First Trip: Get Up and Walk the Land 5

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After half an hour of sauntering down an empty road like it was Yom Kippur in the Land of Oz, the party reached the hill Dor recognized from the firefly video and started climbing. Though the ascent wasn’t steep, the heat and humidity made it laborious.

Even the dainty Tamar had sweat lines on her camisole. Dor had an entire modern art masterpiece painted in salt across his back. Eran kept wiping sweat from his brow before it got into his eyes, inwardly cursing the world for being so near the sun. 

They took their first sanctioned break under a gorgeous oak tree that looked as if taken straight from a Disney classic. A drove of hyraxes skittered from the tree, hopping from rock to rock as if gravity wasn’t their problem.

“Did you see that?!” Tamar cried with excitement as the rotund beasts disappeared in a cluster of castor oil plants

“Wow, rock rabbits on rocks. Such a sight has never been seen…” Eran groaned as he sat down with his back to the tree.

Dor scratched his back against the tree like a bear, moaning with pleasure, before spilling to the ground.

Yaniv said, “Ech!” and folded into a cross-legged position opposite his friends. 

“I’m going to pee!” Tamar announced cheerfully and skipped behind the bushes.

Eran rolled his eyes and shook his head. “What a lady…”

“Well, she’s keeping pace.” Yaniv pulled out a huge cucumber and looked at it for a long time before slowly and deliberately biting off the tip. “And no one ate her yet.”

“Hey! I can hear you!” Tamar shouted from the bushes.

“Good for you!” Eran shouted back, looking at his own lunch. His mom had made him a sandwich with basically everything. It was a thing of terrible beauty. 

Tamar returned and took a seat by Yaniv’s side. She didn’t groan or moan or say “ech”. Such lack of culture. She pulled out her phone and started recording a panorama of the landscape. This slice of life included Yaniv contemplating his giant cucumber, Eran eating his giant sandwich, Dor picking his giant nose and Tamar beaming a giant smile.

“You’re not eating?” Dor asked after going through half a kilo of shawarma wrapped in laffa with the celerity of a Tasmanian devil.

“Oh, I guess I forgot to pack…” Tamar looked into her phone as she spoke, alternating between duck faces, cheese grins, and a comically sad face with one finger pressed under her eye to indicate a tear.

“You can have my cucumber.” Yaniv said, waving his half-eaten cucumber. “I’m stuffed.”

Dor snorted. “Or… if you don’t want to eat rabbit food with a nice helping of germs, you can have half my laffa.” 

“Is it kosher?” Tamar inquired.

“Yes.” Dor wasn’t observant, but he and Yaniv usually brought kosher food to accommodate Eran, whose traditionalist family made him feel guilty each time he broke a mitzvah… Not that it stopped him from transgressing, merely from enjoying it. 

Tamar considered this for a bit. “Thanks, but I’m not hungry. Really. We will have another stop later, right? The Hanitot commercial center should be somewhere near. They have a ton of good places there. We could have ice cream in the evening.”

“Next stop is firefly hill,” Yaniv said. “Possibly our last stop,” he added with an air of resignation.

“I’m rrrrrrrready.” Dor said, somehow managing to work in a Godzillan belch into the word.

“Oh god! You just sounded like three ogres singing acapella!” Yaniv exclaimed with admiration.

Tamar stared in disbelief. “Did he just review a burp?”

“He did.” Eran said. “It was a solid seven.”

“Is this a thing you do?”

“Apparently.”

“We’re Israeli.” Eran said. “We’re allowed.”

Tamar sighed. “Ooookay then. Good to know. I’ll make sure not to include you in the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony next year.” 

“Are you sure?” Yaniv asked. “The release of poison gas seems appropriate.”

Tamar winced as if the joke had physically hurt her. 

Breakfast concluded, they cleaned up after themselves plus other people who had stopped here in the past but weren’t as environmentally conscious. Next, the boys were coerced into a group selfie by Tamar, who whipped out her retractable selfie stick for the occasion. 

Tamar rested her head against Yaniv’s shoulder and wrapped a hand around him while he stood rigid like a candle. The rest of the party kept respectful distances from one another. Dor attempted a smile. Eran didn’t bother.

As the party climbed higher, the wind became cooler. The occasional cypress or olive grove offered protection from the dazzling sunlight. By afternoon, the weather was taking on the semblance of something a generous spirit could call “pleasant.” Tamar hugged herself and said, “Brrrr.”

Conversation was lively and contained only as many insults and backhanded compliments as was strictly necessary. Eran was taking pictures of interesting ruins, caves, and cool insects. Tamar was taking pictures of Tamar. Dor was looking for the right moment to say something clever to impress the girl, which Eran estimated would happen right after the heat death of the universe.

“Hey, I just saw a chameleon,” Tamar said proudly.

Eran snorted. “Must be a pretty shitty chameleon—”

“Oy, this looks interesting!” Yaniv exclaimed and waved to his friends to come over. What he found was a semi-spherical indentation in the ground roughly the size of a cantaloupe. The earth inside was smooth, as if impressed by a heavy object. 

Before anyone had a chance to comment on this discovery, Tamar gasped and cried, “Hey! Look what I found!” 

Eran turned around and saw Tamar holding a grapefruit-sized ball of polished turquoise. She grinned as she looked at the world through a narrow hole drilled through its center.

“Hey!” Dor shouted. “I just found another hemispherical indentation in the ground. Allah yostor, this one is the size of a basketball.”

Eran was starting to get irate that everyone except himself was finding cool stuff. Even Tamar, who spent more time looking at her phone than watching where she was going, turned out to be more observant than he was. 

“There’s a cigarette butt on the ground…” Eran said lamely, almost pleadingly.

“Yes, fascinating…” Dor muttered without looking. “Do you guys think there are more gems around here? This shit looks expensive.”

“Doesn’t seem likely…” Yaniv scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. “Let’s not spend too much time here. We’ve been making good progress so far.”

Tamar, holding her newfound treasure between her thighs, was typing on her phone and laughing. “Give me a few minutes, okay?”

Yaniv squinted at some broken thistles. “I wonder what happened to the other objects…”

Eran took a swig from his semi-frozen water bottle, savoring the coolness spreading through his body. “Maybe they were made from ice and melted?” 

“Maybe your brain melted.” Dor’s voice came from behind an amalgamation of cacti growing around a cluster of palm trees, giving the impression the palms were evolving into tentacled plant monsters.

“It’s only logical.” Tamar said in a thick voice. She was a good voice actress. She had to be, with all the ceremonies and plays she participated in.

Yaniv drained half a bottle of water and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “These two don’t share a brain cell between them, but you surprise me… Ice balls, really?” 

Eran sighed. When did he become the group’s lightning rod of ridicule? “Let’s just continue…” 

Yaniv nodded. “I agree. We want to reach the spot before the sun sets to observe the—” 

“Vampires!” Tamar cried and grabbed Yaniv from behind 

Yaniv shrugged her off. “Don’t do that.”

“Sorry…” Her smile melted away. “Didn’t mean to scare you…”

The expedition went on. 

After crossing a ravine filled with thistles that really wanted a hug, and sand with an insatiable foot fetish, the party was forced to climb a slope that turned out to be much steeper than it looked. The climb soon turned into a scramble requiring the use of four or more (ideally far more) limbs. Eran cut his hand and elbow while climbing, but what’s a few lacerations between friends?

After producing enough sweat to fill a bucket, they were finally on top of the hill Dor designated as Firefly Hill. The sun was about ready to wrap up its business and call it a night. There were no fireflies. Only wasps. Lots and lots of wasps. 

The only human presence in sight was a faraway shepherd serenely following a small flock with a cheerful mutt by his side. One of the sheep shimmered as if sprinkled with confetti. It reminded Eran of the glitter he had seen around the vulture earlier. Maybe some invasive bugs with reflective carapaces? He’d have to google it when he got back home.

Eran walked to the edge of the hilltop to see what was on the other side, and was treated to a very unappealing sight: a field of garbage that looked as if someone had spilled a mighty trash can in the sky. Trailers stood amid the garbage, giving it the appearance of a neglected settlement. In the middle of this blight there was a hole, easily ten meters across, that smelled of grease and sick and fire. 

Eran staggered in surprise. It didn’t make any sense. 

How could four people who’ve spent hours scanning the horizon fail to notice a massive stain of rust and refuse in a soft sea of yellow, gold and green? And the smell! Oh, the Name preserve us! This place reeked worse than the huge landfill near Tel Aviv! And yet, Eran sensed nothing until the stench hit him like a brick wall. 

The ground before him was barren, devoid of even the parched thistles that gave the region its delightful coloration. It was littered with clothing made rigid by filth, disposable utensils that appeared to have been disposed of several times, a baby doll missing three limbs and an eye, old magazines glued together by a substance best not contemplated, carefully sliced stripes of rubber that may have been tires in a former life, lots of chicken and lamb bones, and cracked syringes that looked as if they were designed by insects and for insects. 

Some of the trailers, easily six meters long and two meters wide and high, had oval portholes or missing walls. Others were sealed. The dust on the nearest porthole was disturbed by four vertical lines like the poster for every horror movie ever.

Several spots of green light shimmered through the air and rapidly disappeared under the garbage, as if fleeing the onlookers. 

“You saw this?” Eran cried. These must have been the fireflies from the video.

Yaniv nodded. Dor cursed as the bugs disappeared before he had the chance to take a photo.

Eran wanted to see this place from up close. Maybe he could catch one of these bugs, which would turn out to be an undiscovered species and make him famous. If he couldn’t be a hero who saved a damsel in distress, he could at least be a discoverer.

Yes, it meant they would be walking home in the dark. So what? So what if every step could prove to be the start of a headfirst tumble down a deep ravine? So what if a boy from his town had recently gone missing and the police had no clue as to his whereabouts? So what if the country teetered on the brink of another intifada? So what? 

Shut up brain, you’re not the boss of me! I’ll be as stupid as I want and you can’t do anything about it!

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