Utopias
My utopia is not an idyllic, bird-tweeting Eden where people selflessly cooperate, feet never get sore and food tastes great. No, for me it’s the rare, glorious opportunity to make up for a missed opportunity. It’s a place where regret is erased. Five weeks into my Israel ramble, I experienced a sliver of this personal utopia. Elahna and I hiked a segment of Shvil Yisrael that I had skipped earlier and, in mending this gap, I not only indulged my compulsive need to finish the job but also beheld Tahanat Hanezirim, the Monks’ Mill. It was there that the German thru-hikers I had encountered, the penitents Kristina and Dorit, had reached an apotheosis of suffering as they huddled by night in the ancient rubble, as wild animals licked the ladies’ faces.
Our day began with a pretty drive through vegetable fields and orchards – oranges, olives, almonds – and then a weaving ascension into sparsely-treed hills. We parked in the village of Harduf, named for pink-flowering oleander bushes that gather along streams, and settled on the patio of a hybrid café and crafts store. A lemon tree, with lordly branches and lemons the size of grapefruits, offered shade for our table. And so appeared ceramic mugs of coffee and hefty slabs of apple cake with vanilla ice cream – delicious! This place, unlike most of Israel, had an insinuating, mellow vibe; even the teenagers sliding by in pods of three or four seemed untortured, if not content.
I told our server, an energetic woman in her 50s, that we had stumbled into Harduf, just picked it off the map. “There are no accidents,” she replied, and not ironically. “You must have a guardian angel.” Why? I asked. What’s going on here? She paused, gave us a good look-over. And then Jutka Herstein, a Hungarian immigrant, let us in on Harduf. Founded by followers of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the town’s mission, said Jukta, was “to save the earth, to save children from education today and to eat good food.” Harduf grows organic produce, raises animals humanely and recycles its waste water for watering crops – practices that make it a “dark green” town in Israeli-speak. It also operates facilities for young people with developmental disabilities. The first Waldorf School in Israel, emphasizing interdisciplinary study and the arts, was opened in Harduf.
The people of Harduf, claimed Jutka, didn’t follow the “materialistic values” of society outside the village. Her eyes swelled a bit as she invoked the decadent world below this soulful refuge. Perhaps, she said, we should see for ourselves. Stay the night at her bed and breakfast, learn more about Harduf. Jutka went to the kitchen and reappeared with a vegetarian cookbook, The Living Kitchen, which she had authored. It had graceful illustrations but “no photos, that’s food porn. And then people don’t cook.”
I told her about our goal to hike to the Monks’ Mill. This excited Jutka, who walked to the mill every day as part of her spiritual routine. Religion for her, however, was a “bad word.” Rather, she freely gathered ideas from Waldorf philosophy, Buddhism and Judaism (Christianity and Islam, no thanks) and used those ideas as “tools for inner work” and the achievement of a “personal connection to God.” It must take a lot of motivation, I said to Jutka, to maintain a spiritual toolbox rather than select one off the shelf, all of a piece. So said the man then contemplating conversion into a religion with 613 commandments detailed in the Torah, the guiding text of Judaism handed complete from G-d to Moses. Yes, our host agreed, it’s hard to go it alone. But worth it.
(Of course, Judaism doesn’t end with those commandments. It starts with them, and then the haggling begins, both around the edge and at the core. Without a clear definition of heaven or hell, Judaism is very much an anti-utopian, anti-dystopian religion. You muddle through, and maybe if you’re lucky you have a secure home/homeland and enough to eat – the proverbial, as the Israeli settlers used to say, mango under your palm tree.)
Jutka found a scrap of paper and drew a map to the Monks’ Mill. She explained the route once, and then again, and reminded us that there are no accidents in this life, none, ever. Everything means something (oy, a tiring thought). A few minutes later, as we hiked out of Harduf past vegetable gardens and low-slung concrete houses, Elahna described our new friend in a nutshell. Jutka, she said, was “aggressively Zen.”
The trail beyond the village became rocky and weaved downhill. Elahna used my trekking poles to keep her balance, to help me reclaim my lost mill. In the valley beneath us extended a grove of olive trees shaped like a pizza slice, and I thought of a paperback I had read as a child, Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which claimed that ancient astronauts guided early civilizations in developing their technologies, arts and social systems. Branded in my brain are aerial photographs of giant birds carved in the desert by the Incas, presumably with assistance from “divine” aliens cruising above in air ships. So where had they gone? And why, with such help, did the Incan Empire die away?
It took about an hour to make the valley floor, and there lay a rock breaking out in blue, white and orange stripes – a trail marker for my old friend, Shvil Yisrael. We crossed a harvested field – goats and sheep bent over the stubble, almost frozen – and past rubbly ground betraying decades-old plow marks made by departed monks. (Where they’d gone, I’m not sure, either.) Set into the base of a hill, the mill was a two-tiered edifice with an orange stucco roof. It had been built from the stones of the land rising behind it.
A small river intersected the mill, but its water wheel had been dismantled or washed away. We crossed on a stone bridge and climbed stairs under a wild tangle of purple morning glories. A couple of old Arab men – security guards, I assumed, without uniforms – greeted us and one warned, “Don’t go inside, very dangerous.” He sat in a plastic chair and smoked a Time cigarette. “American Blend,” the box boasted. Elahna chatted with the guards in Hebrew and learned that the mill is owned by the Vatican. The Pope has big plans for it, the smoker told her, maybe next year. Fix the place up, bring in tour buses. Mountain biking, restaurant, gift shop. Rollerblading, he said, skateboarding. Maybe a B & B. Yes, the Pope has big plans. All the towns surrounding the valley, Jewish and Arab, would benefit. It was to be a monkish Disneyland.
The guards waved us into the mill. We looked inside an empty room – dreary, rank with mold, a sleeping bag and pile of books in a corner – and emerged onto the second floor patio overrun with more morning glories. Not a bad way to go to ruin, plastered in blooms, but ruin nonetheless. Mountain biking? Gift shop? It was hard to imagine in this wreck, but the future is nothing if not elusive and, to the chagrin of preening prognosticators, relentlessly surprising. Ignatius Donnelley – a 19th century author who believed that modern man sprung from antediluvian Atlantis, and a major influence on Rudolf Steiner – believed that every last man has a utopia in his head, and from these utopias a better world may arise. For the Arab guards, it was a Vatican-revived Monks’ Mill and the riches that would follow.
We hiked back through a Bedouin village. Every house, it seemed, was under construction; a new basketball court sat empty in the heavy, afternoon heat. The only people we met were three school girls in full hijab who crossed the road as we approached; undeterred, we waved and called out “Hello!” The girl in front chirped “Hello!” herself, in a tingly voice, and what a beautiful smile she had. By the time we circled around Harduf, uphill all the way, and made it back to the café, Elahna was exhausted. Jutka bid her recline on a kind of fainting couch in the dining room. I rustled up cold water and a bag of Bambams from the town store. The snack’s presence may have been a concession to their teenagers and a sign, thankfully, that the good people of Harduf were ardent eco-believers, but not fanatics. Elahna soon arose and we enjoyed a late lunch from Jutka’s kitchen.
First time around, I missed the Monks’ Mill. Via the idyll of Harduf, I was lucky enough to get it back. That is utopia.
@ @ @
Later that day we pulled up to Kibbutz Gan Shmuel; its gate extended across the road like a horizontal construction crane. Elahna asked for her cousin Dror. The guard knew Dror, everyone knew Dror. He was the only Dror in Gan Shmuel, a kibbutz founded in 1923 and now the primary location of Gan Shmuel Foods, the leading producer of natural juices, concentrates and assorted beverage materials (whatever that means) in Israel. Yashar, yashar, the guard told us. Say hello to Dror. The gate retracted.
He came to us on a beat-up bicycle. In his late 50s, Dror has watery brown eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, easy on the pepper. His name means “release from servitude” in Hebrew and, indeed, he projected a shambling, glad-to-be-free air. (Dror’s name also means “swallow,” as in the bug-eating, diasphoric bird that exists on every continent except Antarctica.) At Dror’s apartment, in a neighborhood of units beneath overhanging trees, we met his wife, daughter and a couple of grandkids; against the wall played a TV mounted on a Singer sewing machine console picked up second-hand and long ago. Killer whales dove on the big screen, corkscrewed through the deep. Giant turtles made patrol. After we downed glasses of the kibbutz’ orange juice, Dror took his visitors on a tour.
Membership in kibbutzim is voluntary, except when you’re born into one. Until recently, most were cooperative farms that practiced the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to their needs.” Salaries and living circumstances were equalized; the Internationale was sung on May Day; and kids slept away from their parents in “children’s homes” as a buffer against the ills of bourgeoisie family life. And so, the theory went, a stronger, self-sufficient Jew was born. Today there are 273 kibbutzim in Israel, containing over 100,000 people. In fact, the kibbutz experience peaked in popularity soon after independence, with 7.5 percent of the population living on a kibbutz in 1950. That number has fallen to less than two percent today. Most kibbutzim have privatized, allowing a member to earn more money and live in a bigger house than his neighbor, and many have become industrial concerns – such as Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.
At agricultural kibbutzim, drip-irrigation hoses are strung by foreign workers and international volunteers – a sight that would have shocked the sunburned founders. By his own labor, not others, a kibbutz Jew gains strength of body and character. Or did, once upon a time – the classic kibbutz, the socialist dream, has almost died away. Only the buildings remain. Dror pointed out the abandoned, gymnasium-sized “children’s homes” where his older kids had slept and eaten with their peers. He was, he said, glad that his younger children had stayed at home. Times changed. He changed. And then someone called out, “Dror, Dror!” Two young men ran up – home from the army – and he gave them warm hugs. Everyone knows Dror.
Kibbutz Gan Shmuel was an enterprising place. Dror brought us to the concrete fish pens; giant carp idled there, awaiting transfer to the backyard ponds of Europe. He showed us, too, where alligators had been raised for their meat and skins until the sun disappeared for ten days – a rare, cloudy event in these parts, who could have predicted? – causing the gators to perish from deprivation of UV rays. “And so ended the alligator adventure,” said Dror.
At the communal dining hall, preparations were underway for a kibbutznikim wedding. We walked along new housing blocks for young singles and a rec center for seniors, some of whom had been raised on the kibbutz. Nearby, parrots swooped between date palms and towering eucalyptus trees. The kibbutz cemetery, darkly shaded, included a Holocaust memorial of stunning simplicity: on a rectangular bed of red mulch, twenty or so white, volcanic stones had been stood on end. Each stone represented a kibbutz family that had suffered the death of a relative in the Nazi genocide. Elahna asked Dror if anyone in their family tree were Holocaust victims. He blinked; his eyes became even more watery. “Wow” he said, two or three times. Just “Wow,” as if in awe of the unsaid.
Dror has lived at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel for his entire adult life. The oldest son of Elahna’s Aunt Miriam, he fled Jerusalem at age fourteen and became a shepherd at a kibbutz in the Arava desert. He loved it, he said, but he was a bit wild and got in trouble and, long story short, ended up here. Dror later served in a tank battalion during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (For two weeks, no one in the family knew what had become of him.) The combat experiences of Dror’s unit are detailed in a book, published in Hebrew, called On the Brink. Last year, Dror’s youngest son joined his father’s old battalion. That was a surprise, said Dror, and it touched him deeply.
He got out his keys and opened the gate to Gan Shmuel’s sprawling juice works. One warehouse contained hundreds of drums of juice concentrates and purees ready for shipment abroad. Dror took us to the distillery filled with snaking pipes, boilers and tall stacks of filters. These filters, Elahna said, they’re just like dialysis equipment! We ducked into Dror’s office; from his computer station, he monitored production of “clear,” a colorless, natural distillation of intense juice flavor, such as mango or strawberry. Clear can be dropped into a drink without clouding it. Martinis made with the alchemy of clear were all the rage in Japan. Recently, said Dror, the Japanese made a $100,000 rush order of clear – they even flew a plane out to pick it up. What, I wondered, would the founders of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, worker’s paradise for the new Zionist Jew, think of that?
We left the juice works. And then it happened. On the side of a path, near a fence smothered in vines, I saw the amazing doocheefat. The funny little fellow pecked at a bug or worm in the dirt, his orange crown bobbing, his striped butt wiggling. He was smaller than I’d imagined. “That’s him,” I yelled. “That’s him, that’s him!” Elahna screamed and jumped, I kid you not, into my arms. Doocheefat paid no mind, kept pecking. Dror broke out laughing at the crazy Americans who were so thrilled to spy Israel’s goofy national bird, a creature considered tref, not kosher, because it brutally holds its prey down with claws. Elahna scrambled for the camera, hurry, hurry, but the bird flew off and not gracefully at that.
“We saw doocheefat!” my wife hollered. The day of utopias was complete.
@ @ @
Our day began with a pretty drive through vegetable fields and orchards – oranges, olives, almonds – and then a weaving ascension into sparsely-treed hills. We parked in the village of Harduf, named for pink-flowering oleander bushes that gather along streams, and settled on the patio of a hybrid café and crafts store. A lemon tree, with lordly branches and lemons the size of grapefruits, offered shade for our table. And so appeared ceramic mugs of coffee and hefty slabs of apple cake with vanilla ice cream – delicious! This place, unlike most of Israel, had an insinuating, mellow vibe; even the teenagers sliding by in pods of three or four seemed untortured, if not content.
I told our server, an energetic woman in her 50s, that we had stumbled into Harduf, just picked it off the map. “There are no accidents,” she replied, and not ironically. “You must have a guardian angel.” Why? I asked. What’s going on here? She paused, gave us a good look-over. And then Jutka Herstein, a Hungarian immigrant, let us in on Harduf. Founded by followers of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the town’s mission, said Jukta, was “to save the earth, to save children from education today and to eat good food.” Harduf grows organic produce, raises animals humanely and recycles its waste water for watering crops – practices that make it a “dark green” town in Israeli-speak. It also operates facilities for young people with developmental disabilities. The first Waldorf School in Israel, emphasizing interdisciplinary study and the arts, was opened in Harduf.
The people of Harduf, claimed Jutka, didn’t follow the “materialistic values” of society outside the village. Her eyes swelled a bit as she invoked the decadent world below this soulful refuge. Perhaps, she said, we should see for ourselves. Stay the night at her bed and breakfast, learn more about Harduf. Jutka went to the kitchen and reappeared with a vegetarian cookbook, The Living Kitchen, which she had authored. It had graceful illustrations but “no photos, that’s food porn. And then people don’t cook.”
I told her about our goal to hike to the Monks’ Mill. This excited Jutka, who walked to the mill every day as part of her spiritual routine. Religion for her, however, was a “bad word.” Rather, she freely gathered ideas from Waldorf philosophy, Buddhism and Judaism (Christianity and Islam, no thanks) and used those ideas as “tools for inner work” and the achievement of a “personal connection to God.” It must take a lot of motivation, I said to Jutka, to maintain a spiritual toolbox rather than select one off the shelf, all of a piece. So said the man then contemplating conversion into a religion with 613 commandments detailed in the Torah, the guiding text of Judaism handed complete from G-d to Moses. Yes, our host agreed, it’s hard to go it alone. But worth it.
(Of course, Judaism doesn’t end with those commandments. It starts with them, and then the haggling begins, both around the edge and at the core. Without a clear definition of heaven or hell, Judaism is very much an anti-utopian, anti-dystopian religion. You muddle through, and maybe if you’re lucky you have a secure home/homeland and enough to eat – the proverbial, as the Israeli settlers used to say, mango under your palm tree.)
Jutka found a scrap of paper and drew a map to the Monks’ Mill. She explained the route once, and then again, and reminded us that there are no accidents in this life, none, ever. Everything means something (oy, a tiring thought). A few minutes later, as we hiked out of Harduf past vegetable gardens and low-slung concrete houses, Elahna described our new friend in a nutshell. Jutka, she said, was “aggressively Zen.”
The trail beyond the village became rocky and weaved downhill. Elahna used my trekking poles to keep her balance, to help me reclaim my lost mill. In the valley beneath us extended a grove of olive trees shaped like a pizza slice, and I thought of a paperback I had read as a child, Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which claimed that ancient astronauts guided early civilizations in developing their technologies, arts and social systems. Branded in my brain are aerial photographs of giant birds carved in the desert by the Incas, presumably with assistance from “divine” aliens cruising above in air ships. So where had they gone? And why, with such help, did the Incan Empire die away?
It took about an hour to make the valley floor, and there lay a rock breaking out in blue, white and orange stripes – a trail marker for my old friend, Shvil Yisrael. We crossed a harvested field – goats and sheep bent over the stubble, almost frozen – and past rubbly ground betraying decades-old plow marks made by departed monks. (Where they’d gone, I’m not sure, either.) Set into the base of a hill, the mill was a two-tiered edifice with an orange stucco roof. It had been built from the stones of the land rising behind it.
A small river intersected the mill, but its water wheel had been dismantled or washed away. We crossed on a stone bridge and climbed stairs under a wild tangle of purple morning glories. A couple of old Arab men – security guards, I assumed, without uniforms – greeted us and one warned, “Don’t go inside, very dangerous.” He sat in a plastic chair and smoked a Time cigarette. “American Blend,” the box boasted. Elahna chatted with the guards in Hebrew and learned that the mill is owned by the Vatican. The Pope has big plans for it, the smoker told her, maybe next year. Fix the place up, bring in tour buses. Mountain biking, restaurant, gift shop. Rollerblading, he said, skateboarding. Maybe a B & B. Yes, the Pope has big plans. All the towns surrounding the valley, Jewish and Arab, would benefit. It was to be a monkish Disneyland.
The guards waved us into the mill. We looked inside an empty room – dreary, rank with mold, a sleeping bag and pile of books in a corner – and emerged onto the second floor patio overrun with more morning glories. Not a bad way to go to ruin, plastered in blooms, but ruin nonetheless. Mountain biking? Gift shop? It was hard to imagine in this wreck, but the future is nothing if not elusive and, to the chagrin of preening prognosticators, relentlessly surprising. Ignatius Donnelley – a 19th century author who believed that modern man sprung from antediluvian Atlantis, and a major influence on Rudolf Steiner – believed that every last man has a utopia in his head, and from these utopias a better world may arise. For the Arab guards, it was a Vatican-revived Monks’ Mill and the riches that would follow.
We hiked back through a Bedouin village. Every house, it seemed, was under construction; a new basketball court sat empty in the heavy, afternoon heat. The only people we met were three school girls in full hijab who crossed the road as we approached; undeterred, we waved and called out “Hello!” The girl in front chirped “Hello!” herself, in a tingly voice, and what a beautiful smile she had. By the time we circled around Harduf, uphill all the way, and made it back to the café, Elahna was exhausted. Jutka bid her recline on a kind of fainting couch in the dining room. I rustled up cold water and a bag of Bambams from the town store. The snack’s presence may have been a concession to their teenagers and a sign, thankfully, that the good people of Harduf were ardent eco-believers, but not fanatics. Elahna soon arose and we enjoyed a late lunch from Jutka’s kitchen.
First time around, I missed the Monks’ Mill. Via the idyll of Harduf, I was lucky enough to get it back. That is utopia.
@ @ @
Later that day we pulled up to Kibbutz Gan Shmuel; its gate extended across the road like a horizontal construction crane. Elahna asked for her cousin Dror. The guard knew Dror, everyone knew Dror. He was the only Dror in Gan Shmuel, a kibbutz founded in 1923 and now the primary location of Gan Shmuel Foods, the leading producer of natural juices, concentrates and assorted beverage materials (whatever that means) in Israel. Yashar, yashar, the guard told us. Say hello to Dror. The gate retracted.
He came to us on a beat-up bicycle. In his late 50s, Dror has watery brown eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, easy on the pepper. His name means “release from servitude” in Hebrew and, indeed, he projected a shambling, glad-to-be-free air. (Dror’s name also means “swallow,” as in the bug-eating, diasphoric bird that exists on every continent except Antarctica.) At Dror’s apartment, in a neighborhood of units beneath overhanging trees, we met his wife, daughter and a couple of grandkids; against the wall played a TV mounted on a Singer sewing machine console picked up second-hand and long ago. Killer whales dove on the big screen, corkscrewed through the deep. Giant turtles made patrol. After we downed glasses of the kibbutz’ orange juice, Dror took his visitors on a tour.
Membership in kibbutzim is voluntary, except when you’re born into one. Until recently, most were cooperative farms that practiced the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to their needs.” Salaries and living circumstances were equalized; the Internationale was sung on May Day; and kids slept away from their parents in “children’s homes” as a buffer against the ills of bourgeoisie family life. And so, the theory went, a stronger, self-sufficient Jew was born. Today there are 273 kibbutzim in Israel, containing over 100,000 people. In fact, the kibbutz experience peaked in popularity soon after independence, with 7.5 percent of the population living on a kibbutz in 1950. That number has fallen to less than two percent today. Most kibbutzim have privatized, allowing a member to earn more money and live in a bigger house than his neighbor, and many have become industrial concerns – such as Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.
At agricultural kibbutzim, drip-irrigation hoses are strung by foreign workers and international volunteers – a sight that would have shocked the sunburned founders. By his own labor, not others, a kibbutz Jew gains strength of body and character. Or did, once upon a time – the classic kibbutz, the socialist dream, has almost died away. Only the buildings remain. Dror pointed out the abandoned, gymnasium-sized “children’s homes” where his older kids had slept and eaten with their peers. He was, he said, glad that his younger children had stayed at home. Times changed. He changed. And then someone called out, “Dror, Dror!” Two young men ran up – home from the army – and he gave them warm hugs. Everyone knows Dror.
Kibbutz Gan Shmuel was an enterprising place. Dror brought us to the concrete fish pens; giant carp idled there, awaiting transfer to the backyard ponds of Europe. He showed us, too, where alligators had been raised for their meat and skins until the sun disappeared for ten days – a rare, cloudy event in these parts, who could have predicted? – causing the gators to perish from deprivation of UV rays. “And so ended the alligator adventure,” said Dror.
At the communal dining hall, preparations were underway for a kibbutznikim wedding. We walked along new housing blocks for young singles and a rec center for seniors, some of whom had been raised on the kibbutz. Nearby, parrots swooped between date palms and towering eucalyptus trees. The kibbutz cemetery, darkly shaded, included a Holocaust memorial of stunning simplicity: on a rectangular bed of red mulch, twenty or so white, volcanic stones had been stood on end. Each stone represented a kibbutz family that had suffered the death of a relative in the Nazi genocide. Elahna asked Dror if anyone in their family tree were Holocaust victims. He blinked; his eyes became even more watery. “Wow” he said, two or three times. Just “Wow,” as if in awe of the unsaid.
Dror has lived at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel for his entire adult life. The oldest son of Elahna’s Aunt Miriam, he fled Jerusalem at age fourteen and became a shepherd at a kibbutz in the Arava desert. He loved it, he said, but he was a bit wild and got in trouble and, long story short, ended up here. Dror later served in a tank battalion during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (For two weeks, no one in the family knew what had become of him.) The combat experiences of Dror’s unit are detailed in a book, published in Hebrew, called On the Brink. Last year, Dror’s youngest son joined his father’s old battalion. That was a surprise, said Dror, and it touched him deeply.
He got out his keys and opened the gate to Gan Shmuel’s sprawling juice works. One warehouse contained hundreds of drums of juice concentrates and purees ready for shipment abroad. Dror took us to the distillery filled with snaking pipes, boilers and tall stacks of filters. These filters, Elahna said, they’re just like dialysis equipment! We ducked into Dror’s office; from his computer station, he monitored production of “clear,” a colorless, natural distillation of intense juice flavor, such as mango or strawberry. Clear can be dropped into a drink without clouding it. Martinis made with the alchemy of clear were all the rage in Japan. Recently, said Dror, the Japanese made a $100,000 rush order of clear – they even flew a plane out to pick it up. What, I wondered, would the founders of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, worker’s paradise for the new Zionist Jew, think of that?
We left the juice works. And then it happened. On the side of a path, near a fence smothered in vines, I saw the amazing doocheefat. The funny little fellow pecked at a bug or worm in the dirt, his orange crown bobbing, his striped butt wiggling. He was smaller than I’d imagined. “That’s him,” I yelled. “That’s him, that’s him!” Elahna screamed and jumped, I kid you not, into my arms. Doocheefat paid no mind, kept pecking. Dror broke out laughing at the crazy Americans who were so thrilled to spy Israel’s goofy national bird, a creature considered tref, not kosher, because it brutally holds its prey down with claws. Elahna scrambled for the camera, hurry, hurry, but the bird flew off and not gracefully at that.
“We saw doocheefat!” my wife hollered. The day of utopias was complete.
@ @ @