Setting is Kibbutz Yahel, which is not just the Negev desert, but the Arava, the hottest part of the Negev.
The heavily irrigated fields we worked there ended at the Jordanian border (those mountains in the distance are miles within Jordan), and we were about 20 miles from Petra as the crow flies, but couldn't get there without going all the way back to Jerusalem because…. Middle East reasons. Sometimes stray camels would wander across the border and set off security alerts, which was kind of why Yahel was there -- not so much to make money through cultivation of dates, milk, tomatoes and melons, but to serve as something of a frontier fort. (The date palms are at top left; I missed the harvest by a few weeks.)
Yahel's volunteers were even riff-raffier than those at the posh Kfar Blum way up in the lush north. This lot was almost exclusively English, with a couple of Irish and Aussies and stray crazy Colombian who only stuck around for a little while. Most of the English were from the slums of Manchester and London, save for a couple of people like Neal, who was from middle class North London and was, as I recall, an Arsenal supporter.
I don't know how to say this without sounding weird, but Neal immediately was smitten with me. He followed me around like a puppy dog and tried to get in between my then-girlfriend and me in ways that made us both laugh. I don't think it was necessarily sexual. Maybe it was the American thing, I dunno, but it was weird and would get weirder later. I've had men offer me money for sex when I was a teen, and there was this friend of my late uncle's who used to send me long mash notes, but this was nothing like that. To this day I don't know what Neal's angle was.
(That’s me at left; as you can see, I am not a pretty woman. Neal is not in the frame.)
Anyway, it was tomato plant pruning time at Yahel, so each morning we'd rise at five and head down to the fields with our gloves and our box cutters. The fields were enormous, vast, probably a quarter mile long, and we each were assigned a row. We were instructed to cut three yellow flowers off each tomato plant and move on to the next, the better to make them fruit more bounteously. (It's an insane job. The sun is so bright and the work takes so long, each night when I'd go to bed and close my eyes, all I could see was a tomato plant and it's damn yellow flowers.)
Nightmare fuel to this day.
Anyway, I was working next to Neal, probably at that little rat's design. We got all the way down to the turn-around point near the Jordanian border and we were taking a water break when this pick-up truck comes flying over the sand towards us. Out stepped Oren, a bearded badass with a pistol on his belt. He was our overseer on this job and he was not happy.
"One of these rows, all the flowers are still there. Why this?" he said.
We all looked around sheepishly.
"Whose row was this one?" he demanded.
And then that little fucker Neal pointed right straight at me.
"Okay, we do a test," Oren replied. "You two, come over here. Put your boots in the sand."
We each did so. Oren took the measure of our prints, walked back over to the tomato field, and looked at the prints there.
"You!" he said, pointing to Neal. "Come with me."
And Neal got in Oren's white truck and we never saw him again.
Yikes