The Mata

This morning, my first working since I returned from Jerusalem, I spent in the Mata- the date tree plantation.

I'll write Mata in Hebrew:

מטע

I chose to do that because seeing it in Hebrew does justice to how mighty and biblical this plantation is.

The Mata is a good amount of kilometers from the kibbutz itself. To get there, you must drive over a medium-sized desert mountain (not Wadi Rum-size by any means, but big nonetheless) from which you can see the neat rows of 10-meter high date palms below, and, further in the distance, the no man's land mountains on the Jordanian border.

After driving over this Israeli mountain, the car drives over a large flat desert valley that, from a distance, appears to contain nothing other than a billboard which says (roughly translated), "60 KM an hour. Don't kill your vacation," and an occasional ibex hopping across the light tan rocks.

This route is usually driven before 7 AM, with the sun not quite in full force, in a van full of volunteers, kibbutzniks, and Thai migrant workers.

At the Mata itself, the giant trees are no less impressive. The first time I entered the plantation and saw the picking-trucks driving towards the towering trees as the sun rose over desert hills, I felt as if I were entering into some sort of epic Zionist film.

It was too aesthetic a scene for me to compare it to anything other than a movie. Viewed from a distance, it had the awesome power of the oil-fire scene in There Will Be Blood, the barn-raising scene in Witness, or the locust scene in Days of Heaven; it was a spectacular and cinematic display of the awesome forces at work in basic interactions between humans, technology, and nature.

The actual work a person does at the Mata is a different story.

Some people love it, but working there releases just about every neurosy I have.

Currently, the work being done is the pruning of the date buds. You stand on top of two shaky branches while trimming stems. First, you count the amount of stems and trim them down to a certain amount- on some heads, it's 40, and on some, it's 80. Then, you cut those stems until the stems have only 10 buds each on them.

Since the stems are so densely packed together, it's hard to hold them in a bunch as you count them. I'm not great at counting in the first place, but I'm particularly bad at counting thin stems while straddling the branches of a tall palm tree and holding a deadly pair of pruning clippers. I usually miss some stems or end up counting them twice because, while I'm holding one bunch in one hand and counting some others, some of the tightly held stems will pop out, and, since I'm trying to count the others, I won't notice. And so I'll count them later. Sometimes, they all pop out of my hand and I give up.

In addition to that, I have to do it while balancing myself on top of branches that break if you don't balance correctly on them. Usually, once I've balanced myself, the head of stems is directly in front of my face, which means I have to hold the pair of clippers in front of my face as well.

Sometimes, the branches start to break and I have to step down on to the truck.

When I told kibbutzniks that I didn't want to work in the Mata again, they all said, more or less, "Yeah, we understand, you're afraid of heights."

They have the right idea, but it's not the falling to the ground that scares me, I explained to some of them. It's all of the things that will hit me on the way down. The branches, which will likely hit my crotch. The metal platform from the truck, which will probably hit my butt as well as other body parts. And the clippers, which can cut through two inches of wood, and will probably hit my eye, or my throat, or my lung.

And, in addition to the danger, the cutting of the stems is boring, and I suck at it.

So I'm leaving the magnificent biblical scene behind. I'm a little sad that I won't be going there again. Riding towards the Mata to work, van full of Israelis, Germans, Americans and Thais, at the break of dawn, was thrilling and awesome in a casual and unchoreographed yet cinematic way that the jeep tour through the Sahara at Siwa never was and my planned jeep tour through Wadi Rum never will be.