Sometimes you just have to roll the dice, or at least, that was my thinking when I decided to travel from Tel Aviv back home to Jerusalem on Sunday morning.
After spending most of Saturday night in the safe room of a Tel Aviv hotel as the missile alerts rang out every hour or so, we were ready to take our chances traveling across the city and traveling by train.
Rolling the dice might sound like a tough, wise motto, but it’s not something I would normally say or think. If I had a motto, it would probably be, “Wouldn’t this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive?”, a line from the movie Broadcast News by James L. Brooks, or “If the shoe doesn’t fit in the shoe store, it’s never going to fit,” which Nora Ephron wrote.
But as the news came on in the middle of the night of a woman being killed in Tel Aviv by a missile, and after I smelled, or thought I smelled, buildings on fire as I walked down to the safe room, I wanted to get home. Inside the safe room, which had seemed so secure that morning, there was endless talk of how safe rooms were not really that safe, and how the best place to go was an underground parking garage, if reinforced, or a light rail station. Neither option was anywhere nearby. I couldn’t face another night like that, so we decided to take our chances.
Getting to the train station in Tel Aviv from our hotel, the part I was most worried about, turned out to be the easy part. We left the hotel as soon as one missile barrage ended, thinking we had about two hours, which turned out to be true, and walked to Dizengoff Center, where we knew we could either catch a bus or take shelter. A bus pulled up with two other passengers and took us to an eerily empty Azrieli Center, normally one of Tel Aviv’s busiest shopping centers, where we found out a train to Jerusalem was leaving soon, at a totally different time from what the app had said.
Surrounded mostly by soldiers, we waited for the train to pull up and watched an Israel Railways employee smoking a cigarette on the platform across the way in front of a “No Smoking” sign. I grew up surrounded by heavy smokers, and recognized that this was a kind of force majeure situation. No one told her to stop.
The train arrived and departed, moving along smoothly until it stopped, in an area near Ben Shemen. It moved backwards and forwards a little at first, but then it stayed still.
For a few minutes, it seemed as innocuous as it would have on any other day. Then, we began to get antsy. In that situation, you feel so exposed, so vulnerable, and, if a missile alert were actually to sound then, so stupid. The feeling of stupidity is the one that I think doesn’t get the attention that it should. People abroad imagine raw terror as the primary emotion they would feel if they were under missile attack, but I often feel like an idiot for being in this situation. I’m not saying I think that people who are victims of missile attacks are stupid, not at all, but there is something humiliating about knowing this chunk of hardware is racing through space towards your general area.
Just as people began to grumble and ask what was going on, an announcement played, saying the train would move “in a few minutes,” which as we all know can mean anything from a few minutes to an hour or so. Why today? I thought. We passed the time playing vocabulary quizzes, and, to quote a line from the movie classic, All About Eve, “the minutes flew by like hours.” Finally, the train resumed its journey, but slowly, very slowly. The entire trip, which normally would have taken about 35 minutes, took an hour and 10 minutes. On this, of all days, when the train car felt like a cage, the delay was difficult to bear.
As we went through one of the final tunnels before the train entered the Jerusalem train station, we got one of those pre-alert alerts from the Home Front Command, saying that, “In a few minutes, alerts are expected in your area.” It seemed like good timing, because we were about to enter Yitzhak Navon Station, which is one of the world’s deepest train stations, and certainly one of the safest places in Jerusalem, if not the safest.
But the missile alert that generally follows the warning didn’t come and we headed out and waited for our bus. Just then, we got another “In a few minutes” alert and for a few seconds, we debated returning to the station. But our bus pulled up and, along with everyone else who was waiting, we jumped on it, and it took us all the way to our destination, very quickly. This experience made me value the bravery of bus drivers, who stick to their routes as the alerts keep coming. We thanked the driver as we got off.
More good timing: Just as we turned towards our building, the real alert sounded – time to head for the shelter, a block away, where we played more word games and waited it out.
Steely nerves needed for journeys during war times
Now I’m back home and feel as if I got away with something. The tension on this very familiar journey, one I make a few times a month, brought to mind a line from a book my son Danny, who is on the autism spectrum, has loved to read and have read to him for over 25 years. It’s called Truck Song by Diane Siebert, with pictures by Byron Barton, a classic for kids who love trucks and road trips. It’s an illustrated poem about a trucker driving coast to coast and features the sentence: “Up mountain roads/‘round hairpin curves/with eagle eyes/and steely nerves.”
One shouldn’t need steely nerves to take a train trip between two nearby cities, but that is the world we live in today.
Turning on the news as I unpacked from the weekend trip that I had gambled unsuccessfully wouldn’t end with a war, I learned that nine people were killed by a missile strike in the general area of the therapeutic village where Danny lives. I also received a message from the director of his village, about how well the residents, all of whom are on the spectrum, are doing, how flexible they all have been and how they are enjoying their usual activities. There is a larger-than-usual staff working to help them cope, and the employees have given up a planned vacation to help them through the war. I know how much Danny loves the annual Purim party, and I was grateful to know that it would take place as planned and that at the end of the week, thanks to my good luck and steely nerves, I would be able to see him.