| Driving only a few minutes out of Eilat on Highway 12, we come to a dirt road like so many others leading off the highway. My friend signals and turns off onto it. A few metres into the wadi he parks and we walk the remaining short distance in. To all appearances, it is a wadi like any other. Above it and curving around behind us, the highway. On the other side and further ahead, rock and more hills and channels. A sunny day, a breeze, just another nature walk in the desert, on the face of it. Nothing at all to indicate that less than a week before, 24 people died sudden and traumatic deaths there and tens more were seriously injured.
Not at first glance, anyway. Once further in, however, there were signs if you knew what to expect. Discarded surgical gloves on the ground. A dark streak on the rocks with the reek of fuel still in the air. A camera strap that missed being collected with the bereft belongings for return to the families. Myriad tyre tracks and footprints all churned together in a place that would normally have few. The tyre tracks were a reminder of how lucky it was that emergency vehicles could get right to the scene, unlike an exercise only a few days previously in which the rescue squad had to hike and rappel down ravines and back up with individual ‘casualties' on stretchers because that is so often the case.
My friend pointed out where the bodies had been laid, but I didn't want to go tread there. He started climbing the steep hill up to the road above. I automatically followed, picking my way up the uneven and sometimes slippery footing. About half way up, I wondered why we were doing this and where I might be stepping, and turned back down again. My friend was unfazed. He had done this before, on the day of the accident. He'd been up and down that slope amongst the dead and dying, and down below where the dead were laid out and the living were placed to give medical care that could not be done on the unstable slope.
When you're in the middle of an emergency, you don't think overmuch about dignity for the living or respect for the dead, you just hunker down and do what needs doing. Thoughts and feelings can come later, but while you're busy doing what you're trained to do, the mind goes on autopilot. It has to, otherwise you could not function and would be of no help to anyone. But I was not a medic at the scene, I was a visitor after the fact and did not feel right treading where human beings might have bled and died if it wasn't necessary. I'm not sure why my friend brought me there, but I wonder if it wasn't to see the area for himself as it should be and not as it was on the tragic day he was there on duty.
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We were far from the first to visit the area. Apart from the likes of several cars parked on the road above us and families peering over the railing down into the wadi, there had been people who came into the wadi especially to leave a memorial. Two outcroppings bore rows of candles, and there were also a couple of flowers and a couple of religious items. The victims of the tragedy were not locals, so it can be assumed that fellow Russians, tourism colleagues, or simply caring Eilatis placed the memorials.
So many thoughts go through one's head when a tragedy like that happens. How in a split second, with no warning at all, a person's reality can change so drastically, or cease altogether. How a moment of carelessness, arrogance, disregard, or whatever was in that bus driver's mind can exact such a horrendous price from totally innocent human beings who have no control over the matter. Whether the state and/or his own mind will punish him for the people killed, injured, perhaps crippled for life, and the families grieving for their loved ones and those damaged psychologically or economically by the loss of (for example) a parent or wage-earner, respectively, and so on. Why drivers have seat belts but passengers do not. Why someone with 22 violations was even allowed to drive at all, never mind with nearly 60 passengers dependent on his skill and care. Whether the passengers had time to realise what was happening or whether, as happened to me when ‘hang gliding in a jeep' off a similar slope courtesy of the (then-) archaeological survey many years ago, the mind simply didn't have time to grasp what was happening because it was too overwhelmed and in shock to register those initial seconds of plummeting down a hillside. Whether this tragedy, the worst road accident in Israel's history, will provide any lessons regarding roads, vehicles, and ‘professional' drivers so that at least these people's deaths and traumas will have not been completely for nothing. May their memory be blessed and their families be comforted.
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