A fog has descended over Palestine.
When I left the university this evening after helping Nigel
prepare his recent
diary entries, the sun had fled, and a dense mist had
settled, obscuring the nearby hilltops.
Bloody Middle-Eastern weather. In college, a professor of
mine–Rashid Khalidi–kept talking about some malady that affects
westerners in winter. I forget what it was called, but it had to do
with short days and dry weather. The Khalidi’s are a famous Jerusalem
family (Rashid’s branch of the al-Khalidi’s moved to Beirut prior to
W.W.I.) and I think it would have been fair if Rashid had talked about
the bloody awful weather here during the winter.
You would think that this part of the world is parched, with
agriculture at the subsistence level from the severe and pervasive lack
of rainfall. Of all the uplifting, depressing and monumentally historic
things in this land, my father–as best I can recall from our visit in
August of 1995–was most struck by the thirsty, brown, barren
hillsides, completely bereft of life.
Israel, Jordan, Syria and Palestine lie on the edge of the
European temperate zone. South of Hebron and Amman, and west of
Damascus and Amman, lies that massive belt of desert that stretches
east from Morocco through the north of Africa and beyond Saudi Arabia’s
Rub’ al-Khali (the Empty Quarter).
So when I packed for my four month stay, I included a
wax-cotton overcoat my mother purchased for me in Thomastown, Ireland
that was made specifically for Ireland’s temperate and extremely rainy
climate. I brought it, however because it was lighter than my wool
overcoat, and thus–I reasoned–more suitable for cool desert nights.
But my Irish coat has served a greater purpose than just
keeping me warm. From the day I arrived until two weeks ago, it rained
literally every day. I sh*t you not. My Swiss roommate Roland’s summary
of our first two months here is perhaps the most accurate: "It was
crap."
When I got off the plane in Tel Aviv (Jan. 27), it was
raining. For the first two weeks in Birzeit village, it rained every
day–and if not during the day, the ground would be wet when I went to
buy bread the next morning. Then we had one-and-a-half weeks of
gorgeous weather. And then it started to rain. And hail. And rain. And
rain. And rain. And rain. Every day and every night. Even Ireland,
England, Scotland and Wales–the home of daily rain and mist–can not
be this bad.
Normally, it rains in December and January. But this year they
had an Indian summer. There had not been significant rain since
February of the year before. The land was brown, cracking, parched. In
fact, there were grave concerns that there would be a massive drought.
But as soon as we arrived, it began to rain. And rain. And
rain. Every time I thought it was safe to do laundry, i.e. safe to hang
it outside to dry, it would begin to rain. Roland started predicting
the weather by my laundry.
And it wasn’t just rain. It was wet. Every other day, a dense
fog would settle in the hills. The fog was so thick that buildings just
100 feet away would appear as dark, looming shadows wavering in and out
of sight. The water would condense on the walls every evening, and drip
down onto the floor. My dirty laundry sitting on the floor of my closet
was wet to the touch. For weeks on end, I would dry myself with a towel
that was just as wet as it was after my shower the previous morning.
And when it rains here, it’s not some wimpy spring shower. I
haven’t seen hail in years, but it was a weekly occurrence in February.
Moreover, there are no drainage pipes in the West Bank. It’s too
expensive, and nine months out of the year, totally unnecessary. But
this winter, the torrential rains turned the streets into creeks.
Miniature waterfalls spilled down into our neighbor’s backyard.
Those six weeks of rain, hail, fog and humidity had more of an
impact on my psyche than any of the brutal, -20 Fahrenheit Januarys in
Chicago. There was always a warm place in Chicago. Correction: the
radiators were almost impossible to turn off. You had your choice
between freezing and boiling. But you could always open a window if it
was too hot.
Central heating is a luxury here. Radiators are a luxury here.
We have three electric space heaters–you know, the ones that start all
the fires in the States. Only two are effective, though. The worst has
been confiscated by yours truly (my rather selfish reasoning is that,
on occasion, the cigarette smoke gets to be too much, so I DESERVE a
heater in my room. Greedy Americans). The "OK" heater has found a
permanent home in the bathroom. As the first one up nearly every
morning, it is my job to plug it in so that the bathroom is toasty and
warm when we take our showers. The third heater–the one that will burn
you if you get within a foot of it–has the exalted task of heating our
kitchen–our home, our living room, the place where we spend the
majority of our waking hours. It is our dinner companion, our shishbesh
(backgammon) partner, and our drinking buddy.
Today’s mist is, God willing, just an aberration. Summer
started two weeks ago, and red poppies have been sprouting like weeds
all over the hills. In fact Summer-Time just started a few weeks
earlier. (Funny story, that. Israel jumps ahead an hour about two weeks
before Jordan. The Palestinians refuse to recognize either time change.
They change a week after the Israelis, and a week before the
Jordanians. Just to be different. It was such an issue that, during the
Intifada, Israeli soldiers were ordered to confiscate or destroy
watches that showed the incorrect time. Politics seeps into everything
here. Needless to say, it’s more than a little strange to go south
and encounter a new time zone).
All the mist will do this time is give me another wet towel.
But I must admit that its arrival inspired more gloom than fog ever did
in the States. I’m simply glad that I did all my laundry this past
weekend.