{"id":537,"date":"2014-02-07T16:14:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T21:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diaryofthedesert.com\/?p=537"},"modified":"2014-08-04T19:46:19","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T23:46:19","slug":"my-mountain-my-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.diaryofthedesert.com\/?p=537","title":{"rendered":"My Mountain, My Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

One day, after I’d been living in Dir Edis for several months, I was standing outside my house waiting for my Pickup Truck Escort For Respectable Ladies on the way to school, and I happened to look northward and discovered: a mountain. It hadn’t been there before. It was just suddenly there<\/em> — in the distance, true, but undeniably mountainous.<\/p>\n

\"Harhahermon20050828\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I knew there were mountains in that general direction, but I am not great at math and even worse with spatial organization, so it had just never occurred to me that I ought to be able to see them. And I’d gotten so used to the blurring that is the almost-perpetual condition of the desert horizon that it had never really occurred to me that the haze might be hiding something.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

An aside: there’s a reason it took a Divine act to show Moses the Holy Land from his resting point on Mount Nebo. Even though it’s, like, feet away,<\/em> just down there<\/em>, you often can’t see the Jordan River or the Dead Sea, and you certainly can’t see Jerusalem. There’s a helpful map pointing to where all those things should be, but it’s a lucky visitor who gets to see them. You just get used to an abbreviated field of vision in the desert.<\/p>\n

So anyway, one day, there was this mountain. And I kind of became obsessed with it. I scrabbled around in my brain trying to figure out what mountain it might be and realized that there are actually a number of “Mount”-type names in the Bible. This was before smartphones, so I finally had to ask someone, and of course they told me jebal as-sheikh<\/em>, which was utterly unhelpful to me in terms of labeling it with a name I knew. But that’s what I called for months, until it occurred to me to look it up on one of my visits to an internet cafe, and realized it was Mount Hermon — disputed territory, the height of the Golan Heights, the training ground for the Israeli ski team. And I could see it from my house!<\/p>\n

Once I knew it was there, I looked for my mountain every day. some days it was just a line, like an unmoving cloud. Some days it only appeared as a slight difference between degrees of haze. On some days it was as shockingly clear as changing the channel between SD and HD. Those were good days.<\/p>\n

In 2000, I found myself with an unexpected and last-minute vacation (another story!), and hightailed it across the border to spend some time in Tiberias. During the break, I took a day trip to Sefad, which I had enjoyed as a kid. I ate delicious blintzes and walked down flower-hung alleys and eventually stumbled into the studio of Bracha Lavee<\/a>. There, right on the top of a pile of prints, was one entitled “The Sea of Galilee.” It looked like this:<\/p>\n

\"Lavee\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The angle was wrong — too far to the west, obviously — but there it was. I bought the print on the spot and when I got back to Dir Edis I taped it up on my wall. Then I could see my mountain every day, even when the haze was heavy.<\/p>\n

When I got back to the U.S., I put the print up in my room — in my parents’ house, where I lived for almost a year while I sorted out my life. That year for Christmas my parents gave me this page from an old book:<\/p>\n

\"Illustrated<\/a><\/p>\n

And it was off to the races. I have a standing order with a friendly bookseller to let me know if travel guides from the 1880s come across his desk so I can tear out pages, and I stalk print- and booksellers on Ebay. There’s a lot of repetition, but my collection is growing.<\/p>\n