Monday July 10, 2006
You'll find this hard to believe after all the "heat stories" last week, but it actually can cool off here--today is proof! Light cloud gave us a break early in the morning, but even after it burned off the furnace didn't really get going today. One guy with a thermometer on our site said it barely topped 90 Fahrenheit by noontime. In relative terms, that's practically chilly! And the humidity was a lot lower than usual too; it's often been up in the 70% range or even a bit higher, but it dropped all morning until it was only about 30%. What a huge difference this all made, not only to our comfort level but also to the visibility. Every other day until now, we can barely see the city of Tiberias, which is only just on the other side of the lake, maybe a couple of km away. There's just too much water vapour in the air, I guess. Anyway, today was just crystal clear (by late morning), and thus a great day for pictures.
This is such beautiful country--in a harsh way. The rocky landscape covered with scrub-brush is about as different from our western-Canadian countryside as you can imagine. Speaking of which, somebody mentioned a story that supposedly came down from Jewish sources: When he was making the world, God gave different jobs to different angels, and gave one of them a huge sack full of rocks to distribute all over the world. You can probably guess the punchline: as he was flying over the Holy Land, the bag broke! Honestly, I don't think I've seen as many rocks anywhere in hte world as here. Even where things do grow, which certainly isn't everywhere, the rocks are never very far away.
Boy did we ever get rocks in our square of the dig today too. I guess we've been spoiled so far, working in square E-1, because (as I've mentioned) we found walls galore, tons of pottery, glass, bone, a metal ornament--you name it! The digging was pretty easy too, because apart from big rocks that used to belong to walls but fell down in earthquakes, most of what we were digging out was just dirt.
But now we're into a new square, as of today, E-0, and yes it really is different. There's only one wall, and it's another "floating" wall like the one we had in E-1. The bad part about floating walls is that they have to be removed so we can see what the original structure was like. And that removal means a ton of hard work! So we spent a lot of time today hefting great big rocks up and out of the square. Many of them were so big we had to use the cargo net, with as many as 5 of us pulling and lifting. Floating walls, phooey, somebody said: What we really need are levitating walls!
Still, the work went pretty well. Because there aren't many walls in this square, the material we're grinding through is a mixture of big rocks, medium rocks, small rocks, and dirt. Oh, and a few scorpions, and a very large number of bugs, thrown in there too. (Today we killed 3 large scorpions, and a whole lot of little tiny ones.) It's miserable work chewing through this kind of jumble. A pick doesn't work very well because there are too many rocks. But turreah doesn't work very well either because there are too many rocks (are you seeing a theme yet?). So we just have to go back and forth, back and forth, all day: pick a little, turreah a little, etc. There aren't many "small finds" either--the interesting stuff that breaks up the monotony of the picking and turreah-ing, bits of pottery, glass, bone, and so on. Most of those kinds of things come from inhabited areas, and especially from domestic space (houses, etc.), and that's what we don't have in this square, which seems to be mostly an open area that just got filled in with random wind-blown (?) junk over the course of many centuries.
I don't think I mentioned it before but one of the people on our team, since last Thursday, is Bob Holst--otherwise known as the president of Concordia University College, St. Paul, Minnesota! At first I was a bit concerned about being his boss, since I'm the supervisor of the square, since he's been to Israel umpteen times and has worked on digs a couple of times, but it's worked out just great. We have a lot in common, it turns out--including the fact that he and I both vicared at the same congregation under the same pastor (though 26 years apart). So we've had all sorts of things to talk about. Besides which, he's just an amazing worker too; despite being old enough that he could have been retired for several years already, he just plunges right in and does even the dirtiest, heaviest jobs with gusto. Amazing guy. It's a privilege to work with him and get to know him.
I spent a lot of time this afternoon working on my photos. My computer hasn't been "recognizing" my camera when I plug it in, so I've had a cumbersome time getting access to the pictures for a few days already, but anyway I finally got them loaded onto the computer today and realized that I had a backlog of close to 400 snaps to edit (keep/discard) and title (so I don't forget what they're about). Needless to say, I didn't get them all done, but was glad to have chewed through more than 200 of them at least. This is helpful not only for me but also for the whole team, since the plan is for everybody to turn in copies of all of their pictures to a central "pool," so CDs can be burned and distributed in order that we can all have access to everybody's pictures. Sounds nice, right? But do the math: There are about 25 of us (the number varies day by day, as people come and go from the team). If each person turned in only 400 pictures--which is pretty minimal, I think--we'd each have 10,000 pictures to sort through. That's crazy! I don't know anybody who has that amount of time. So part of my task is definitely doing some serious editing. I'm hoping to pare down my total collection by trip's end to something like 400-500 shots. Aren't digital cameras great?
Sorry I haven't been able to post any pictures yet. I still need to monkey around with this. I've tried but it hasn't worked, and I don't know why. Maybe one day soon I'll take the time to pursue it further.
Progress report on all my various misfortunes: Things are gradually working out. The embassy should have my papers ready by late in the week so I can pick them up before heading home on Friday morning. The bruise on my leg is fading, and even though there's still a pretty nasty lump just above the ankle, my walking is pretty good. No consequences at all from the tick episode (you can read about it on Clint and Joyce Magnus's blog, if you want--I guess I forgot to mention it here). And there haven't really been any other major problems to contend with. Maybe bad things really do happen in threes.
There are just three more days of digging for Clint and Joyce, Dan and me. We're getting close to being done! In a way that's a really good thing. The Magnuses are looking forward to travelling around for a few days after our duties here wrap up at Thursday noon, and Dan and I are really looking forward to going home. Partly of course this is simply because the work is so tiring. But we're also missing the familiarity and comforts (in the best sense) of home. Yes, travelling expands your horizons wonderfully: but nobody can just keep expanding continually! A bit of retracting is good too, especially after being stretched in as many directions as we have been here.