They Paved Paradise

The quadruplets

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” As I walk across the land we recently bought, Joni Mitchell’s lyrics echo in my mind. This land is empty, save for jutting rocks and boulders. The gravelly, dry, and dusty ground crunches below my feet. 

A few hardy weeds grow in clumps, clinging on for life under a scorching sun. At the back of the property is a dead tree; skeletal, scorched, and black, it is a remnant of a fire that ravaged this parcel of land a few years ago.

And now, this infertile land is ours to breathe life into by using natural ways to transform it into a food forest. The major building block and key component of a food forest is healthy, fertile soil, and our first obstacle ahead is this gravel. 

I first thought the gravel was superficial like a thin glaze on a cake, and would give way to fecundity below. Our food forest expert ordered a soil test, hiring a tractor to dig down and extract a sample to send to a lab.

One morning, a small tractor arrived, its digger poised for the mini excavation. Exhausted by our recent move and our ongoing house renovation, I was excited to be outside kicking around the earth and dreaming of the planting phase of our new life.

We stood around the digger as the driver raised the bucket and lowered it to the ground. Clunk. The machine reared back on its back wheels, looking as if it would do a digger somersault. The driver made another attempt. Bang. 

He moved the digger and started to scrape a second area. Crunch. The digger rose up in protest, the driver scratched his head, and the food forest expert directed him to yet another part of the land. 

When we bought this land and I asked about the gravel, the former owner mentioned that he had rented out this land for parking during the Pope’s Israel trip. That was back in March, 2000 when John Paul II delivered a homily near Korazim. 

And here we are, standing on a gravelly plot some 22 years later. An unassuming tractor is trying to dig a hole for a purist permaculturalist so that us uninitiated land owners can grow trees organically. But what happens when there is no soil so to speak?

The digger finally found a spot that gave way and we stood beside the hole with bated breath. Gravel, small rocks, and more gravel came out. “Deeper,” the permaculturalist instructed.

The little digger groaned and fell back, then dug a bit deeper. More rocks. White, chalky, limestone. We peered inside. Deeper, he tried, but this little digger could not dig. It was just too little. 

We set aside a date the following week and a bigger digger arrived. The permaculturalist indicated a spot and the claws went into the earth. Scratchhhh went the digger, nails scraping  blackboard. 

He tried a different angle. Scraaape. We peered into the hole as he unearthed a giant boulder. The arm heaved as he pulled it forth, birthing it from a millennia-long slumber. 

“Gorgeous,” I marvelled, shocked that I would use this term to describe a rock. These were not regular rocks, but basalt beauties that were spewed from volcanoes in the Golan some 100,000 to 700,000 years ago. 

When I heard the scratching sound again, I realized that it had a twin. No, it was one of quadruplets. I touched the newborn giants, still warm from their long gestation in the ground. And then it dawned on me that I may be in the rock-collecting business and not a permaculture farmer after all. 

Down the tractor claw went, finally extracting a chunk of dark earth in its metal palm. The permaculturalist jumped into the hole to examine the earth. I took a clump in my hand and smelled it. Pressed it. Clayish. 

Similar to an archeological excavation where civilizations are delineated by natural lines underground, there was a division between the gravelly white stuff and the dark stuff about a foot below the surface. 

This caused the puzzled permaculturalist to call the former owner. He learned that 22 years ago, in preparation for the Pope’s visit, a tractor carted off the huge boulders sitting atop the land. As for the rocks partially jutting out of the soil, they were extracted like cavities and the holes then filled in with gravel, rocks, and assorted garbage to put up a parking lot.

So here we stand atop our thick pile of gravel, close to Capernaum, the place of the famous Beatitudes’ teachings and even closer to ancient Chorazim, which was cursed in the Book of Matthew. At the start of the millennium, John Paul II visited and delivered this homily. 

We have not received the results from the soil lab and the project is already taking interesting turns. I am learning the history of this area, and about the Evangelical Triangle. In the times of the Tanach, Korazim was the wheat capital. 

Although I see no wheat, the rich basalt soil endows thriving mango, lychee, sabra, grape, and fig. 

We have a rocky road ahead of us, literally, but are up for a challenge with lots more tractor time scheduled for the near future. In the meantime, I will appreciate each and every basalt and limestone rock that is unearthed and birthed.