Traveling as a tourist in Israel via bus is something of a nihilist metaphor for life. You find the bus out of pure luck and board at an arbitrary time that bears only a humorous relationship with any timetable; you have a vague idea of where you're going (town X) but not how large that place is, how many stops are within it, or which one is yours (is there even a stop you can call your own?); and, after hurtling past unchanging desert landscape that the local passengers around you mysteriously recognize and decode instantly, you debark at a place you know nothing about and do not recognize, and yet nonetheless it is your destination.
10:45AM: I arrive at the exact moment the bus pulls in, so have no time to devour a cheese pastry, memorize the bus schedule (bus drivers only stop where passengers who know where they're going tell them to stop in a language I cannot speak, so timetables are about as effective at expediting these trips as security blankets are at protecting you), and read my book until I've reached my Happy Place. I jostle around in line with three dozen Israeli soldiers for 10 minutes, hand my money over the driver, tell him the name of my hotel, he stares back confused but mostly unimpressed, I resort to simply saying "Mitzpe Ramon?", and he grunts in confirmation that, yes, this bus is going to someplace in that place that is somewhere other than here. I walk back to my seat tearing at hangnails.
11:15: I am listening to Leonard Cohen mourn vagrant women he actually has no feelings for, re-examining my hands for stray hangnails, and watching the last location I recognize go by. I accept that I will spend the rest of my days wandering the desert alone, babbling to the few strangers I meet about bus schedules from 2011. Will I be able to kill and cook jackals, or just have to eat raw scorpions?
11:35: I make a break for it. Stray bags and wires bump around my frame as I bounce between successive aisle-seated soldiers until I reach the front, when I ask the bus driver to stop pulling away from this remote station and open the trunk. I descend, begin fetching my bag, then quickly stop, wheel around, dash up the stairs, ask "Mitzpe Ramon?" again, and get in reply "No no no!" An old man seated nearby makes a "this bro is crazy" gesture with his hand moving in circles around his head. Either in these 10 seconds I've wasted have ruined the trip or my touristic inelegance is just too much for a reasonable non-tourist human being to bear. Again, I bump my way back to my seat.
12:40PM: We have arrived at the military base and all of the soldiers have gone. At least there are 36 fewer guns on this desultory machine that controls my future.
1:30PM: I get off with all the remaining bus inhabitants. I am in Somewhere, Israel.