coffee break with paid staff, who wanted nothing to do with us.
What we needed was a tool that came to a long, thin point and would allow us to dig in and get under the mess, preferably something long and made of metal. What we got was a long broomstick with a piece of metal soldered on at such an angle that it looked like. . . . a metal squeegee.
Do these squeegee people never give up?
The tools made enough of a difference that we were able to eliminate the biggest colonies of smashed schmutz quickly, leaving only small islands requiring super-human effort to remove. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what our supervisor wanted. Although he was hesitant, we finally convinced him the only way to get the rest of the muck up was by spilling buckets of water on the mess. The approach was helpful, but not as good as I’d hoped.
“What we really need is a high pressure hose,” I jokingly said to my partner, Jeremy, as I left to fetch a pail of water. When a forklift driver saw me filling the bucket, he told me to stop, showed me where a hose was and dragged it to the cooler and turned on what turned out to be a high-pressure hose as our supervisor arrived. In seconds, the blast atomized every remaining morsel, leaving us to wonder why we weren’t allowed to use the hose before.
Of course, our work wasn’t done quite yet.
We still had to squeegee the floor.
The squeegee follies ended that afternoon, but our disastrous “dates” with destiny went into the following day when we were both stationed on the packing line. Jeremy worked at the front end, pouring trays of dates onto the conveyor belt and I worked at the tail, putting the tops on cartons of dates — when the industrial accident occurred.
It happened 10 minutes after our shift was supposed to end. The assembly line was still going strong when Jeremy put his hand underneath the belt for support as he spilled more dates on the conveyor. His hand got caught and he tried to save it by grabbing the belt and pulling hard enough to reverse it so he could free himself. The first indication we had something was wrong was when Jeremy screamed “STOP THE MACHINE!”
I was impressed with the speed of the response. Workers dropped everything, the supervisor cut the belt, Jeremy was rushed to a chair, his arm was tied off, he was given water, his arm stabilized on a tray and then they hosed him down with the high pressure sprayer. (To this day, no one has been able to explain why the dousing was necessary — he wasn’t on fire.) A car was driven onto the factory floor and Jeremy was rushed to an infirmary.
Jeremy ended up with five stitches in his hand and his whole arm was put in a cast and stabilized with a splint. He was also told that he wouldn’t have to work in the processing plant for the rest of his stay.
The injury didn’t keep him from being active, though. He ended the day playing basketball with his cast on.
As for me, I decided if I never saw a date again, it would be too soon. Squeegees, too.
I had a good laugh a few hours later when I saw the list of work assignments for the next day. The sheet contained the following listing for Jeremy:
Jeremy Accident
The listing did not specify if it was supposed to be a new one, what kind of accident it was supposed to be or where it was supposed to happen.
There was a certain sameness to life on a kibbutz I found refreshing after months on the road. Everyone gets up at the same every day (except on Sabbath) and generally did the same thing day-in, day-out. Volunteers and members alike usually got up around 5 a.m., had breakfast and walked to work. The jobs ranged from working in the kitchen and dining room to gardening, harvesting dates and doing laundry. Getting up early may have been a pain for vacationing volunteers, but it had a positive side. Every one had more leisure time while the sun was still up.
The disadvantage was there wasn’t a lot to do afterwards. There was visiting with members, hanging out with volunteers, swimming, playing games, reading and an occasional bit of shopping when the people who ran the kibbutz store remembered to open it for a half hour or so, generally at the most inconvenient times.
Many volunteers also liked to hike, and the Negev was a great place to do it. All volunteers had to do was walk three minutes and they were in the desert. I was still so exhausted I couldn’t work up enough of a head of steam to go beyond the borders of the kibbutz, which weren’t far. Instead, I was just happy to sit in the shade, read, write and regroup. A few volunteers and I talked about going to Egypt or Jorda=n for a few days, but we never did.
A slew of oddball volunteers helped spice up life. For example, there were four women from England who were the loudest, most obnoxious people in the place. Claire and Sue were the most difficult because they had been on the kibbutz longer than other volunteers and felt Ketura owed them something. What, I’m not sure. Although they were in their early 20’s, they felt everything they said was golden and that they spoke for all volunteers. My neighbors, Katie and Kelley, also from England, arrived after me, but made their presence known, yelling at each other late into the night. They didn’t worry about being too tired to work when they got up early because they rarely did so. They reported for work, they just never did any.
Right before I left for the kibbutz, the person who helped me select Ketura stunned me by saying English volunteers were known for being loud and lazy. I found it hard to believe because most of the people I had met from Britain were quiet hard workers who believed in keeping a stiff upper lip and all that. Apparently, Claire and Sue were a different breed. Sue always had to know what was going on in everyone’s life and felt it was her right. When she saw me carrying a backpack across campus, for example, she asked what was in it. Since it was none of her business, I just ignored her constant questioning as I took my laptop to a safe storage place in the home of a family from Seattle. She asked me each time she saw me with it until finally I told her it was a bomb.
The response shut her up.
For a whole three minutes.
I wasn’t the only one she irritated. She walked into the room of a friend of hers around 11 p.m. without knocking because she saw a light on. Her friend, Brian, wasn’t there, but his roommate Scott was. Although he was in his pajamas and reading in bed, he was livid and screamed until she left. Admittedly, Scott was a little too tightly wound. The Miami, Florida native took himself a bit too seriously and enjoyed every job he was given, no matter how bad, because he felt he was doing God’s work. We all knew Scott was a little off and mostly harmless, but the incident steamed off what little glue was left on the envelope that was Scott. At breakfast, Sue dropped her dirty dishes on the conveyor belt in the dishwashing room where Scott worked and he gave her a tongue lashing, swearing and yelling at her loud enough to be heard in the dining room. The tirade may have upset members, but it would have been excusable if he hadn’t made a fatal mistake. When a kibbutz member told them to “take it somewhere else,” Scott wrote himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville by telling the man to fuck off.
Not wanting to get involved in the squabbles among younger volunteers, I hung out with the older, quieter set. As a result, I spent most of my time with a woman from Connecticut who was taking time off between getting her undergrad degree and going to law school; a quiet young art student from Calgary; and a mellow 33 year-old construction worker from New York who was debating whether he wanted to join the kibbutz or return home. We occasionally hung out and talked about everything from our lives back home and past disastrous relationships to what we would do when we got home.
Life on the kibbutz remained uneventful until the Swedes arrived and the shooting began.
The two events were not related.
Like many events of 1996, the Swedish invasion of Kibbutz Ketura was over-hyped and under delivered. The Swedes weren’t terrible people or even slackers. It’s just that they weren’t everything members hoped they would be.
In order to understand what they were hoping for, it’s important to know that most of the kibbutz’s members were American and most were men. So, they had certain images in mind when it came to Sweden — and I’m not talking about ABBA (at least not the male half. Anna and Frieda, yes. Bjorn and Benny, no.) When they think Sweden, they undoubtedly had visions of nubile, blonde-haired, blue-eyed nymphettes who want sex, sex, sex. Since the Swedish group that wanted to volunteer at Ketura wasn’t Jewish, members had to vote whether to accept them. Since they’d accepted a similar group the year before, the results were no great surprise to the volunteers.
If the men were hoping for beautiful young women, they were sadly mistaken. Although most of the female volunteers were upset about how beautiful the newcomers looked in their pictures, I just didn’t see it. At best, the six women and three men looked average. The art student from Calgary even said they looked like “meatheads.”
Despite how bad their pictures looked, most kibbutzniks were breathless in anticipation over their arrival. When it finally happened it was a non-event. Considering how deadly dull kibbutz life can be, though, I’m not surprised so many people could get whipped into so much froth over so little.
My first brush with the Swedes came late on a September evening when I was sitting on the lawn outside my room trying to get the Seattle Mariners-Anaheim Angels game on my radio. A woman who had just moved into the building next door asked if I’d heard anything new about what was going on in Jerusalem. At the time, talks on establishment of a Palestinian state had stalled and the Jerusalem Post was reporting that tensions were rising throughout the city. Not wanting to sound shallow, I said I hadn’t heard, but added that I was looking for additional information. She told me not to bother looking on her account (which I wasn’t because I didn’t think she’d be interested in the Mariner’s game).
“You must be one of the Swedes,” I said. When she nodded yes, I added, “That’s all everybody has talked about for the last few weeks. ‘The Swedes are coming! The Swedes are coming!'”
She was quite stunned.
While there were more men than the male kibbutz members preferred, and the women weren’t knock-outs, the Swedes were a lot of fun. At least, for me. The night after their arrival, for example, was the start of Sukkot, the celebration of the harvest. Tradition calls for people to eat and live in a three-walled shack (a sukka) with a roof made of leaves and palm fronds so residents can see the stars at night. While no one on the kibbutz slept in the over-sized sukka, we ate all our meals there during the festival. Having never celebrated the holiday before, the Swedes were doing their best to be good guests and ask about all the symbols.
“What is the significance of the plates?” the woman I’d met the night before asked.
I hadn’t even noticed each place setting had a bowl and a plate sitting on the table bottom-side-up. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have given the positioning of the plates much thought, because we were in the desert in early fall when winds kick up without warning, blowing sand in all directions. The bowls were face down because we didn’t want sand in the soup.
As tempting as it was to mislead her, I ‘fessed up and told the truth. The prankster in me regretted it so much I changed my response when another Swede asked the same question. My second answer was far more fanciful with tales of unidentified flying objects, the desert, and the giving of the Torah. Unfortunately, the word was already out. Once I finished my answer, the newcomer looked thoughtful and stunned for a moment until one of her peers told her the real reason in Swedish.
My favorite moment with the group came when we all caught the same bus to Eilat, the closest thing to a decent-sized city near our kibbutz. Although I’d just gone into town to buy laces for my hiking boots and check out air fares for my return home, I spent most of the day hanging out on the beach with the group, being the only brunette in a sea of blondes. As we sat around waiting for the bus, I heard one of the group use the word “kop,” which they said means “head.” Since kop also means head in German and Yiddish, I asked about other words and learned there are no other similarities among
the three languages. I also learned the words for thief (shiv), potluck (pronounced k’nud k’los), cookie party (cock k’loss) and some other choice phrases.
Hoping to consolidate my lessons into one sentence I told the group I was a k’nud k’loss shiv, which made them all roll with laughter. When I asked why, they told me I’d just said I steal the tops of chamberpots.
Why the Swedish would name a food event after the top of a chamberpot remains a mystery.
Ironic, isn’t it? I had gone to Israel hoping to learn Hebrew and learned Swedish instead.
“Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood.”
I’d heard that phrase thousands of times when I wrote for a Jewish newspaper in Seattle, but I didn’t understand it until I lived there. On a map of the world, the country is so small it looks like a spitting champion could spit across it, but he might not want to for fear of pissing off one of Israel’s neighbors, who would undoubtedly blame it on the Jewish state. The country is surrounded by Arab nations that have all, at some time, claimed that their mission was to push Israel into the sea. (Each time they’ve tried, of course, they’ve lost land in the process. Maybe there is something to this Chosen People thing, after all.)
The only way to put the hostility into understandable terms is to compare the country to a Jewish gay black family moving into a neighborhood knowing everyone on the block was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but not being able to do anything about it because they didn’t have any other options. The family knows there’s going to be a cross-burning, they just don’t know when. The only thing they can do is put up a good defense to dissuade their tormentors. Israel’s defense is its military, made up mostly of gun-toting teenagers who serve at an age when I wouldn’t trust most kids with a car or the equipment in a chemistry class much less an Uzi. (Come to think of it, I don’t even think I’d trust kids under the supervision of a high school chemistry teacher. After all, if she were really so educated, why wouldn’t she be making big bucks working for a chemical company?)
Having kids carrying guns is a double-edged sword. The bad side is that they’re just out of adolescence, still fueled by hormones and God knows what they’ll do. Fortunately, they’re highly trained and subject to severe punishments if they brandish guns or use them to intimidate civilians. On the plus side, having so many people patrolling the streets in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv made me feel safe.
The guns also make a handsome fashion accessory. One of the funniest sights I saw in Israel came when I was sitting on a seawall on a beach in Eilat and saw a soldier
wearing brightly colored swimming trunks, a hat and an Uzi. Festive, very festive indeed.
Still, no matter what the soldiers wear, their presence made me feel secure, without a care in the world.
So secure that I forgot about what a dangerous neighborhood Israel lived in.
Until the shooting started.
The trouble began September 24th after the opening of an Israeli-built 500 yard tunnel running from Jerusalem’s Western Wall (one of Judaism’s holiest sites) and alongside the Al Aqsa Mosque (Islam’s third holiest site) to the Via Dolorosa. Violence flared as Palestinians claimed the tunnel could undermine the foundations of the compound where the Dome of the Rock is located. They also said the move was aimed at undermining Arab control of the shrine and their claim to East Jerusalem as the future capital of their country. The shooting quickly spread to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two longstanding sore spots in negotiations between the two sides. More than 40 Palestinians and 11 Israelis died in the battles.
News of the fighting hit the kibbutz especially hard. Many members were discouraged or depressed. Some members criticized American officials for insisting Israel reach agreements with the Palestinians even as the people they were negotiating with were proving they couldn’t be trusted. Still others called it the new Intifadeh.
The Intifadeh was the uprising in which Palestinians gained international sympathy by throwing rocks and bottles at Israeli soldiers who really weren’t allowed to throw rocks back, but had to defend themselves the best they could. Backed against the wall, they often used their guns. Any time a not-so nonviolent protestor was killed, Palestinians would decry their harsh treatment at the hand of the soldiers much to the consternation of Israel.
What made this potential Intifadeh worse than the first was the sheer amount of weaponry available. The recently created Palestinian Authority alone had a substantial cache of automatic weapons and they not only weren’t able to use them to control their own people, they also turned them on Israeli soldiers.
The violence may have started when the tunnel opened, but Israelis said it was just an excuse. A week before the first shots were fired, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Arab terrorist group Hezbollah was frustrated with the peace process and planned to resume attacks. At the same time, Palestinians were complaining that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had done nothing to resume the peace process.
Thanks to CNN, NBC, CBS, NPR, BBC, FOX, AP, UPI and an alphabet soup of other media organizations, my mother received news of the event early and often in bold, screaming headlines and ugly video footage of each day’s events. I have no doubt that
CNN and the other major networks replayed them every hour on the hour because of the change in tone of my conversations with my mom.
“I don’t care if it costs a thousand dollars, I will buy you a plane ticket to leave tomorrow,” she said.
If she had known what she was asking, however, she wouldn’t have offered. I was safer staying where I was then I would have been if I’d left. In order to fly out of the country I would have had to go to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem where the shooting was. As long as I stayed put I was perfectly safe because most of the rioting was confined to northern Israel and I was near the southern tip where quiet reigned. It was similar to my experience during the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle three years later. The news was filled with stories about clashes between protestors and police, rioting and even a declaration of martial law, but I never experienced any of it, even though I lived five minutes away.
Israel may be a small country — in fact, it’s small enough to fit into the tiny island of Tasmania three times over — but it didn’t seem so small that week. Considering all that I was hearing on the radio, and seeing on CNN, I felt like I was in another country. While there was some fear the fighting could migrate south, nothing happened and the daily routine never changed. If I hadn’t listened to the radio, watched television or read the Jerusalem Post, I wouldn’t have known anything was going on.
Convincing my mom I was safe was another matter. She wanted me home yesterday. I wasn’t about to go home just because she wanted me to, though. I still wanted to stay as long as I could in part because I wanted to complete my mission and also because I would do anything to avoid the endless coverage of the smear fest that has become the presidential election process. I wasn’t avoiding my obligation as a registered voter. I had registered for absentee ballots while I traveled and already knew who I was going to vote for, I just had no stomach for the level to which the political debate had sunk. The Republican’s Contract On America and Newt Gingrich’s shutting down the federal government before I left because Clinton hadn’t shown him proper respect during Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s funeral had made female mud wrestling seem like high political discourse in comparison.
The other reason I didn’t want to return home was I didn’t know where home was. I had given up my house in Seattle, my old housemates didn’t renew the lease, I couldn’t very well live with my sister and her fiance until they got married in late November and my mother’s definition of home, Fort Myers, Florida, was unacceptable. I may have grown up there, but I took off as soon as I was 18 because it took me that long to realize I was free to leave. In fact, one of the happiest days of my life was when I saw Florida in my rearview mirror. It’s no accident I live in Seattle, the furthest state in the continental U.S. away from Florida.
Still, as part of the agreement I had with my family to come back to attend my sister’s wedding, my mother had agreed to pay for my return trip ticket. Since it was her money, she had a right to determine where I landed.
By early October a new series of high-level negotiations began. They weren’t about the Hasmonean Tunnel or how to restart the peace talks, they were about where I would go when I came back and both sides were so stubborn they made the ongoing difficulties between the Israelis and Palestinians look like a sixth inning dust-up after a pitcher with poor control beaned a second batter in a row.
I don’t care what other volunteers say, working in the melon factory wasn’t that bad. There wasn’t any chopping, scraping or squeegeeing, and we started later — 7:30 a.m., to be precise. It also meant we finished later. It was a tough trade-off, but it was a sacrifice many of us were willing to make. Of course, it also helps that I ended up with an extremely cushy job: Box boy.
I never asked to be relegated to the second floor of Ketura’s melon-processing plant, and I wasn’t really sure I wanted the job. Once I settled in, though, I realized I had the best assignment of all. Maybe it was seniority, maybe it was my experience boxing dates at the processing plant or maybe it was good fortune, but I thanked my lucky stars all I had to do was throw boxes down a series of chutes all day because the other jobs were far more back-breaking and mind numbing.
The first workers on the line, for example, watched melons float by all day and squeezed them to make sure they were firm enough for export. If one was too soft, they had to determine if it was good enough for the local market. If not, it was thrown out. Brennan, a funny 23 year-old South African, got the unlucky draw and was trained to run the melon-waxing machine. As a result, he became indispensable and had to spend his days watching melons roll by and make sure they were properly waxed. He also spent the rest of his time trying to get me to switch jobs.
At the next stop volunteers measured the melons by dropping each through a series of wood cutouts to determine circumference. If a melon fit through the hole in the wood, it was too small for the corresponding box. If it only made it halfway through the hole it was just right. The boxes came in four sizes: 4s, 5s, 6s and 8s. (To this day, I still don’t know what the numbers meant.) Filled boxes were put on the conveyor belt to roll to the end of the line where the boxes were thrown on pallets. I considered this one of the worst jobs in the whole place because there wasn’t much room to move, the work was dull and volunteers couldn’t sit while sorting.
It wasn’t the hardest job at the plant, but the work at the end of the line was the most physically demanding because the volunteers had to heft boxes off the belt and stack them on pallets 13 deep. As a result, the people who worked here started on each pallet by bending down to place the boxes and finished by reaching far above their heads to pile the last rows of boxes on the pallet’s top levels.
Although I was a vital cog in the wheel of this industry, my job was far less strenuous. All I had to do was stay on a second floor platform over the packing line and make sure the chutes were stocked with the right boxes. I also had to clean my work area, break boxes and tidy up. Granted, my work wasn’t as significant as that of a doctor at Walter Reed Hospital, the president’s health care facility, but I kept the line running. If there weren’t enough #5 boxes in the chute when they were needed, for example, everything backed up.
When I started, there were two other people working with me, Nathan the obnoxious New Yorker who said he left the States because they were too bland, and Capre a pretentious 19 year-old from Norway. The platform we worked on was 40 feet long by 12 feet wide with two chutes on each end. The distance between the two pairs of chutes and the constant demand for 4s and 5s meant the job required two people (really 1.5, but no half people were available). It didn’t matter, though, because after lunch Nathan decided he was too good for the job and never returned.
Working the chutes wasn’t intellectually taxing, but it required work management skills. By some odd lucky fluke of fate, the two chutes the plant supervisor stationed me at were the least busy. Capri got the bad end of a good deal because he had to spend more time rushing around to make sure the chutes remained filled with 4s and 5s. I ran over to help whenever he fell behind, however.
By the end of the first week, we got used to the job’s rhythm and were able to relax. We got so good at managing our jobs that we spent most of our days sitting doing other stuff. Capri studied Hebrew. I read books and wrote to friends. To relieve the tedium of reading and making stuff up in letters home, I occasionally updated my journal between regularly scheduled feedings of the box chute.
Capri and I kept our good fortune to ourselves. We never flaunted our mastery of our jobs or the free time it allowed us. In fact, we made a point of reading and writing out of vfew. Because we were on a platform overlooking half the floor, it wasn’t too hard to hide as long as we sat on the floor along the back wall. A couple of weeks into melon season the kibbutz unwittingly helped our effort to hide our luck when it delivered more boxes to the upstairs loading dock than we could possibly use in more than a week. The surplus allowed us to build a wall at the front of the platform to use as cover. We also built our own individual box fortresses so that we could sit on chairs and read if we wanted to. I don’t know how he did it, but Capri dragged a mattress upstairs so that he could lie down and study in comfort between rushes.
Despite our efforts, though, word of our fortress of solitude began leaking out. One day, Sue saw me walk into the factory with my journal. (I stopped carrying my backpack because she kept asking me about it.)
“Why are you bringing your journal into work?” she asked.
“So I can keep track of the drug deals,” I shot back.
Sue may not have been real smart, but I didn’t doubt that if she thought there was a way to legally do less work or avoid it all together, she would sniff it out and want a piece of the action. In short, she was a slacker savant and she knew she had smelled something big. So, she began campaigning to replace us.
Sue’s biggest liability was her mouth. She couldn’t keep it shut. By the time her campaign began, there were so many people lobbying for our jobs that the supervisors left us alone. They knew we were doing our work, they hadn’t received any complaints and they didn’t know what the fuss was about. After all, none of the others wanted to spoil a job they might luck into by squealing. Besides, managers were used to complaints about assignments because every job in the place was either backbreaking or just plain dull.
The only relief came in the form of a water break around 10 and lunch at 1. Eventually, the break became cause for celebration because our bosses occasionally served special treats. One day, they served the same melons we’d been packing. When that didn’t go over well, they turned to soda, juice and, occasionally, popsicles and ice cream. We loved it.
Breaks were a chance to blow off steam. When a malfunctioning waxer kept us cooling our heels during one break, we played catch with overripe rejects. The game evolved into baseball, which ended when our balls exploded.
Other days the breaks were just long, quiet escapes in the middle of tedious days. A chance to smoke, go back to our rooms for a minute (the center of the kibbutz was three minutes away), sit around, chat and drink water. Our bosses kept reminding us to drink because it was summer, we were in the desert and they wanted to prevent dehydration. The open air plant was so hot we didn’t need to be reminded to amble to one of the water jugs stationed whereever there was space. If we were close to running out the manager would send one of the workers out to fill the jugs.
On one particularly slow day when we were sitting around schmoozing, one of the volunteers hopped up onto a table holding several jugs. The impact pushed off a precariously perched jug, which hit the ground upright, then fell as the weight of the sloshing water pushed it over, knocking off the lid and sending water cascading out of the container. We were so stunned, it took a moment before anyone did anything about it and, by then, it was mostly empty.
Without missing a beat, a volunteer named Jeff yelled, “We’re all gonna die.”
It may have been the single funniest moment I experienced while on the kibbutz.
I guess you had to be there.
As the days in the melon factory became weeks, my exhaustion became boredom, irritation and crankiness. Although I finally had enough get up and go to hike, I didn’t have the patience for it. Instead, I wasted my energy on odd pursuits.
One night, for example, a cricket got into our room and began chirping any time Mike or I reached the fragile state between consciousness and sleep. Frustrated, I donned a headlight/flashlight and went searching for it every time it chirped. The noise didn’t bother Mike much because he had gone on a late night moonlight hike with another volunteer. So, he simply left early. I stayed and remained in a state of irritation. He returned an hour later to find me in my underwear, a flashlight hanging from my forehead and a broom in my hand as I stood sweeping at a crack in the wall by his bed where the cricket had fled.
Although we had a good laugh about in the morning, there was no doubt it was time to go home. I still didn’t know where home was anymore. Besides, I’d hoped to see the Pyramids before I went home. Once I got to the kibbutz, I also began hearing about Petra, an ancient city in Jordan, that also intrigued me.
I also began feeling completely out of touch with the rest of the world. While I was happy to miss the presidential election, I got up at 3 a.m. twice in two weeks just so I could watch the presidential debates between Senator Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton. The first was a shocker because Dole didn’t screw it up by throwing a tantrum. I didn’t realize how out of touch I was until I heard on a Voice of America broadcast that Tupac Shakur had been killed. I became even more depressed when I realized I didn’t know who the hell Tupac was.
Suddenly, things took a turn for the weird.
It began when the bottom fell out of the melon market. There was still a demand for Ketura’s melons. The problem was that the first melon shipment had been refused at the European port where they were delivered because the fruit had either turned brown, was sticky, mushy or cooked. We were never told which. The development represented a crisis because melons were Ketura’s biggest cash crop. Every year, the cooperative took on extra volunteers so that it could get the melons out fast enough to meet the need, and now its income source was in peril. Extra processing shifts were added. Many of the pallets of melons that had already been prepared for shipment were recalled back. More volunteers were called up.
Then, Capre and I got caught slacking.
It’s not that we weren’t working, it’s just that the plant manager walked upstairs while we were reading.
The chain of events leading to the discovery came as a result of the Great Melon Export Crisis. Because the plant was rechecking previously packed melons while processing unpacked ones, the demand for boxes was so great, the manager sent us
another boxer. Fortunately, it wasn’t Sue. Unfortunately, it was Frederic, the human machine. Of course, the managers wouldn’t send the extra worker on the day we really needed him because they said it wasn’t busy enough. So, they sent him our way on one of the slowest days of the entire packing season.
Capre and I got to the factory five minutes late. In that short time, however, Frederic was already hard at work. He had filled each of the chutes, cleaned the entire second floor, brought the bad guys to justice, and was instituting world peace. In short, he was too industrious. Even after we showed up he worked at the same pace I set during my first days before I got real and settled in for the long haul. So Capre and I just sat back, read and waited for the madness to pass. It never did.
I can’t say I didn’t appreciate his industriousness. I just didn’t like the result. He’d stocked the chutes with the wrong boxes, so line workers yelled at me for his mistakes, which I had to fix by pulling up the boxes through the top of each chute. Even after I fixed it, he continued putting boxes in the wrong chutes, generating more complaints and irritating me further.
When the plant manager came up to check on Frederic he saw Capre and I in our little box forts reading, and he wasn’t happy. He ordered us to tear down the wall, but not in so many words. Instead, he told us to tie down all the boxes we weren’t using, put them on pallets and have forklifts pick them up. The assignment made me crankier because it was busy work, it would make it easier for everyone in the plant to see us and also because I knew we’d need those boxes as soon as we packed them up and we wouldn’t have an emergency supply to fall back on. I was right, of course, but the managers wouldn’t listen. The job took most of the day, but we got it done.
Then we asked for more boxes so we could rebuild the ramparts.
When I signed up to work on a kibbutz, I figured I would work there for two months and then go see the Pyramids before flying home on November 17th. Going to Petra made sense because Ketura was close to Egypt and Jordan and I could spend a day relaxing before going to my sister’s wedding. As my stint in the factory wore on, however, I realized I wouldn’t be able to work there much longer and retain sanity, even with the cushy job.
Just as I was rethinking my plans another volunteer said she was considering going to Egypt and wanted a companion. Our efforts to plot, plan and figure out logistics gave me something to look forward to until she discovered the trip was too costly. We switched our focus to Petra, but that was too expensive, too. I went anyway.
I wasn’t even sure I was going to go until the processing plant ran out of melons and sent us home two hours early. So, I ran home to pack my backpack and leave the kibbutz as quickly as I could.
I wasn’t the only one surprised when the packing ended early. Mike and Frida, one of the Swedish volunteers, were shocked because I walked in on them when they were in bed together. Granted, they were fully clothed, which was puzzling, but it was still an awkward moment.
“So, they let you out of packing melons early,” Mike asked, trying to make the best of a bad situation.
“Why, yes they did,” I said, silently congratulating Mike on his grasp of the obvious. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much I could do if I wanted to make a fast getaway other than keep packing and occasionally ask Mike about his own experiences in Petra.
It would be my final journey.