Mitzpe Ramon

Schools here close down for a good week and a half before Passover so that the kids can help clean the house. With the kids home from school, we have done no cleaning but lots of entertaining our kids. We drove down to Mitzpe Ramon which overlooks the Ramon crater (where we saw the double rainbow when we drove through with Deb and Adriana last time). The boys had a good time. Both of them came home with various abrasions and contusions but Lev's were on his face so they were more visible. He fell once off the bunk-bed at the youth hostel and once in the wine storage cave in the ancient Nabatean city of Avdat. They ate nothing but pizza and ice cream for two days. Mitzpe Ramon is a strange place. It's pretty run down. The ibex wonder into town. Benjy loved that, seeing them as we walked back from the busted-up kids' park at the edge of town. Then they hop up on the wall at the canyon edge and over into space. Once, we came over a hill walking along the crater rim and saw this big mountain sheep not twenty feet away from us. He looked nonplussed. We were plussed.
For me one of the highlights of the trip was something that happened in the crater. We drove down and were going to hike but the boys were too tired, so I went off on a little explore by myself. I walked for ten or fifteen minutes seeing nothing but more of the same, wide open expanses of sand, rock and occasional scrubby bushes. Then I saw a big raptor flying ahead of me. There was one other way up and I assumed they were a mating pair. Then, he saw me and came over to take a look at me. He flew closer and closer until he was nearly overhead. I had stopped walking at this point and the absolute silence of the desert rushed in on me... it is startling this quiet, no bird calls, no bugs, no human sounds, just mile after mile of quiet, and I look up directly above and this lone hawk has flown into a cloud of enormous birds circling directly over me in the clear blue sky in these lazy overlapping helixes, maybe seventy five of them. The quiet and the blue and the dizzying quality of craning my neck made me feel like I was underwater and I was looking down at a school of sharks swimming beneath me. They were absolutely silent. There were two types, my raptor who had spotted me and got my attention and his kind which may have been a red hawks (Daih Aduma. The picture here is from the Israeli birding sight Moadon Tsiprut). They were big birds but the others were even larger. For a heartstopping moment I thought might be vultures because of their enormous wings and long necks. I knew that vultures wouldn't attack me but there was something about the idea of a swarm of fifty vultures thinking of me as carrion-to-be that really gave me pause. But vultures don't fly in big packs, they circle far apart and watch each other and only congregate on the ground. These were most likely some kind of migratory stork or crane. I have found no mention of them co-migrating with hawks. I remembered something that I read about the Gulag, about how when men escaped they would take a 'cow,' a fellow prisoner to eat on the way. I wondered if the hawks figure that traveling with a group of storks is a good way to get an easy meal if one of the storks founders. They circled for a while and then moved on and were replaced by another tower of birds and another. All completely quiet.
Benjy and I are reading The Hobbit in Hebrew. It is very fun. It took me a long time to figure out that the Shaydim -- which might roughly be translated as "demons" -- are the Orcs.