ISRAEL BY CYCLE
KRASNOW, NADINE
ISRAEL BY CYCLE NADINE KRASNOW It was a month to get ready for, two weeks to do, and may take forever to get over. But that will be fine, because cycling Israel is that kind of experience. It's...
...Shabbat observers, going to and from synagogue, some staring at us, some oblivious, a few shaming us into acknowledgement of Shabbat (but I would rather observe by spinning through the city, loving everyone who loves this place...
...As I half-expected, my chaverim were very wonderful and slightly crazy in a lovely sort of way...
...But flying around Israel on a bicycle...
...Al ofanayimV...
...And I was ready...
...And packing away bicycles, re-, luctantly separating lives and moments that came together, exploded in magnificent experience, and now wrench apart...
...God willing, it will take forever to get over...
...Within five minutes of finishing the article, I had signed up for the trip and found a babysitter—I, who had never left the children for more than two days, and never with a hired sitter...
...Donkeys crossing the road, making traffic signals and automobile...
...Oh, weeks in the Caribbean were not for me...
...my friends said, incredulously...
...it is the only way I have left to share this with her...
...If only the Syrians and the Lebanese and the Saudis and the Israelis too could share that innocence...
...When I read a story about Cycle Israel, I knew it was what I had been waiting and preparing for my whole life...
...Sounds of Arab chanting insinuating into deep sleep...
...Intimidated, I retreat...
...And then I had babies, three of them...
...He glows,-even though he thought my toe clips were bizarre...
...Walls everywhere: old, new, Israeli, Arab, walls of peace and walls of war, walls you can touch and walls you can feel...
...He couldn't understand why we just couldn't cycle across all the borders that we came to...
...Massachusetts...
...Finding a bomb on your bus...
...Spirits soaring at the Sculpture Garden, and plunging at Yad Vashem, remembering the terrifying things we do to each other...
...One, in fact, had never even known a Jew, but he'd just been to Egypt and just started riding his bicycle and, well, it seemed like a great thing to do...
...Well, we got up very early in the morning, and we cycled...
...Eat some candy, smell the spices, look at the jewelry, the rugs, the people...
...Look at an embroidered blouse, the shopkeeper will tell you that for you, with your pretty smile, it is half price...
...Keep walking...
...I'd always wanted to go to Israel, but when I was in college, girls (that's what we were called then) took tame adventures,af they took any at all...
...irrelevant...
...Step aside for the donkeys, rest a few moments with Turkish coffee...
...So this past November 4,1 put my old bike and a suitcase in the car, hugged the kids goodbye, and set off for New York to meet the twelve other Americans who thought that this was a speciaVthing to do...
...And I knew I would never go to Israel that way...
...Nadine Krasnow, a mother of three, runs her own real estate business in Newton...
...To climb every mountain, to come around a bend in the road and see the Sea of Galilee sparkling just beyond, to know the ancient and the modern, the cities and the countryside, the Arab and the Israeli, to be welcomed, to embrace that desert, to sweat and hurt and not believe, to sing "Oseh Shalom" with the Israeli wind at your back, and finally to come to Jerusalem...
...Go to The Wall, approach for prayer, but be pushed away by Orthodox women crooning prayers and guarding their Wall from those who look insufficiently fervent...
...As we spun along, exhilaration took over very quickly and very completely...
...So what is a trip like this about...
...A young Arab boy gives me a shepherd's flute in exchange for a ride on my bike...
...On to the Jewish Quarter, exciting, various, and like all of Israel, there since forever and beginning still again...
...After that I was too old and too tied down and to scared to consider anything but a bus tour with 40 or 400 people...
...I wanted to say (Caddish here for my beloved sister...
...Israeli soldiers guard the Church of the Nativity, across the road from Arab police, each guarding their land, though it's the same...
...By bicycle...
...the Israelis exclaimed, incredulously...
...Through the gate, into the alleys and aisles of the souk...
...A classic view of the city, encompassing an ancient cemetery, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Russian Church, a new highway, the Old City and Dome of the Rock, and against a perfect blue sky, skyscrapers...
...They—we— ranged in age from 17 to 65, were from all over the U.S., led all kinds of lifestyles, and some were not even Jewish...
...I cycled a couple of summers around the Maritime Provinces and Europe, then I worked, and then I got( married...
...It's 561 miles of impossibly blue sky, of mountains too steep to consider until you're finished with them, of desert so huge and empty that your spirit is overwhelmed with revelations of beginning and never-ending, and a place too hard and passionate to just be, in peace...
...To know Eretz Yisrael, in your body and your soul...
Vol. 5 • April 1980 • No. 4
