You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (11 page)

We get back on the bus and head south, into the Negev Desert. Along the way we get some more history from our tour guide, Doron Wilfand, who was born and raised on a kibbutz and served in the army. He graduated from Hebrew University and did postgraduate work in religious studies at Duke, where he developed a taste for American sports, especially pro football, which he knows more about than we do.

Doron is a sweet, patient, compassionate and very smart guy. He is also unbelievably well informed. He does not do tour guide patter. Whatever you ask him about, he gives you a thoughtful, nuanced, nondogmatic and encyclopedically detailed answer, sometimes including personal anecdotes. If you ask him, for example, about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he’ll give you an articulate twenty-minute argument for the Palestinian position, at the end of which you will feel (if you are me) suddenly pro-Palestinian. But then he will give an equally articulate twenty-minute argument for the Israeli position, and you will feel (if you are me) suddenly very much of two minds. Then he will present a
third
way of looking at the conflict, and then a fourth, and maybe a fifth, until your brain is throbbing from looking at the issue from so many different perspectives and you realize that the only thing you will ever really understand about the Middle East is that you will never really understand the Middle East.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, nobody in the Middle East really does, either.

As we drive south, Israel quickly becomes a desert—miles and miles of sunbaked dirt and rocks. There are also occasional roadside camels, which stand around acting as though it is perfectly normal for them to be by the side of the road, as opposed to in a circus.

Finally, we reach our destination, which is a Bedouin camp. The Bedouin are tribal, traditionally desert-dwelling Arabs; there are more than one hundred thousand of them in Israel. They pretty much keep to themselves, but they are Israeli citizens; some of them even join in the Israel Defense Forces, where they serve as trackers.

This particular camp is essentially a tourist attraction. You can ride camels there, have a Bedouin-style meal and even spend the night in a tent. There are several busloads of American college students staying in the tents. They’re with Birthright Israel, a nonprofit program that brings Jewish young adults to Israel for free ten-day trips, during which they learn about their cultural and religious heritage. Because they are college students, some of them also take the opportunity (although this is not a formal part of the program) to get hammered.

We are not, thank God, spending the night in tents with the college students. We’re there to ride camels. I am not thrilled about this. I do not enjoy climbing onto the backs of large animals (horses are another example) that have hard feet and could, anytime they wanted, throw me off and stomp me until my skeletal system was the consistency of rice pudding. If I were a camel and hefty American tourists kept climbing onto
my
back, I would definitely try to kill them. No jury could convict me. I would plead camel.

The Bedouin are operating a camel train, consisting of fifteen camels tied together in a line. Each came kne."1el carries two people on a big saddle. The train makes about a fifteen-minute loop, going out into the desert and back. There is no beverage cart service.

Before we board, we receive a short briefing from a Bedouin named Amir, who gives us these instructions:

 


• “Don’t get with food on you on the camel. The camel behind you will try to eat it.”
  

 


• “Hold on tight. The camels are coming up and down a little bit funny.”
  

 


• “Don’t pet the camel. They don’t like to be pet.”
  

 


• “Try to avoid screaming.”
  

 

Two Bedouin guys herd the camel train over to our group and make the camels kneel. Michelle and I board the last camel in the train. A Bedouin does something to make the camel stand and,
WHOA
, Amir was not kidding about coming up funny. It is all I can do to observe the no-screaming rule as we lurch violently upward to a height of (this is an estimate) seventy-five feet.

Then the camel train starts moving and,
WHOA
, we discover
why you never hear camels described as “The Lexus Luxury Sedans of the Desert.” It is not a smooth ride. It’s like a rockin’ and rollin’ amusement park attraction called the Krazy Kamel. We’re going maybe two miles an hour, but Michelle and I are clinging to the saddle like terrified barnacles.

To make matters worse, our camel, which we nickname “Thunderbolt,” has decided that he
*
no longer wishes to be the last camel in the train. He keeps trying to pass the camel in front of us. Maybe he’s tired of being the fifteenth camel, spending all day schlepping tourists around a loop and staring at the butt of the fourteenth camel. He has ambitions! He wants to move up in life, maybe stare at the butt of the thirteenth camel or even (He can dream, can’t he?) the butt of the twelfth camel.

Whatever the reason, Thunderbolt keeps speeding up to 2.1 miles per hour and attempting to pass. The ropes prevent him from succeeding, but he is not the kind of camel to give up easily, so, as we jounce along, we repeatedly bang into Camel 14. The Bedouin guys don’t seem to notice. Michelle keeps asking me—because naturally, as the husband, I am supposed to be an authority on camel behavior—“Is it supposed to do this?” We are involved in numerous camel collisions as we jolt our way around the loop. We are greatly relieved when we finish and,
WHOA
, Thunderbolt kneels to let us off. My feeling is if this is how people have been getting around for centuries, no wonder the Middle East is tense.

After the camel ride we go into a big tent, sit on mats on the floor and enjoy a hearty meal featuring a specialty of Bedouin cuisine: Roast Hump.

No, seriously, we did not eat camel. As far as I know. It was dark in the tent.

After dinner we drive to a very nice hotel in a town called Mitzpe, right next to the famous Ramon Crater, which—as you know if, like me, you just looked it up on Wikipedia—is “a large erosion cirque.” Our hotel is perched on a rock ledge overlooking a vast desert valley. From our room, as the sun sets, we can see a dramatic rock cliff plunging straight down a long,
lonnnng
way to the valley floor. Looking at it, I recall that the tour schedule for tomorrow involves rappelling. But I am sure that there is no way that anybody would expect a bunch of tourist schlubs like us—people from Miami-Dade County, where the highest point, by far, is a landfill—to rappel down this
particular
cliff. Surely we’ll be using some smaller, wussier cliff, right?
Right?
This is what is on my mind as the sun goes down.

Fortunately, the hote kelyaller, wusl has a bar.

DAY THREE

After another traditional 273-course Israeli breakfast, our group climbs into four Land Rovers for a trip into the crater. From the hotel the highway descends through a series of switchbacks about a thousand feet to the crater floor. In a few miles we turn off the road onto a barely there dirt track and start lurching up a steep, rocky hill. There is no vegetation anywhere, just rocks and dirt. The driver tells us we are in what is called extreme desert. He says it gets very hot here, but he gives the temperature in Celsius, so all we hear is a meaningless number such as “fourteen” or “thirty-eight.” We ask him how hot it gets in
real
degrees and he launches into a brief rant in favor of the metric system, ending with, “You Americans, with the inches and the yards! Grow up!”

After driving upward through a great deal of nothing, we arrive at a high vantage point from which we can see: a whole lot more nothing. We get out of our Land Rovers, and the main crater guide explains where we are.

“You are in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “If you want to live here, you are in trouble.”

We have no desire to live there, but we do take numerous pictures of ourselves standing in front of the nothing in various groupings. Then we pile back into the Land Rovers for a rocky, bouncy drive down a series of tracks and through miles and miles of desert until finally we reach our destination, which is: a tree. I am pretty sure this is the only tree in the Negev Desert. If you look closely at a map of southern Israel and you see a tiny dot labeled “Tree,” that is our location.

We pile out of the Land Rovers again and gather around the guide, who squats by the tree and uses a pile of sand, some bottled water and a stick to demonstrate the geological process that formed the Ramon Crater. As I understand it, what happened was, there was this huge raised area of land that was eroded over millions of years by water being poured from a giant plastic bottle. It occurs to me that the reason why the Negev Desert Tree is located here is that this particular spot has been watered by thousands of tour guide demonstrations.

Before we leave the Negev Desert Tree, we spend a few minutes tossing a football—one of the families brought it along—with the drivers. They’re not sure how to throw it, but they have seen enough NFL on TV to perfectly mimic a quarterback hunching over a center and barking out nonsensical sounds. One of the drivers says: “What’s up with the Dolphins? No Dan Marino?”

Even in the middle of nowhere, we can’t escape the pain.

After the crater tour there is an optional tour of an alpaca farm. I don’t really know what “alpacas” are and I don’t want to run the risk that they’re anything like camels, so I pass on the tour. This is a decision I will come to regret because if I
had
gone to the alpaca farm and an alpaca
had
decided to stomp me to death, I would have gotten out of participating in the next scheduled tour activity, which is: rappelling.

We walk from the hotel to the rappelling site, which turns out to be the very same cliff that I observed the night before from the hotel room: the Cliff of Death. I seriously would like to get out of this—I’m afraid of heights—but I can’t think of a manly way to back down in front of my daughter, who thinks this is a
great
idea. I reassure myself with the thought that the rappelling company surely must have a facility with a trained professional staff and many safety procedures.

What they have is: a guy.

One guy. He’s standing casually right on the edge of the cliff, his back to the crater, his heels practically hanging over the ledge. Because of the angle, it looks to me a kloolly rs though he’s thousands of feet above the floor of the valley behind him. I’m scared just
looking
at him, but he does not appear to be even a tiny bit concerned.

There is no rappelling facility. There is a metal ring bolted into the rock near the cliff edge and some harnesses scattered on the ground. The guy tells us to put the harnesses on, then gives us a briefing on how to rappel.

In the United States, where we have a ratio of 4.7 lawyers for every human, the briefing would have lasted at least an hour and we would have signed legal indemnity forms until our fingers bled, admitting that we were suicidal idiots for engaging in this insanely dangerous activity and legally indemnifying the rappelling company from every bad thing that could ever possibly happen to us, including lightning strikes, earthquakes, comets, werewolf attacks and of course loss of blood caused by signing the forms.

But here, on the Cliff of Death, there is no paperwork to sign. The briefing takes maybe three minutes. Basically, the guy tells us that we will be walking backward off the cliff. He says we have nothing to worry about because we’ll be attached to ropes.

“It’s safer than riding in a car,” he says. This is not a reassuring statement for people who live in Miami. For us, smearing our bodies with pig blood and playing water polo in a shark tank is also safer than riding in a car, but that’s not an argument for actually
doing
it.

After giving us the brief briefing, the rappelling guy asks who wants to go first. Our fearless group leader, Rabbi Edwin “Eddie” Goldberg, immediately volunteers. He walks backward off the cliff and, with a jaunty wave, falls to his death.

No, that’s what I expect to happen, but somehow Rabbi Eddie makes it to the bottom alive. He remains at the base of the cliff to untie the people who follow. A teenage boy goes next; I can see his legs and arms shaking with terror as he backs off the cliff. But he also makes it down OK. The rappelling guy asks for the next volunteer and I step forward—not because I am suddenly brave but because I know that if I wait any longer, I will back out of this and Sophie will think I’m a coward. Which, make no mistake, is what I am. I just don’t want Sophie
thinking
it.

So I walk up to the cliff edge. You know how—I’m talking to you men now—when you meet a well-endowed woman wearing a low-cut garment, you make a major effort to maintain eye contact with her because you don’t want her to think you’re thinking about her breasts, which are of course all you’re thinking about? That’s how I handle the cliff. The cliff is a giant set of bazooms and I am determined not to look at it. I am making
intense
eye contact with the rappelling guy. He probably thinks that at any moment I’m going to ask him out. He attaches the ropes to me and gives me some final instructions—I have no idea what he’s saying—then tells me to start walking backward off the cliff. Which I do, still maintaining eye contact with him.

“You have to look where you’re putting your feet,” he says. Reluctantly, I look down and . . .

WHOA.

This is way,
way
worse than the camel. My brain, which has spent all these years trying to keep me alive, cannot
believe
what my idiot feet have gotten me into. It is shrieking at me to go back up. Meanwhile, the rappelling guy keeps telling me to lean back. I don’t want to lean back; I want to grab the cliff and hug it tightly. I want to become so intimate with the cliff that a few months from now it has little cliff babies that look like me.