Special to Lehigh Valley Source
Eilon, 2009
Hello friends
On late afternoon summer walks in Adamit, when the first westerly sea breeze expels the torrid motionless heat from the hillsides, hyraces emerge from their stony crevices to bask in the glimmer before a rapidly descending twilight, the discernibly faint sound of a lone red tractor in the east intensifies as Ghasan makes his way to feed his cattle.
The herd has been out all day foraging the countryside, visible in open spaces that do not count much as meadows amid dense and shady patches of oak and terebinth trees. They sometimes meander from within the thick umbrage, heedless to the occasional vehicle that careens through the wending country road between Adamit and the Bedouin of Arab al-Aramshe.
As temperatures subside, that westering sun shimmers in a pink-orange dollop, dripping fiery until it is lastly submerged at sea. Somehow the pasturing herd switches direction and lumbers on to its feed center, converging amidst much clamor with the arrival of Ghasan, who died this past weekend at age seventy-five.
Ghasan penned his cattle on the lee side of Adamit's eastern flank, adjacent Jeruba; a gully where torrential winter rains drain down the escarpment into the gorge. Sitting with Iyad, one of Ghasan's twelve children amongst the many mourners who gathered to pay respects and bide by the tractates of Khatam, the village imam, he tells me that this site was used by his father for more than forty years. However, I specifically recall that Ghasan settled it, not without controversy, around 1980. It was just a few years after the tract of land directly east of his feed center was abandoned by the army, which had located a battery of field guns there during the 1973 war. Except for the briefest period, when the land was dutifully plowed by a pair of diligent Caterpillar tractors in preparation for a new orchard, and a passing effort at planting cypress trees, the land remained fallow up until the late 1990s, when the current apple orchard was established on the grounds of the former artillery battery.
Throughout most of my period in Adamit's orchard, our fields were frequented by the errant presence of wandering cattle. Several graziers kept livestock in the vicinity, and to an outsider, it was baffling how these herds appeared not to mix, perhaps adopting the clannish territorial proclivities of their respective owners.
As Ghasan was our neighbor, or at least his cows were, and since we both shared the bounties of our limited terrain, I often came in contact with him over matters of common concern. In the early 1980s an understanding was reached between Ghasan and Adamit regarding the confinement of his cattle at Jeruba and in later years a working arrangement with the main herders concerning their livestocks curious interloping within the orchard. The prevailing suspicion was that the cattle were deliberately herded into the orchard. Although this problem was not fully resolved until a watchman was hired in the late 1980s I was able to secure the cooperation of the graziers and personally oversee the chase, as cattle were driven from the orchard amid a flurry of handshakes, discussions about the weather, farm news and the inevitable invitation to coffee.
Grizzly Ghasan Mgheis, unusually tall for his generation, was lanky and loped beneath stooping shoulders, perhaps acquired from hauling heavy sacks of grain to his bellowing cows. He looked very much as though he could have appeared, the rough and tumbleweed sometime villainous cowboy, bespangled and glittering in a still moonlight, galloping with Victor Jory into Dodge City.
Still, as I surmised, en route to the village and the gathering at Ghasan's home, the cattle at Jeruba were very much in evidence, milling about the feed center, still awaiting Ghasan's arrival.
Enclosed is a photo of Ghasan, taken in the late 1980s on the road near Jeruba.
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