Getting to somewhere

Past cafes and restaurants and sandwich shops, dodging couples and bikestands, skipping over the piles of sewage at the rear of the shuk, and onto the beachside tayellet, I ran.  Green and red and orange fluorescent lights flickered across women with strollers, bike riders, and slick torsos.  Before long, the rainbow-colored hotel loomed before me.  It’s where I usually turn around.  But today, for some reason, I kept running.  

Israeli folk dancers and peddlers of cheap perfume slipped past me.  Intermittent crowds became clusters of dining families and teenagers out shopping.  I was entering the port.  A street angel held a child, and delighted parents took pictures.  Kids played on scooters.  I skipped down to a low dock to avoid a mass of people congesting the slim walkway bordering the marina, and, jogging on past all the crowds, came to where the waves boom like cannons against the walls of the dock and then erupt into saltwater sprays, a place beyond the pedestrians.  Just past that is the bridge that marks the end of the port.  For the first time I hesitated, for I’d never run past here before.  But, feeling spry enough, I took but an instant to decide, and went on.  

Somehow I lost sight of the beach.  I passed alongside a factory guarded by serious-faced men with machine guns, followed the road inland, and then continued along a highway while cars swam languidly by.  My attempts to get back to the beach were continually stymied.  Beyond a small airport, I found myself on a dark dirt road, unsure if it would lead anywhere, but hoping it would provide a shortcut between highways and building complexes to the beach.  Kitchy Israeli pop music trickled in on the breeze.  It became louder around this bend and softer as I went behind a high mound of dirt, but progressively closer until I realized that my meandering path was leading me towards it.  Then I burst out of the darkness into a set of young and middle aged revelers dancing under too-bright lights, too bright for a party but fit for an exhibition, as if their festival had been planned on a stage for my benefit.  To what I owed this, I don’t know.  I was tired, my knees ached, and I didn’t belong there, so I ran past them, and as I climbed the dune of shoveled dirt beyond the party, I slowed to a walk.  What was on my mind now?  Not that which had set me to run.  Peace had swept in, with only disconnected thought snippets interpolating between the sounds of the night.  A bird chose that moment to fly over me and squawk shrilly.

I had arrived at a vista from which I could see the staged party behind me, a smokestack from the factory jutting up from the south, and what I thought was the rim of the sea straight ahead.  Fields and low enclaves inhabited the darkness, followed by a wide trench cutting off two long archipelagos of office buildings and apartment complexes, and beyond that, an even, grassy hillock atop the dunes lining the ocean.  I glanced once more at the party and, with dirt cascading into my running shoes, slid down the far side of the dune.  The night filled with crickets.  I wondered, then, if I could see the stars, and was surprised to find that the night was half shrouded in clouds, a rarity for summer in Israel.  I kept on.  The way was straightforward, and in not too long I was back on another beachside tayellet, passing quiet conversers on park benches, nodding to an old couple planted down by the entrance to the beachfront, and then, rounding a tall dune, making it back where I was aiming -- to the beach.  

The beach was dark, quiet, and empty.  Only occasionally did I pass solitary walkers, mostly lost in their own reveries, faces featureless in the shadows.  Hot plumes of ocean air rolled over me and swept up the dunes, which were as tall as houses, and the stir of the waves over the low natural jetty obscured all other noises.  I passed a couple having wine by the light of a headlamp and a fisherman whose head swiveled the whole way around to keep tabs on me, as if he were suspicious I might contaminate the night’s stillness.  I looked backward and forward.  Cities stood on both horizons, equidistant: the smokestack, high-rises, and lights of Tel Aviv to the south, and a mirrored collection of lights and buildings to the North, which I suppose were Natanya.  Once more, I hesitated.  My mind was now tuned into the night’s sensual offerings, with my initial thoughts dissolved into the ocean’s roll and the natural solitude of the duned, darkened landscape.  I hadn’t thought about getting back, and now I started to wonder -- how would I?  But the thought washed away, and my body said “forward,” and I obeyed.  

Fireworks suddenly rose one after the other like phosphorescent palm trees across the northern skyline, their low thuds blowing in softly, long moments after the palm trees themselves had evaporated.  I kept on, not able to move faster than a walk for the last hour probably, thirst beginning to harden my throat, yet determined.  After a long while, high dunes and low jetties finally fell away, and I emerged at the other end of the beach into a Disneyland tayellet, with manicured grass on multiple clean terraces broken neatly apart by curvilinear rock walls.  There was a water fountain.  I drank and then sat, watching the waves break apart over the jetties.  

I was here, I was -- where?  Somewhere.  

The city lights to the North were still a ways off, but not nearly as distant as the Tel Aviv lights, which shimmered like a tiny bundle of lightning bugs.  I had gone far past the halfway point, far past the point from which my body could carry me comfortably back.  I hadn’t budgeted for the return; I had only blazed forward, carried first by my legs and then by my spirit, and now I had gotten to this somewhere, and I felt lost.  Thirst abated, I felt a deep strain in my leg ligaments, long unaccustomed as they were to running.  I looked back and forth and then out to the ocean.  The waves rolled in endlessly.  For a while I stayed, soaked in sweat, sand carpeting my insoles, the tayellet's floodlights overpowering the dark night I had journeyed through to get there.  Wherever I was going, no matter how weary I felt, I couldn’t stay here. I would have to keep moving.  Somehow, I would have to get home.


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