I never thought I would come to loathe knee sweat as much as I did while on the dig. Every time I would move my knees from their position on the pad, a swathe of sweat would cause me to slip in my new angle and pitch forward, nearly bashing my head on the side of one of the many precarious boulders teetering on the top of the exposed road. I was hunkered down with my pick-axe and broom head, carefully chipping and brushing away at the wall, alternating between kneeling in sweat and the thin rivulets of mud it created and falling back onto my butt, sitting on a flat flagstone.

It was about three days into the dig and already I had managed to find about twenty different ways to sit and pick, thirty ways to kneel and brush and a hundred ways to try and avoid moving the seemingly endless piles of rock we had to clear. There was an easy rythym to our days now... friendships were being formed, alliances clearly marked... your Area and Locus defined you and there was a distinct championing of the spots where we were digging. It wasn't a far stretch for the Diggers in Area A, Locus 1765 to know we were the very best, working with great humor and good will under circumstances where other Diggers would be want to complain. Our sifter was continuously placed in the sun, our buckets were pillaged and we never saw the famed wheelbarrows until the next to last day. Despite the lack of luxuries, our road begin to yield finds almost immediately.Iron age ring, projectile, Assyrian arrow head...basically we rocked.

I was picking and prodding away one day when I happened upon some bones. Now bones, along with pottery sherds, had ceased to cause much excitement.. the first few days of the dig I was prone to yelling out "BONES" at the top of my lungs at first sight of them, causing people to drop their pickaxes and cover their ears but bones became so commonplace that we ended up going "bones, eh... " and tossed them aside. This time, though, this time I was determined to be triumphant... this was a bit of a jaw with what appeared to be a tooth still attached. Fairly certain that I had found the jaw of Herrod himself (or perhaps Wilfred Brimley in his role from Cocoon) I placed it gingerly aside for Rami to examine when he came by. All of our finds went into special buckets to be cleaned by the washers in the morning and then presented to Rami for inspection the next day at Pottery Reading. I would wait anxiously for my Jaw of Destiny to be discovered and for Rami to fall to his knees in awe at, praising my keen eyes and nimble fingers.

Our days began to form into a relaxed and hyper pattern. I would wake at 4:30 am to snag a shower before anyone else, then sit on the front porch of the dorm drinking folgers instant coffee bags and watching the sun rise. The dorm area was located in the Inn at Kibbutz Ginosar, framed by the actual apartments of those who live on the kibbutz. Birds flocked to the small field in front of the dorm, as well as some of the dogs that roam the kibbutz. After sorting through the 20 plus pairs of shoes piled on the porch of the dorm, i hoisted my backpack and made my way to the bus. In my backpack was, as follows: sunblock spf a trillion, bugspray laden with as much deet as I could locate, two pairs of gardening gloves, a bottle of frozen Israeli tap water, camera, band-aids, sunglasses, a headband and my Baggy of Joy.

The Baggy of Joy was a large ziploc bag I always carried with me, chock full of things like: peanut butter crackers and kashi bars I brought from the states, fruit snagged from the buffet dinner the night before, as well as whatever random treats I could find. Breakfast at the dig doesn't begin until 9am, something that just doesn't sit well with a stomach as fickle and voracious as mine and so while constantly flicking off the trails of ants finding a home in my backpack, I would periodically pull out the Baggy of Joy and share my treasures with others to get us through the morning. This would be supplemented by pocketfulls of hard boiled eggs that C and I would steal from the kitchen/office during a bathroom break at the dig, eaten while wandering back up the dusty, heat soaked road back to our sites.

Once the dig was over for the day, the bus would drag our filthy bodies back to the kibbutz where we would eat lunch in the workers dining cafeteria. Lunch was a motley collection of reformed and refashioned food from dinner the night before.... food items began to take on an eerie resemblence to dishes from the evening prior, food that I convinced myself did not prove to be all that popular for dinner and so were reinvented as a new dish for lunch. I couldnt get the thought out of my head as I would peruse the vast selection of curried potatoes, soups, cabbage salads and veggie pies. Lunch also brought us face to face with the Cappucino Machine of Desire. It sat in the room, dispensing a fine blend of expresso yet when you pushed the button for the steamed milk, all that came out was the very decidely kosher...steamed water. Every day I would make myself a cup, hoping that perhaps there actually wasn't meat with lunch and I could finally get milk with my coffee but alas, it wasn't to be.

After lunch came a tough decision...pool, Sea of Galilee or nap. Each option was weighed heavily and generally C and myself would make our way to the pool for a couple of hours. Then it was time for a couple of beers at the hotel bar, some serious Snark time as we picked apart the general poor habits of Kibbutz hotel guests and then a shower before Pottery Reading at 4 o'clock.