Final Photos, Final Days

We wake up at 3:50 a.m. and put on our work clothes and shuffle over to the truck. We are the first to the site and Dan, one of the directors and the official photographer, perches a top his ladder with two cameras hanging, like a strange collection of ornaments, around his neck. We sweep little pockets of dust off dust and stoop down to pick up little pebbles. This strange ritual can only mean one thing: final photos.

After weeks of picking, hoeing, troweling, and brushing: it has all come to this moment. After we brush away the remaining loose dirt, we walk ceremoniously around the square so as not to disturb the dirt, which we have just smoothed away, with our messy footprints. The sun rises above the Hula Valley as Dan takes up his camera for the final shots. We gather to the side of our square watching; it seems so strange that everything has finished, that all our hours and days and weeks of work is captured by a collection of photographs.

The drone flies in—a buzz that we know well by now, but still it seems to surprise us, make us think for a second we are about to be swarmed by a mass of bees—and closes in to take the aerial shots, and we watch it, sleep-deprived as we are with a strange sort of awe. Each of the squares has had their turn for final photos and now, finaly, we are initiated in this strange ritual.

We take celebratory photos, throwing our arms up in the air, smiling, laughing, with a sense of relief but also sadness; the five by five meter patch of earth we have tended for so long will cease to be ours.

The photos are over. Our final week on the field has ended. We have been picking and hoeing, leveling down all our loci as fast as we can, and then brush off the dirt, cleaning each crevice; it suddenly ends. The sifters come down. The breakfast tent is dismantled. The stakes are removed. And suddenly it seems, with the exception of a few more holes in the ground, that we had never been here, and that the site is resting on the foothills of the Golan as it had been for many hundreds of years before we arrived.

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