A week ago I went to the Dead Sea with my boss’ wife and son. Once you drop down from the crest of hills that Jerusalem lies on, and into the Jordan Valley, water all the sudden becomes an issue. In Jerusalem you have a rainy season, but within 20 minutes of driving, the landscape transforms into a desert with clay-colored canyons and sagebrush and sand, rather than the leafy olive trees and grassy hills that color winter in Jerusalem. My friend Will here is in Israel/Palestine for three months studying water—how it’s distributed, who needs it, and who gets it. The Jordan River, then, is the sole source of water for West Bank residents and also for the Dead Sea. And in the middle of a desert, there’s not always enough to go around. Driving along the western shore of the Sea, you pass ageing spas that tout the healing qualities of Dead Sea minerals and are patronized by Danes in need of dermatological goodness. (The government of Denmark will pay for cirrhosis patients to fly to Israel and spend a month at a Dead Sea spa soaking in mud—it costs them less than paying for chemical treatments back at home. Let’s here it for socialist healthcare!) So these spas are here, lined up along the lakeshore, except the shoreline is a good 50 yards from where it once was. Beach umbrellas stand lonely in the middle of mudflats that used to be the Dead Sea; the water of the Jordan has been rerouted and dammed and siphoned up until barely a trickle reaches the Dead Sea, and the water level has been dropping consistently and quickly for years now, and is not projected to stop. Tragic, but hard to remedy as the water is actually being used for drinking water and not, say, supplying large amounts of hydropower to a chemical plant.
Trundling along the roadside in a region where water is so precious, a truck driver took a curve at a few too many kilometers an hour and, whoops, lost his entire load of water bottles on the side of the Dead Sea. So you’ve got a desert, you’ve got the most saline body of water on Earth, and this dude with a truckful of filtered, distilled, drinkable water drops it all on the side of the road where the bottles burst and water the sandy shoulder. Can you say “My bad?” People were pulling over on the side of the road and running out to try to grab a few undamaged bottles, pouring the water from leaking bottles into containers they had in their car. I stopped to get pictures, but someone handed me a full bottle anyway, which I’ve been using in my iron. Here are some pictures of water in the desert:
Here’s a picture I love, of a girl at the diabetes clinic. She had just gotten a shot and was quite proud of herself, showing off her arm to every woman at the nutrition seminar.
This is my new friend Will with a copy of
Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, which just goes to show that you don’t read any of the good stuff when you’re an English major.
We found a used English bookshop this weekend and I bought a somewhat sticky but very engaging copy of
Sir Vidia’s Shadow by Paul Theroux, whom I love. The memoir tells about his decades-long friendship with V.S. Naipaul. They met in Uganda in the 1970s and, both being rather disagreeable fellows, took an instant liking to each other. As of page 60, I highly recommend.
