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Similar early days of roaming the South American continent, slipping southwards, from one tourist destination to the next, from one garage to another, until you finally end up in Quito, Ecuador’s primary hub. Endurance carried you into town with but a single companion; obstinacy shall drive you outta town with no less than four. Freedom is not what it used to be, now that responsibility has leeched itself onto an individualist journey turned collective. Your new partners expect you to make the journey work; make the team work. Nevertheless, your own conviction that you are capable of making it all work also remains as ever strong. To the clueless girls, who just bought into an expensive automobile without knowing fuck all about how an engine works, you promise feasts and jubilation; a life of adventure and comfort within the spacious belly of this noble savage. You promise them all great feats of rustic traveling - the mounting of enormous ridges, with the motor roaring in their ears; the crossing of great rivers, splashing mud everywhere; the paving of their very own paths through the jungle bush, while the wind is blowing through their hair.
Your other two companions, however; an enormously powerful guy and this girl, who looks like she could wrestle an ox, are not so easily fooled. They can sense the weary tone behind these empty promises, yet follow it up with one of their own.
“We’re a team now,” they declare, “and we’ll deal with whatever happens as one.”
You are grateful for their genuine support, you really are. However, you alone know what a can of worms hides underneath the hood of this Jeep; what torments and hardship await you on every mountain ridge, river and jungle you’d be foolish enough to cross. With your previous companion, at least, there were no secrets; no need for lies or manipulation. You both knew damn well what a mess you got yourselves into, and were making an honest effort to make the best out of a miserable situation.
Then again, maybe things are no longer as bad as you’ve grown to imagine. Maybe all these repairs, all the time, money and effort that were sunk into this bottomless pit of Hell over the last seven months, shall finally begin to pay off. Maybe your dreams, as well as the dreams you weave for others, shall finally come true.
Back on the Pan-American highway and bound for Guayaquil, you’re driving across yet another cascading river, past a narrow bridge and begin to climb up a curvy road, going along a steep mountainside and heading west on a dreamy mid-autumn afternoon.
This time around, you make sure to drive responsibly, keeping everyone feeling secure and in good spirits, and certainly do not entertain thoughts of daredevil overtaking of any sort, no matter how slow and annoying the traffic might be. A tape of Israeli music is playing in the cassette player, promising that it’ll all be good, while a king-size bag of Bamba[1] is passed among a bunch of mochileros; a heavenly taste of home away from home they all got hooked on during childhood.
You focus on the road, as visibility gets somewhat blurry on account of the position of the sun relative to the angle of the windshield, a known problem on this CJ-7 model type. “Jeep really should look into that one,” you reckon. “It might be dangerous if…”
But, at that very moment, a perfect combination of solar and windshield angles makes the whole world magically disappear.
A second earlier, you were going up a mountainside, with a spectacular view of a drop-dead gorgeous gorge just a couple of meters to your right, with nothing but a ditch standing between you and the plunge of a lifetime, however short that lifetime might prove to be. Right now, all you’ve got to follow is a glaring light. The windshield is reflecting the rays of the sun so intensively that everyone inside the car is blinded and screaming at the top of her lungs. This high pitched squealing becomes even less tolerable once the car starts rocking violently in its invisible course. Thus, and at the risk of being rear-ended into the afterlife, you slam on the brakes and bring the Jeep to a halt.
For a timeless interval, reality comes to a halt and all becomes as light as light.
When the light subsides, along with the shrieking, you realize you’ve managed to stop at the very edge of the cliff, with two wheels hanging over the ditch and one already beyond it. Very slowly, everyone exits the Jeep, and only then resume breathing.
A short while later, a pickup truck pulls over and a whole bunch of locals jump out the back of it. For a few bucks, they quickly grab the Jeep, and together all of you lift the heavy beast up in the air and carry it back to its rightful side of that ditch.Guess nothing much is free in life, ‘cept for maybe life itself.
* * *
This time is summertime, and the livin’ sure is easy. Israel has become your home again for well over a year, pulling a forged worldview back into a provincial prospective, and what can be easier than receding into the womb of a mother tongue and the fellowship of those with whom you share a familiar cultural background.
The one harsh thing about Israeli summers, however, is trying to keep cool.
Even up here, in the more acclimatized northern part of this tiny country, where a few still flowing rivers keep your grass green and the neighbor’s even greener, it’s so fuckin’ hot all the fuckin’ time that you’re reduced to a delirious puddle of quivering sweat from sunrise to sunset. Air-conditioning is the only way out of this quivering mess, which you certainly cannot afford. Well, not a real one anyway. The best you can do is have an old, rusty air-conditioner you found in a pile of junk and stuffed through a window stir the oppressive air within the confines of the concrete cellblock you now call home.
For that reason, as well as for the purpose of paying for food, board, cold beer and next year’s tuition, you quickly nail a summer job at one of the many blue-water rafting operations in the area. By pulling rafts into the river and people out of it all day long, you at least get to spend most of the scorching daytime hours in a submersed state, splashing around, having fun and bringing home the kosher bacon.
Ever faithfully by your side is a scrawny scooter; a flaming red fifty cc Piaggio Fox, released into the northern wild, where traffic is non-existent and nature is in abundance. Uninsured and unbothered, this light piece of ingenious Italian engineering gets you anywhere you wanna go. Uninsured indeed, ‘cause issuing a mere yearly basic insurance policy on it is far more expensive than the price of the Fox itself; a scooter so scrawny that it is practically incapable of doing any harm in the first place.
The gift this little companion bestows on you is one of sheer, priceless freedom. The gift of mobility; the freedom to go anywhere you wanna go, on the road, off the road, across fields, plantations and parklands, up mountains and down to the river. But, right now, all it’s gonna do is deliver you back home from the rafting site, bushed and smeared from head to toe with a day’s worth of sunbaked mud, clay and filth.
Leaving the tedious task of washing and piling the heavy rubber rafts to the rest of the guys, you slide your helmet on covertly, kick-start your scooter and are burning the gravel leading away from the river before anyone notices your early retirement scheme.
Though it’s still the early stage dusk and visibility is good, you turn your headlight on anyway, as you round the curve and speed up along the byroad, running through the heart of a small village and in between corn fields. You’ve been riding this exact same route every day for the last couple of months and know every bit of this road, every crack and every bump, like the sole of your foot.
You merge into the main road and speed up to the maximum this baby can take, which amounts to about eighty km\h. This road is where you’re most exposed to law enforcement, so you want this part of the journey to be over and done with as quickly as possible. The headlight goes off. Rotten tangency always plays tricks on you. You smack the headlight, and it comes back on again, just as you’re approaching a small intersection with a service road.
You notice a car coming out of the gas station and stopping to give right of way to other cars passing on the main road. Like it or not, where traffic matters, size doesn’t, which means he’s gonna have to wait until your little scooter shall pass him just as well. At least that’s how you see it. The driver, on the other hand, seems to have a different view altogether. Thus, imagine the dismay at seeing him suddenly pull into the road right in front of you.
Driving this fast on what has just become a collision course does not, however, leave much time for dismal, which quickly clears the way for sheer panic. You pull on the rear brakes, for the front ones would send you flipping in the air, vote against shooting into the ditch on your right, against sliding into adverse traffic by swerving to the left, come to terms with the way things are, manage a grin and pull on the front brakes with everything you’ve got a split second before ramming head on into the side of that car, at a velocity that has only been reduced to about fifty.
Next thing you know, you’re human cannonballing over the roof of the car.
For a timeless interval, you’re in an utter state of shock, but for an annoying little buzzing sound inside your head. You don’t even remember how you ended up here, sprawled across the road in a pool of blood, nor how your poor Fox managed to somersault over the hood of your assailant and land, bent beyond repair, by your side. The only thing you do remember is the hard, cold truth it all boils down to - you ain’t got no medical insurance either, hence must avoid a billing enema at all cost!
Then, people begin to gather. Someone wraps a bandage around your knee, someone else calls an ambulance, and the poor kid, who happened to be driving his daddy’s car for the very first time after getting his driver’s license the day before, is as pale as a ghost. When the ambulance arrives, you refuse to get on it, rightfully claiming you feel no pain at all. However, in your disoriented state, you are certainly no match for the stately medical services. Behind, you leave your mutilated pat, a pair of flip-flops and an oceanic bloodstain on the road.
As it turns out, other than plenty of bruises and scrapes, all you’ve really got is a cut all the way to your knee bone, caused by hitting the side view mirror. At the hospital, you’re stitched up by tired looking doctor, before being sent straight to bed.
Still in a state of physical shock and far too sore to move around, you spend the next day lying in a drab hospital bed, trembling like a leaf while calculating the piling medical bills that shall need to be paid through teeth you’re at least lucky to still have. Every little bit is sore, but most of all the heart. There’s no two ways about it. You may play the odds, as you have been for thirty three years, but once they get you, they’ll squeeze you for everything you’ve got. Rightful aspects of dearness aside, it’s an unfortunate fact that the medical industry charges these inconceivable amounts largely just ‘cause they can.
The next morning you ask your inspecting doctor if you can go home now. He says that you may, but is not at all enthusiastic about the idea and prefers that you shall stay a few more days for observation.
Half an hour later, you stumble out of that hospital barefoot, still covered in blood, mud and filth, and begin hitchhiking your way back home across sizzling asphalt.
Home, where your body shall mend and your heart shall soon heal.
Home, where you shall be able to give your Foxy friend a proper burial.
Home, that by an unforeseeable turn of the wheel those bills shall never reach.
Home, where you shall later find out that you were fully covered all that time after all.
* * *
A veil of disenchantment hangs over these later days of miracle and labor; a discontented winter of furniture hauling and truck driving across the state of California and on a collision course with the inevitable turn of a century. Freedom is just another word for having neither a work permit nor a truck driver’s license, but that won’t hinder you from riding the gravy train all the way to renewed economical independence and the continuation of your journey.
Once in a while, there’ll be an opening for a long-distance job going from LA all the way up to San-Francisco. Those, you always grab with zeal, as there’s excellent money to be made on long-distance trips. Besides, it’s always good to get out of the Los-Angelical vortex, even if just for a couple of days.
More often than not, these jobs begin at the point in time and strain in which a whole day’s worth of furniture has already been hauled across town. Only then do you proceed by driving the loaded truck throughout the night, so as to cover the five hundred miles separating the two renowned cities. In order to stay awake, you smoke lots of reefers, which is alright, just as long as you make sure to keep to the golden rule – always be following the red lights and be avoiding the white lights.
At the early hours of morning, you arrive at your destination. After washing your face and getting yourself a strong cup of joe at a gas station, you commence clambering up the steep hills San Francisco is so famous for, with what is always an antiquated truck on the verge of complete and utter cave in. Sometimes it makes it, sometimes it don’t. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see the Golden Bridge from afar, but mostly, you see furniture up and down endless stairs and into closet spaced apartments. Three, sometimes four jobs take up most of the day. Then, you gotta drive back down to LA.
Your hand for this particular job is no longer a rookie, but is still a dope, and is already snoring in the passenger seat even before you get to turn the key in the ignition. Boy, would you love to do the same right about now, but someone’s gotta drive. That someone is the foreman; and that foreman is you.
By the time you reach the San-Franciscan outskirts, his snores have subsided, and now he mumbles to himself in broken, soggy Hebrew.
“Can’t wait to get back on the I-5,” you shift gears, as you prepare to slow down at a crossroads in the middle of an industrial area, “where I could light up another reefer.”
You look left and right, check the side view mirrors, then make a wide and lazy right hand turn onto the main road, surprised to hear an added scraping noise above the usual racket the truck makes. From the side view mirror you now notice a peculiar growth that has attached itself to the side of your truck; a lump in the form of a minute car, now being dragged alongside, fighting and screaming. Some hasty fucking idiot has tried overtaking you from the right, and during a turn no less, getting himself plowed good and proper.
“How fucking stupid can you get?” you sigh, before stepping out of the truck and facing yet another on a long list of roadside catastrophes.
“Oh well, here we go again…”
______________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] A popular Israeli snack.
Similar early days of roaming the South American continent, slipping southwards, from one tourist destination to the next, from one garage to another, until you finally end up in Quito, Ecuador’s primary hub. Endurance carried you into town with but a single companion; obstinacy shall drive you outta town with no less than four. Freedom is not what it used to be, now that responsibility has leeched itself onto an individualist journey turned collective. Your new partners expect you to make the journey work; make the team work. Nevertheless, your own conviction that you are capable of making it all work also remains as ever strong. To the clueless girls, who just bought into an expensive automobile without knowing fuck all about how an engine works, you promise feasts and jubilation; a life of adventure and comfort within the spacious belly of this noble savage. You promise them all great feats of rustic traveling - the mounting of enormous ridges, with the motor roaring in their ears; the crossing of great rivers, splashing mud everywhere; the paving of their very own paths through the jungle bush, while the wind is blowing through their hair.
Your other two companions, however; an enormously powerful guy and this girl, who looks like she could wrestle an ox, are not so easily fooled. They can sense the weary tone behind these empty promises, yet follow it up with one of their own.
“We’re a team now,” they declare, “and we’ll deal with whatever happens as one.”
You are grateful for their genuine support, you really are. However, you alone know what a can of worms hides underneath the hood of this Jeep; what torments and hardship await you on every mountain ridge, river and jungle you’d be foolish enough to cross. With your previous companion, at least, there were no secrets; no need for lies or manipulation. You both knew damn well what a mess you got yourselves into, and were making an honest effort to make the best out of a miserable situation.
Then again, maybe things are no longer as bad as you’ve grown to imagine. Maybe all these repairs, all the time, money and effort that were sunk into this bottomless pit of Hell over the last seven months, shall finally begin to pay off. Maybe your dreams, as well as the dreams you weave for others, shall finally come true.
Back on the Pan-American highway and bound for Guayaquil, you’re driving across yet another cascading river, past a narrow bridge and begin to climb up a curvy road, going along a steep mountainside and heading west on a dreamy mid-autumn afternoon.
This time around, you make sure to drive responsibly, keeping everyone feeling secure and in good spirits, and certainly do not entertain thoughts of daredevil overtaking of any sort, no matter how slow and annoying the traffic might be. A tape of Israeli music is playing in the cassette player, promising that it’ll all be good, while a king-size bag of Bamba[1] is passed among a bunch of mochileros; a heavenly taste of home away from home they all got hooked on during childhood.
You focus on the road, as visibility gets somewhat blurry on account of the position of the sun relative to the angle of the windshield, a known problem on this CJ-7 model type. “Jeep really should look into that one,” you reckon. “It might be dangerous if…”
But, at that very moment, a perfect combination of solar and windshield angles makes the whole world magically disappear.
A second earlier, you were going up a mountainside, with a spectacular view of a drop-dead gorgeous gorge just a couple of meters to your right, with nothing but a ditch standing between you and the plunge of a lifetime, however short that lifetime might prove to be. Right now, all you’ve got to follow is a glaring light. The windshield is reflecting the rays of the sun so intensively that everyone inside the car is blinded and screaming at the top of her lungs. This high pitched squealing becomes even less tolerable once the car starts rocking violently in its invisible course. Thus, and at the risk of being rear-ended into the afterlife, you slam on the brakes and bring the Jeep to a halt.
For a timeless interval, reality comes to a halt and all becomes as light as light.
When the light subsides, along with the shrieking, you realize you’ve managed to stop at the very edge of the cliff, with two wheels hanging over the ditch and one already beyond it. Very slowly, everyone exits the Jeep, and only then resume breathing.
A short while later, a pickup truck pulls over and a whole bunch of locals jump out the back of it. For a few bucks, they quickly grab the Jeep, and together all of you lift the heavy beast up in the air and carry it back to its rightful side of that ditch.Guess nothing much is free in life, ‘cept for maybe life itself.
* * *
This time is summertime, and the livin’ sure is easy. Israel has become your home again for well over a year, pulling a forged worldview back into a provincial prospective, and what can be easier than receding into the womb of a mother tongue and the fellowship of those with whom you share a familiar cultural background.
The one harsh thing about Israeli summers, however, is trying to keep cool.
Even up here, in the more acclimatized northern part of this tiny country, where a few still flowing rivers keep your grass green and the neighbor’s even greener, it’s so fuckin’ hot all the fuckin’ time that you’re reduced to a delirious puddle of quivering sweat from sunrise to sunset. Air-conditioning is the only way out of this quivering mess, which you certainly cannot afford. Well, not a real one anyway. The best you can do is have an old, rusty air-conditioner you found in a pile of junk and stuffed through a window stir the oppressive air within the confines of the concrete cellblock you now call home.
For that reason, as well as for the purpose of paying for food, board, cold beer and next year’s tuition, you quickly nail a summer job at one of the many blue-water rafting operations in the area. By pulling rafts into the river and people out of it all day long, you at least get to spend most of the scorching daytime hours in a submersed state, splashing around, having fun and bringing home the kosher bacon.
Ever faithfully by your side is a scrawny scooter; a flaming red fifty cc Piaggio Fox, released into the northern wild, where traffic is non-existent and nature is in abundance. Uninsured and unbothered, this light piece of ingenious Italian engineering gets you anywhere you wanna go. Uninsured indeed, ‘cause issuing a mere yearly basic insurance policy on it is far more expensive than the price of the Fox itself; a scooter so scrawny that it is practically incapable of doing any harm in the first place.
The gift this little companion bestows on you is one of sheer, priceless freedom. The gift of mobility; the freedom to go anywhere you wanna go, on the road, off the road, across fields, plantations and parklands, up mountains and down to the river. But, right now, all it’s gonna do is deliver you back home from the rafting site, bushed and smeared from head to toe with a day’s worth of sunbaked mud, clay and filth.
Leaving the tedious task of washing and piling the heavy rubber rafts to the rest of the guys, you slide your helmet on covertly, kick-start your scooter and are burning the gravel leading away from the river before anyone notices your early retirement scheme.
Though it’s still the early stage dusk and visibility is good, you turn your headlight on anyway, as you round the curve and speed up along the byroad, running through the heart of a small village and in between corn fields. You’ve been riding this exact same route every day for the last couple of months and know every bit of this road, every crack and every bump, like the sole of your foot.
You merge into the main road and speed up to the maximum this baby can take, which amounts to about eighty km\h. This road is where you’re most exposed to law enforcement, so you want this part of the journey to be over and done with as quickly as possible. The headlight goes off. Rotten tangency always plays tricks on you. You smack the headlight, and it comes back on again, just as you’re approaching a small intersection with a service road.
You notice a car coming out of the gas station and stopping to give right of way to other cars passing on the main road. Like it or not, where traffic matters, size doesn’t, which means he’s gonna have to wait until your little scooter shall pass him just as well. At least that’s how you see it. The driver, on the other hand, seems to have a different view altogether. Thus, imagine the dismay at seeing him suddenly pull into the road right in front of you.
Driving this fast on what has just become a collision course does not, however, leave much time for dismal, which quickly clears the way for sheer panic. You pull on the rear brakes, for the front ones would send you flipping in the air, vote against shooting into the ditch on your right, against sliding into adverse traffic by swerving to the left, come to terms with the way things are, manage a grin and pull on the front brakes with everything you’ve got a split second before ramming head on into the side of that car, at a velocity that has only been reduced to about fifty.
Next thing you know, you’re human cannonballing over the roof of the car.
For a timeless interval, you’re in an utter state of shock, but for an annoying little buzzing sound inside your head. You don’t even remember how you ended up here, sprawled across the road in a pool of blood, nor how your poor Fox managed to somersault over the hood of your assailant and land, bent beyond repair, by your side. The only thing you do remember is the hard, cold truth it all boils down to - you ain’t got no medical insurance either, hence must avoid a billing enema at all cost!
Then, people begin to gather. Someone wraps a bandage around your knee, someone else calls an ambulance, and the poor kid, who happened to be driving his daddy’s car for the very first time after getting his driver’s license the day before, is as pale as a ghost. When the ambulance arrives, you refuse to get on it, rightfully claiming you feel no pain at all. However, in your disoriented state, you are certainly no match for the stately medical services. Behind, you leave your mutilated pat, a pair of flip-flops and an oceanic bloodstain on the road.
As it turns out, other than plenty of bruises and scrapes, all you’ve really got is a cut all the way to your knee bone, caused by hitting the side view mirror. At the hospital, you’re stitched up by tired looking doctor, before being sent straight to bed.
Still in a state of physical shock and far too sore to move around, you spend the next day lying in a drab hospital bed, trembling like a leaf while calculating the piling medical bills that shall need to be paid through teeth you’re at least lucky to still have. Every little bit is sore, but most of all the heart. There’s no two ways about it. You may play the odds, as you have been for thirty three years, but once they get you, they’ll squeeze you for everything you’ve got. Rightful aspects of dearness aside, it’s an unfortunate fact that the medical industry charges these inconceivable amounts largely just ‘cause they can.
The next morning you ask your inspecting doctor if you can go home now. He says that you may, but is not at all enthusiastic about the idea and prefers that you shall stay a few more days for observation.
Half an hour later, you stumble out of that hospital barefoot, still covered in blood, mud and filth, and begin hitchhiking your way back home across sizzling asphalt.
Home, where your body shall mend and your heart shall soon heal.
Home, where you shall be able to give your Foxy friend a proper burial.
Home, that by an unforeseeable turn of the wheel those bills shall never reach.
Home, where you shall later find out that you were fully covered all that time after all.
* * *
A veil of disenchantment hangs over these later days of miracle and labor; a discontented winter of furniture hauling and truck driving across the state of California and on a collision course with the inevitable turn of a century. Freedom is just another word for having neither a work permit nor a truck driver’s license, but that won’t hinder you from riding the gravy train all the way to renewed economical independence and the continuation of your journey.
Once in a while, there’ll be an opening for a long-distance job going from LA all the way up to San-Francisco. Those, you always grab with zeal, as there’s excellent money to be made on long-distance trips. Besides, it’s always good to get out of the Los-Angelical vortex, even if just for a couple of days.
More often than not, these jobs begin at the point in time and strain in which a whole day’s worth of furniture has already been hauled across town. Only then do you proceed by driving the loaded truck throughout the night, so as to cover the five hundred miles separating the two renowned cities. In order to stay awake, you smoke lots of reefers, which is alright, just as long as you make sure to keep to the golden rule – always be following the red lights and be avoiding the white lights.
At the early hours of morning, you arrive at your destination. After washing your face and getting yourself a strong cup of joe at a gas station, you commence clambering up the steep hills San Francisco is so famous for, with what is always an antiquated truck on the verge of complete and utter cave in. Sometimes it makes it, sometimes it don’t. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see the Golden Bridge from afar, but mostly, you see furniture up and down endless stairs and into closet spaced apartments. Three, sometimes four jobs take up most of the day. Then, you gotta drive back down to LA.
Your hand for this particular job is no longer a rookie, but is still a dope, and is already snoring in the passenger seat even before you get to turn the key in the ignition. Boy, would you love to do the same right about now, but someone’s gotta drive. That someone is the foreman; and that foreman is you.
By the time you reach the San-Franciscan outskirts, his snores have subsided, and now he mumbles to himself in broken, soggy Hebrew.
“Can’t wait to get back on the I-5,” you shift gears, as you prepare to slow down at a crossroads in the middle of an industrial area, “where I could light up another reefer.”
You look left and right, check the side view mirrors, then make a wide and lazy right hand turn onto the main road, surprised to hear an added scraping noise above the usual racket the truck makes. From the side view mirror you now notice a peculiar growth that has attached itself to the side of your truck; a lump in the form of a minute car, now being dragged alongside, fighting and screaming. Some hasty fucking idiot has tried overtaking you from the right, and during a turn no less, getting himself plowed good and proper.
“How fucking stupid can you get?” you sigh, before stepping out of the truck and facing yet another on a long list of roadside catastrophes.
“Oh well, here we go again…”
______________________________________________________________________________________________
[1] A popular Israeli snack.