Sunday July 9, 2006
The morning came early again, and we rejoiced to see some low cloud to the east as we were piling out of the bus at the top of the road, but unfortunately it didn’t help very much beyond the first half hour up on the mountain. If anything, I think this was one of the hotter days so far. Our task didn’t help either: the day was mostly spent tearing down one of the secondary (late) walls that had been laid across the earlier structure of the church. That meant, above all, moving a very large number of very large stones. Some could be man-handled by two of us, usually Dan and me, but many others required the help of a third or even fourth person, as well as the use of a cargo net brought for this exact purpose. Did I talk about that before? A heavy mesh net is laid alongside, the heavy stone is toppled onto it, the excess net is piled atop the stone, then as many hands as necessary grab onto the mesh of the net and lift. It works especially well in hauling rocks up the “cliff edges” of an excavated hole, since several haulers can stand at the top and pull on the net, while one or more down below can do likewise, everybody pulling/pushing together despite the difference in their elevation.
Besides hauling stones, we excavated several cubic metres of dirt, cleaning away debris down to the level of the original Roman street and exposing the stylobate that originally ran between the large columns that lined it. There wasn’t much pottery or other “small finds” in most of it, but in a few places we really hit “pay dirt,” hauling out several intact pot-handles, a couple of nice rim sections, a small glass vial that was perhaps 60% complete, with a small rounded bottom and considerably larger flared top, and even—my “prize”—a long thin lead ornament of some kind, tapered from end to end, recessed in the middle, and tabbed on one end. Once again we filled a whole bucket of shards, winning the trophy (imaginary, of course) for the most productive team of the day. Yay! Thankfully we all share the pottery-cleaning equally, regardless who pulls what out of the ground. Otherwise I have a sneaking suspicion our team would suddenly start finding quite a bit less…
The biggest excitement of the day was truly impressive: more gold! Three pieces were found last year, two belt ornaments and a magical amulet, and now today here was one more! It was buried in a cistern that was one of Dr. S’s important objectives for this year. The area around the cistern’s opening had been cleared last week, and partway through the morning today he called a bunch of us stronger folk over to help lift off the very large stone “head,” which stood perhaps half a metre high and was close to a metre on each side—a great square block of stone with a large hole in the middle from which people could draw water. With that head off, one of our younger and more agile guys was sent down inside to carefully excavate the conical pile of dirt and debris that had accumulated over the centuries within the cistern, and near the end of that task here it was—a golden, Byzantine belt-ornament! Straight out of the dirt, it was shining just as brightly as if it were made yesterday. It has some sort of design on it, and is in almost perfect shape. These are only first impressions, of course—I only saw it for a moment before it was wisked away for safekeeping and proper study—but a jolt of excitement surged through us all at the sight. That’s the kind of thing we all dream of finding!
Dr. S. thanked me for my part in finding it, which I didn’t quite understand until he connected it up with today being my birthday. Oh! That was a causative connection I hadn’t thought of… He disappointed me then by saying that no, I couldn’t have it as a birthday gift. Rats, I said, I’d been looking for a little bauble of some kind for my wife... He thought that was pretty funny.
Yes, everybody sang for me at breakfast (which is more like lunch, though we eat it at 8:00 am). Rhoda doesn’t miss a beat: when we supplied her with photocopies of our passports, for safekeeping, she methodically checked them all for everybody’s birthdate, and made up a calendar for herself so we can be sure to catch them all for the entire month of the season. No wonder she’s nicknamed Regina logistica (“Queen of Logistics”)!
Walking down the hill at noontime with Clint, I told him that today was probably the hardest day so far, physically. “I must be getting old,” I said—“the work never seemed this hard when I was 43!” It was good to kibbitz back and forth with him.
On top of the usual afternoon routine—dip in the lake, including laundry, then lunch, a quick nap, some writing, then pottery-cleaning and supper—I had two other special afternoon projects. One was uploading photos from the Jerusalem trip from my camera onto the computer, which takes a while right now since—for some reason—my computer won’t “recognize” the camera when I plug it in, which means I have to upload the pictures onto somebody else’s computer, burn them onto a CD, then transfer them that way onto my machine. Sounds complicated perhaps, but it’s actually not a big deal compared to the work of editing and titling the pictures! From just this 2-day trip, I have 364 pictures to go through…. Wow! (No, I haven’t done anything yet—the writing has been taking all the time.)
The other task was doing some maintenance on the camera itself. During the morning, I set up one shot only to notice that I had a blurry black rim around part of the image. Oh-oh! I checked the lens and found that the little flip-back covers hadn’t, well, flipped back all the way. Evidently some grit had gotten in there and gummed things up. So that was it for pictures for the rest of the morning. Thankfully though it wasn’t too hard to fix, using spray-on eyeglass cleaner, Q-tips, and a bit of patience. Everything’s clean now and working just fine. I’ll just have to make sure from this point on that I keep the camera very well protected from dust and grit except for just the brief time I’m actually using it.
Somebody at the kibbutz had an old but serviceable-looking “420” sloop pulled up on the beach when we arrived home from work today, and boy did that get me interested in finding out whose it was! I looked for it at 4:30 though when I went over to clean pottery, and it was gone. I couldn’t see it out on the lake either, though the wind was as perfect as usual at that time of day—a nice brisk breeze that would make a small boat like that just fly. Somebody must have been having great fun with it somewhere!
Finally, I’m having great fun building relationships with the other people on the team. As we’re getting to know each other better, there’s a whole lot of joking going on, in both directions, which I always take to be a really healthy sign. It doesn’t always happen like that, across the “divisions” between faculty and students, adults and college kids, and yet it often doesn’t seem to take much more than a bit of intentionality on the part of the older / “higher” person to break down the presumed barriers and relate more as friends. No, of course I’m not a 21-year old undergrad anymore… and yet in some ways I very much am the same person today that I was (way back) then. This too is part of being the body of Christ, I think: There is no more Jew or Gentile, slave or free… student or teacher? middle-aged or young adult? Hmmm!