Special to Lehigh Valley Source
Eilon, 2009 Hello friends
It has been hot and dry the past two days. The weather for the remainder of the week promises to be varied. Our field consultant arrived as the harbinger of rain. He announced that the agriculture meteorologist insists that we will receive typhoon like quantities of precipitation on Friday. Pardon me for my skepticism. The experts are predicting an exceedingly wet winter, yet it is not enough to deter a major increase in water tariffs or the reorganization of all residents in the various kibbutz communities who will comply by law to pay directly for their own water consumption. As such, most kibbutz communities will begin to redress the problem of water meters. The problem looms large because the old infrastructure was not designed for provinding a meter per housing [and garden] unit.
As I look forward to some inclement weather, I still recall how the rain day [when farm work is curtailed or postponed] has figured so prominently in our lives. Brooding clouds coil and converge, lightning which had illumined an inky pre-dawn horizon clash over a deep and swollen sea, and as if on cue, billowy clouds surge, like a frontal assault against a mistakenly impregnably parched landscape. The crew had arrived that morning, with some prospects of continued sun, and had set to work training the juvenile apple trees in the famed palmette configuration. Training the trees with a minimum amount of pruning, and tying scaffolding branches onto a wire cordon. We busied ourselves with our famous techniques for cutting cord, and along with a panoply of pruning appliances, including oil and a possible hydraulic chain saw, came the real essentials. These included the styrofoam thermos with the hot water and plastic bag used as an insulating sealant beneath its lid.
A handy ammunition box replete with coffee, tea, sugar, cups and spoons.
A radio that sat in a portable wooden carrier that the carpenter had fashioned for the crew, often attached to a pack of 8 volt batteries.
The wooden carrier cushioned the red or blue plastic radio from those jarring vibrations while it sat in the wagon towed across the fields of Irbin. Often when the ominous deluge came, with no ark or local shelter to resort to, we retired to wait out the squall, breaking out the ammo box and preparing coffee as the rain pelted and lashed our little red Vauxhall chuck-wagon. At such times the orchard seems such a lonely lightless place with those churlish clouds overhead, and the distinct sound of fallen rain shattering like just so many dreams in the mud.
The manner in which our coffee break was arranged was timed to coincide with the passing of each squall. It took just so much time to reach the wagon, prepare coffee and discuss the latest local topic of interest, an unending catalog of parochial issues. More often than not, the storm would wither, passing its commotion eastward. Sometimes the downpour continued, its obstinacy defying expectations. Someone volunteered to drive the crew the two and a half kilometer distance back to Adamit. On the tractor, exposed to the storm, utterly drenched despite rain gear, anticipating an aborted work day, I once plied the hill in a driving rain. A precipitous crashing of lightning exploded overhead, like two colossal biblical sparring rams colliding. The sky poured forth in fury, its electrical contents oozing in one finite breathtaking moment. As I parked the tractor, the rain had begun to sputter.
When I entered the communal kitchen and described my enlivening revelatory moment beneath the "celestial chariots", a much animated Dora barely described that at that very moment she had opened the oven door where "out of nowhere" a repressed flash of lightning sprang forth from the day's simmering meal, escaping as if imprisoned through the rear door. This recalled a famous cartoon where Popeye is wheeling a sleeping Sweet Pea through the noisy byways of the city. Despite Popeye's remonstrances, the noise goes on. Men wielding jackhammers, musicians practicing their cacophonies settle for a non-spinach Popeye wielding resolution to their unabated clamor . Popeye and slumbering Sweet Pea pass a shop with a vibrating Atwater Kent radio blaring Johnny Green and Edward Heyman's Out of Nowhere by a triller likely parodying Bing Crosby's inimitable crooning. Popeye, perhaps unfamiliar with the volume dial, lands a punch on the radio with such force that a bolt of lightning follows the path of the air waves, leaps from the microphone in the radio studio and just "out of nowhere" delivers a terrific punch to the much bewildered and self-absorbed crooner.
Addendum: November 2, 2009
We've wrapped up four days with nearly 200 mm (4 inches] of rain which is the most for this period in seventy years! Danny Roop, who presents the weather on Israeli TV said. In some places as much as a third of the annual average had fallen within this three day period. It is estimated that a whopping 15,000 metric cubes of water flowed or rained into our reservoir. It sounds incredible! With that, the forecast is for hot weather by the end of the week.-Barry
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