Ground Control to Major Major

We took off from Beirut, a parking lot, as the sun hung low in the end-of-winter sky, navigating through narrow streets and metal asteroids. We mocked stupid drivers, cursed semi-trucks, laughed as an unfortunate man waved other cars around his taxi with a broken axle. Beirut turned into suburbs and we climbed higher and higher and farther and farther into the Lebanese atmosphere.

The road from Beirut into the great beyond is steep, necessitating harrowing curves and skillful navigation. With big eyes and good fortune I watched a billion possible head on collisions not come to fruition. We left daylight and approached the darkness of Lebanese space, reaching the peak of the mountain road just after the last rays of the day's sun had become forever forgotten. We hit the police checkpoint, then the army checkpoint, then around the bend, down the hill, and...wow.

A full moon flush with the ruddiness of a new night illuminated the entirety of the Bekaa Valley, whose tiny, twinkling lights were no match for the radiant sphere dominating the cosmos before us. No photo or words can recapture the instantaneous breathlessness of that moment. We pulled over in a vain effort to forever preserve the moment in binary form, but even the cosmonaut's fancy camera could not save the initial awe of the sight.

The clarity of the night lent a brilliance to the stars that one doesn't get in an urban cosmos. Orion hunted Ursula while she tried to protect her cub. Scorpio clicked his shiny claws and Leo paraded with his luminescent pride and I struggled to recall the names of constellations I had known so well as a child. The night cloaked the posters of dark stars, hiding Nasrallah and dead Khoemeini and Imam Musa, who left the building long ago.

The night also masked the potholes, blackholes, a danger to the health of our four-wheeled ship. The cosmonaut navigated the treacherous path to Planet Btedhi with wild abandon. Eventually, we landed. Yes, outerspace is cold, if you were wondering, but there was plenty of heat to get us through the night.

I woke up to this view, fortunately early enough to enjoy a sunny warmth for a couple of hours before the winds began to blow some weather in. Planet Btedhi is a lot like Planet Earth, only they don't have 24 hour electricity or internet and there are no car horns or blaring pop music to disturb the peace. The temperature began to plummet by the afternoon; comfort was a shooting star diving out of existence. I learned about photovoltaics and watched the Btedhians prepare for the next day's workshop on that topic. Wires and computer chips were everywhere. The Btedhians are a smart race of people who want to use the sun to overcome their electricity problems. What a novel idea! Maybe the Earthlings should try it!

On Planet Btedhi, stores don't have shelves. If you want to buy a toaster, you have to take it off the tree it's hanging from. On Planet Btedhi, their pizza doesn't have tomato sauce. Also, they drink pineapple beer. And they have woolly animals with tiny legs that participate in marathons on the winding roads. Oh, and they have ham from invisible pigs. I didn't see any, anyway. Also, the mystery of the Flintstones has been solved, because we found the ruins of their home near a reservoir in the hills. You can see this amazing dwelling place in the photos that follow. Not quite as impressive as the Roman ruins on Planet Earth, however.

American astronauts helped the Btedhians alleviate their water problem by building this reservoir, as another alien race with yellow skin, gnashing teeth, and Iranian weapons was stealing all the water for their crops. It's still not enough water, for climate change is causing desertification in Lebanon and there just isn't enough snowfall in the winters any more. Snowfall is vital to the Bekaa because there is no rainfall in the summer. The water table is found deep in the ground, too, so wells for irrigation have to be dug quite deep, and the fuel to run the generators for the pumps is expensive. Solar powered pumps would change the lives of the farmers out there, but that takes funding, so we'll have to work on that.

On Sunday I learned that the Btedhian weather can be unkind. Shamefully I did not attend the workshop that the Btedhians worked so hard to prepare, and I regret that, but my Earthling body was no match for the alien temperatures which had dipped into what humans would call winter. But the workshop was given in the Btedhian language and though I have learned some phrases, the complicated topic of photovoltaics - a word I hadn't even known in English until my voyage to the planet - would have left me wishing I had stayed under the down comforter in the headquarters. Which is what I did, by the way. The weather was such that we had to delay our return trip for another day; however, we had expected that, and I had packed extra undies for the occasion.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to miss that cosmonaut, for he is returning to Earth while I will continue to float through the vast expanse of outerspace. But it is just one mission that has finished, and perhaps we can continue to help the Btedhians overcome their energy problems.

The title of this post is a reference to the character Major Major in Catch 22 and David Bowie's Space Oddity, both chosen for a purpose. Wiki says it well:

His character also stands in contrast to the other authority figures in the book who relish their power and use the bureaucratic system and the law of Catch-22 to maintain or try to increase their power over others.

Here are some more photos of Planet Btedhi:

Making Arak

Yesterday I went back to the village of Btedhi in Bekaa. We left at 5am and hit a patch of fog in the mountains that was so thick you felt like you had reached the edge of the world and then went into the nothingness beyond it. The bad weather must have covered all of Lebanon, because when we left Beirut it was raining after a thunderstorm, and it rained all day in Bekaa Valley. You couldn't see the mountaintops. And it was cold. Winter cold. In the thirties. We got there so early that nothing was open for breakfast, even in Baalbek, which is as close to a city as you're going to get out there. Always cool to see the Baalbek ruins and say a silent prayer to Bacchus. Not so cool to see the streets lined with Hezbollah flags, but it is what it is.

The weather was such that we got stuck in Btedhi for the night, but that just made for a great night. One of the highlights was hanging out with a half a dozen guys from the village while they were making arak, Lebanon's version of Ouzo. You could smell the alcohol as soon as you got out of the car, and inside the small room the fumes were enough to make you drunk. At one point there was so little oxygen in the room that no one's lighters would light, which set off roaring laughter.

They had already processed the grapes into alcohol and had added the anise and sugar to work towards the finished product. The first jar they filled was 30% alcohol. It decreased each time to 28, 27, and further down. When they finish the batch, they mix the jars together to get about 25%. I had a sip of the 30% stuff straight from the tube and thought my body was going to catch on fire. But then water was added to the glass, as is the way arak is drunk, and it tasted nice (though it was still too strong for my beer-drinking taste buds.)

I was told the distiller worked exactly like an espresso machine. The top of it is heated and water is poured onto it, causing condensation on the inside, which is what's needed to start the flow of arak.

I've had homemade spirits before - in Bulgaria we drank rakia semi-frequently (often purchased from under the table at the Veliko Turnovo market) - but never straight from the distiller. I enjoyed the evening immensely and thought about similar times in Bulgaria and how, like the Bulgarians, Lebanese grow their own food as if it's a celebration of life.

The clouds cleared for the night and without urban luminosity you could see myriads of stars and feel your own insignificance in the universe. The moon was so bright you could see the patchwork fields and tiny towns of the valley quite clearly, and the mountains glowed white with the snow that had fallen all day. You could almost forget there were problems in the world.

I saw the sunrise over snowcapped mountains and enjoyed breathing the crisp, cold winter air as everywhere I looked were great white heights. The snow had come very close to falling on the village, and truthfully, I wouldn't have minded so much, as I had good heating.

Going back there this weekend (and wouldn't mind getting stuck an extra day if the weather is bad in the mountains.) Will take a look at the USAID built reservoir to see what my tax dollars are doing. Glad to have a reason to wear my hiking boots.

The Ingenius Gentleman of Btedhi

I spent my Saturday in Btedhi in the Bekaa Valley. Simply breathtaking. Or perhaps a better term would be breathgiving, for the air cleanses your lungs and the views cleanse your head after being in the chaos of Beirut for so long. The village is near Baalbek, whose ruins I had previously visited in July 2009. (That's Baalbek in the hazy distance in this photo.)

Some highlights:

• Clean air.
• Snow-capped mountains.
• Olive groves and wine fields.
• Satellite dishes at gypsy tents.
• Hawks instead of pigeons.
• Peace and quiet.
• Wind turbine juxtaposed with the ancient ruins it sits on.
• Roman column rising up in the middle of flat farmland that was part of a series serving as a guide to Baalbek.
• Nearly getting shot by some idiot hunter (the bullet hit two feet in front of me.)
• View of all of Beirut lit up at night.
• Going from 35 degrees to over 60 in the span of 30-45 minutes.
  
• Good company.

A friend who is working on alternative energy out there graciously let me ride with him into the valley, whose luscious farmland, snow-capped mountains, Roman ruins, steepled churches, Hezbollah flags, gypsy tents, potholed roads, and crazy drivers make a visit seem like an adventure into an impossible land.

There's something about olive trees that fills me with a sense that the past, present, and future are indistinguishable from each other. Very spiritual trees, even when they are tamed in rows. These photos contain plenty of them, including the one above.

The sunshine was nice and the empty roads begged one to wander them. As the afternoon wore on, the wind began to whip its way around the curves and corners with an iciness that reflected the snow on the mountains. Still, for a good part of the day it was warm enough to be outside, so I meandered around the village and sport a bit of sunburn to prove it.

As always, the thoughts that filled my head were various and roaming. There were the usual musings about history, about all of the empires who have controlled this land, with the bias of my Western education providing me with extensive knowledge about what the Romans did here while teaching me next to nothing about the non-Western empires. There was another failed grasp to understand how something so ugly as Hezbollah and sectarianism could exist amidst such beauty. I thought about how Lebanon's greatest writer, Kahlil Gibran, was born just over one mountain but achieved his prestige in New York and how Syria was just over the mountains on the other side of the valley. I marveled at how my sight deceived me in the distance to the mountains and thought how odd I was so warm when up there was much colder, though not enough to keep the snow from melting before my eyes.

I thought of more practical things, too, about how there are no water systems in many of the villages in Lebanon so everyone has to have their own water tank and how foreign governments were trying to help build new systems with the aid of local NGOs but progress was extremely slow, with bureaucratic nonsense and politics mostly at fault. In Btedhi, a sign proudly proclaimed that the Italian government is aiding in the development of an irrigation system.

And then there was the windmill.

It may seem a bit quixotic to be putting up wind turbines and solar panels in a land where corruption is so severe that they can't even make the street lights run at night, let alone provide electricity for 24 hours a day. But change doesn't come when people sit back and do nothing. Kudos to those who are doing something. They're astronauts exploring the vast expanse of Lebanon energy problems. Or, er, cosmonauts.

Other photos, twenty hours after I started to post them. (Thanks, Lebanon internet.)