A couple of downs, and a step back up

Best intentions of writing yesterday too, but it didn't work out-- a construction worker in Jerusalem went berserk with a front-end loader at noon yesterday, killing three people and injuring dozens more as he crushed several cars and flipped over a bus with his machine before passersby shot and killed him. Terrorist, or lone crazy-guy? Who knows. It was enough, at any rate, to prompt Dr. Schuler to cancel our planned trip to Jerusalem. We had planned to leave this afternoon, Thursday, for two nights' stay, but in light of the immense security lockdown that automatically follows any such incident, the journey suddenly seemed to be a very bad idea. Families at home would no doubt appreciate knowing we had followed the old advice, "Better safe than sorry." The security situation here is just completely foreign to us who are, well, foreigners in this way too!

One of the suggestions about how we should fill these two suddenly-vacant days, Friday and Saturday, was that we could spend at least one of them working "overtime" up on the dig. You can imagine how much enthusiasm that generated from the group! Personally though I wasn't quite sure whether to take Doc Schuler's remark as a compliment or an insult: "Well," he said, "we might get one or two crazy types who'd actually do that. Betcha Chambers would do it!" And actually he was right: I probably would!

Today, especially, reminded me why I love this work so much. Most of this week has been pretty dull: as I've mentioned before, we spent endless hours chewing through bucketful after bucketful of dirt, just plain old dirt. There were hardly even any building stones in it, which is extremely rare since the more normal pattern is to clunk your implements on big rocks constantly. So many of the rooms in this North-East Church were small store-rooms or single-person sleeping rooms, there are walls everywhere. And where there's no wall, there's "tumble" from the walls all around that came crashing down in the huge earthquake of 749. So stones are just part of the deal, all day, every day-- everywhere else except in square F-1! The upside is we had clear sailing with very few impediments all week. The downside is that we had bucket after bucket of "nothing": very few pot-sherds, and just the odd little piece of glass or bone. Yawn.

But today was different-- at last! All week we were gnawing across this 5m by 5m square, plus an adjacent few square metres "just for fun" (hah). From the surface level it was pretty much all pick-work for the first couple of passes across the whole area, with Dr. Jim Gimbel from Concordia-St. Paul proving to be The Pick-Master par excellence. After we complimented him on his speed and technique, time and time again, he fessed up that he had learned to swing the thing as a kid, helping his Dad, who was their church's janitor, dig graves in the church-yard. It wasn't too bad in the summer, Jim said, but in the winter they had to burn straw-bales on top of the frozen ground for several days sometimes before they could even dent the ground with a pick. Here, of course, it's the other end of the temperature scale completely: after the day's first round of pick-work, Jim's shirt was soaked-through across the shoulders; after the second round it was wet down to his belly, and after the third round it was dripping all the way down!  

Not only is Jim good, though, he's also almost comically keen to pick up the pick and have a real swing-fest. Time and again he'd ask, "Do you want me to work that area over with a pick for a bit?" After a while, it wasn't really necessary-- and Jim knew it-- but hearing us answer "No, it's actually as soft as butter" just didn't cut it for him. Sometimes I thought I saw him twitching, if he hadn't been able to get in a few good blows within the previous half-hour!

Hmm. I wonder if all that pick-work has something to do with the fact that we didn't find a whole lot of pottery-pieces that were big enough to keep. Think there might be a connection? :)

Anyway, as I was saying, the pick-work was pretty much finished a couple of days ago except for isolated hard-spots here and there. Then it was a matter of loosening, sifting, and bucketing the whole square-full of dirt. We got a good rhythm going after a while, starting off in the morning in the areas that would later be exposed to full sun, then moving under the shade of our large overhead screens when things heated up later on. We'd get three or sometimes even four guys working beside each other, kneeling in parallel and filling buckets wedged between their knees then hoisting them up onto the ledge of unexcavated dirt in front of them. From there, another guy or sometimes two hauled the buckets over to the edge of the square, where they were either dumped into a wheelbarrow for carting to the edge of the cliff for disposal, or carried by hand to a closer dump-site. We'd switch duties regularly, every half-hour in the early part of the morning when the weather's fairly cool or every fifteen minutes later on when the sweat's really flowing. Again, because there wasn't a lot of pottery or other valuables, we got into the groove of moving pretty quickly. Doc Schuler even said, in an unguarded moment this morning, that we had done "spectacular" work this week! None of us could imagine him, who's normally quite unflappable and understated, giving higher praise than "spectacular."

Finally, today, we actually did find a few pretty spectacular things too. Since the coin that Ian found in the first ten minutes of the first day, we hadn't had much to boast about. But once we finally got down to the bottom of our square, this morning, we found a number of nifty items right at the level of the crude plaster floor that we found there. We found four iron nails-- four!-- two of them in fragmentary form missing their heads, but the other two full and straight, between three and four inches long and very well preserved. I found two of these and Jim Gimbel found the other two. Gene Balding, meanwhile, found a partially folded-up strip of metal that we first thought to be lead but then, on closer examination, realized was actually copper. Then, a few minutes later, he found a small rectangular tablet or slab of lead, about 20 x 35 mm and between 1 and 2 mm thick. None of these items were, of course, anywhere near as spectacular as the glass amulet that Darryl Schmidt found in his square a few days ago, or even the beautiful wall that the crew in A-0 has been working on the last couple of days. But after a week of schlepping nothing but dirt, dirt, and more dirt, six pieces of metal (plus a few very interestingly shaped shards of glass as well, from the bottoms and sides of fancy vessels), for our crew at least this was really pretty spectacular.

Within our team, I've already touched on Jim Gimbel's skill with a pick. He's also a very funny guy, sparking off comments made by others among us with quirky and creative wit. Ian Wemyss is like that too, I've been discovering, which is interesting since I've had him in class all year yet have hardly gotten to know him much at all until now. And Bill Hayes-- what a good-spirited, clever guy he is, always ready to jump in with a joke or wry comment. In fact, I guess I could pretty much say the same for all of us-- the other guys being Gene Balding, Dan Westberg, and now Harry Westberg too the last two days. We've warned each other a couple of times to quit having so much fun when Doc Schuler comes around, lest he decide to break up our "Gang of Seven"!

I've got to say a bit more about Harry Westberg, one of the most amazing seniors I've ever met. He's 85 years old-- yes, I typed that correctly, a full 85 years old. But what a going concern he is. Yesterday he spent several hours carrying rocks that we dug out of the square, taking them across to the "dump" on the other side of the tractor-road. Today he ran one of the wheelbarrows-- not just for a half-hour shift like the rest of us, but the entire morning up until the last half-hour, when he went back to carrying rocks again. I asked him repeatedly how he was doing and the answer was always "fine." We tried to get him to slow down, and take smaller loads, and ask for help if he needed it, etc. etc. etc., but he just kept working away with as much energy and good humour as the youngest one among us. Absolutely unbelievable.

Speaking of age, we had guessed a few days ago that our group's average age was probably about 50. We actually did the math on a water-break, later, and calculated it to be 51.3. But that was before Harry joined our group-- he brought it up pretty close to 60! The funniest part was (we joked) that he also brought up the productivity ratio at the same time.

And that's the story behind this post's title, "a couple of downs, and a step back up." The big down was the cancellation of the trip to Jerusalem. A down of a different sort was our group's gradual progress from surface level down to the plastered floor, more than half a metre below. The step back up was the great good fun we had, all week long. And that's quite enough for today.