Diary of a Goatherd, Pt. II

Day 8

Five things not to do in Israel:
1. Brush your fingers idly through the leaves of a roadside shrub.
2. Shoulder your way past the hanging branches of a tree.
3. Plunge your hand through the tall grass to grab a stone.
4. Sit down on a rock wreathed in slender vines.
5. Carry a large, awkward sheet of tin under an innocent looking tree, push an obstructive limb aside with the lead edge, and then allow it to slap you across the torso as you walk by.

It seems like every tree, bush and weed in Israel has thorns. I don't know why. Is the land under a curse? Do they perform some valuable photosynthetic function? Are they the unholy creation of a dastardly mad botanist?

In any case, if ever you find yourself traveling in Israel, take heed: the plants are not your friends. They are ornery and antagonistic, and they will not take your guff. They will cut you.


Day 9

Today I watched the goats all by myself. Four hours in the morning, two in the evening. I think I'm getting pretty good at this. I'm not saying I'm the goat whisperer, but I'm alright. I'm learning some tricks to slow them down, and to pull the far ones back without scaring the near ones away. I'm figuring out where to lead them, when to let them lead themselves, and how much separation to allow.

Most days we taken them to graze in the morning and just fed them in their pen in the evening. Because who's going to spend six hours a day wandering the hills with a bunch of goats?

I guess that would be the new guy.

I keep waiting for herding to become tedious, but I still get a kick out of it every time. Maybe car counting has inoculated me against boredom. Or maybe the other shoe drops tomorrow.


Day 10

In my childhood, someone - possibly Old McDonald - taught me that donkeys say "hee haw". Well, I don't know how it is in Scotland, but the donkeys here do not say anything like "hee haw". No onomatopoetic rendering could do justice to this noise. It's something between a grut and a bellow, punctuated by short squeaks. I don't know how else to describe it, except to say that it sounds like someone's harpooned a wookie.


Day 11

The past couple days I've been working around the farm, rather than herding. I helped water the donkeys, pull up old irrigation, and put up a new fence in the goat pen. I also scrubbed down a Mikveh - a pool for Jewish purification rituals. This particular Mikveh was carved right into the rock, probably in the second temple period. It was discovered years ago by the goatherd, who noticed it's square corners sticking out of the dirt. He excavated it and returned it to use.

It still blows me away how much ancient stuff they have here. The other day I noticed a chimney coming out of the hill. "What's that?" I asked.

"Oh, you haven't seen that?" he says. Turns out there's an old empty cave-house next door. "We sleep in there sometimes in the summer, when it's really hot."

Ya, it would be nice to have an ancient stone hobbit hole to sleep in. If it was hot out.


Day 12

Today I pruned a grapevine. They're crazy plants. The trunk is this incredibly gnarled, twisting thing with brittle bark hanging off in strips. It looks thoroughly dead. And then shooting out of it are slender leafy vines that grow to remarkable lengths. We found one that crept through a cactus patch and then wound around a tree, sending out half a dozen offshoots each several yards long. You have to hack it down so it will stop trying to conquer the world and focus on producing fruit.


Day 13

Last night I slept in the hobbit hole.

And this morning I took the goats out for the last time. I've been listening to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which is kind of an odd soundtrack for a goatherding holiday. I've not been feeling very ecclesiastical, if that's the word.

It occurs to me that Chesterton's idea (and he may say this himself; I don't have the book with me) of an exuberant God who cries to the sun each morning, "Do it again!", is a kind of antithesis to Solomon's "There is nothing new under the sun." Perhaps the difference between world-weariness and joie de vivre is essentially the difference between seeing nothing as new and seeing newness in everything.


Day 14

My last day on the goat farm. It's a little sad to be leaving this place, but I'm ready to move on. I'm off next to Eilat, the Red Sea resort at the southern tip of Israel, and thence to Petra in Jordan, which I've heard is the best thing ever. Will it live up to the hype? Stay tuned!

I'll miss herding goats. I'll miss the farmer and his family. I'll miss my sukkah and the view of the valley, and all of the awesome old stuff. I will not miss the mosquitoes.