Part 22
The very first time I was in Eilath a mammoth tanker was moored in the Gulf. Apart from all speculation it was a known fact that the shipping company had gone bankrupt and we made plans to go and take a look. It was too far to swim, so we looked for and found a small boat. We rowed towards the ship, took a halfway break and I dived overboard. The first thing I saw was a large, grey shape with a lot of fins. I was terrified, made it back to the boat and yelled ‘haai, haai’ (Dutch for ‘shark’). As my crying out was understood to have a psychedelic dimension (i.e. ‘high’), before I thought of saying ‘shark’, Jim the Bricklayer jumped in as well. Possibly our noise kept the shark(s) at a distance, but for the rest of our voyage we kept scrupulously within the boards of the boat. The crew very much appreciated our visit and showered us with food. The whole lot of us ate it in a fat week.
There was, however, also a grim dimension to our life: word went around that Israeli soldiers would come to celebrate Pesach (Easter) and that they would make their camp in the large adjoining wadi.
All of these adventures I wrote down for the first time 32 years after they happened (’99), but the following report I wrote in situ around the same time.
The Burning Wadi, Eilath, March 20th 1967
At about 4 o’clock in the afternoon I came by the Wadi to take to East Village the things I had found on the beach where a kibbutz had camped: 3 pans, half a pound of sugar, half a tin of coffee, 12 potatoes and 5 forks. When I got to the rim of the riverbed from where you looked down on the wadi, I saw to my great surprise an enormous army camp that had been built there within a few hours. I slid down into the beatnik wadi and saw people running in and out of their huts. When I asked what had happened, I heard something like: ‘The bastards, they have given us exactly 20 minutes to save our stuff and then they’ll set fire to the huts’ and ‘Most people are still at work in Timna, there aren’t enough people here to manage all the stuff, help us!’
Jan Ploeg
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