In the Dead Sea, anyone can float.
I hadn’t planned to go swimming, and modesty was on my mind as I entered the sea and experienced my body propelling itself like a hot-air balloon. It was 2010 and I, a broke graduate student, wore an orange bebe logo shirt I got in a free promotion and a casual gray skirt with a fraying elastic. My great-aunt, then 85, sat in a chair and waited along with our kind taxi driver, Osama, whom she called “Oh-sam” with the pedal on the O. The desert beach had cabanas and those little shop-huts you see everywhere, outdoor showers and foot-height water pumps. I threaded my way from our chairs to the shoreline, doubtful that I could float as my body always sinks in water.
Coming here to Palestine, we had defied the masses of tourists experiencing the Holy Land with every possible comfort from their sacred buses. We hopped over the contentious and malleable border from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. I snapped a photo on an early morning walk of a bebe retail store ad proclaiming that New York, Paris, and Bethlehem should be held in the same esteem. Odd gears, cracked cinderblocks, and fragments of rags littered the sidewalks. It was dawn and already hot, the sun rising on the settlement that overlooked Bethlehem like a hungry spider supervising a colony of ants.
My aunt and I wandered through this landscape alone. Never did we see a bus full of passengers. The tourist attractions had a shabbiness the luminous, ultra-famous sites in Israel lacked. She took everything in with the fearlessness of a female nun and educator who grew up during the Depression. She insisted on walking up the steps to the Mount of Temptation, a mile-plus climb in disorienting sun. Osama stayed beside her the whole time, guiding her with his arm and matching her pace. Everything was hot and hard: desert, mountain, weather, steps. At the end of this herculean effort lay an oasis of blue stone, white marble, ancient gilding—a sight so magnificent, it necessitated this contrast as if in tribute.
By the Dead Sea, my aunt dozed in the arid sun. A taxi driver in a blue long-sleeved striped shirt watched our purses. I floated in the sea like a dying fish, content to let my body be raised like a flag—grounded in this healing moment: hot salt, gilt sand.
Maria S. Picone (she/her/hers) often writes about social justice and identity. Her writing has been published in Kissing Dynamite, The Sunlight Press, and Q/A Poetry. She received an MFA in fiction from Goddard College and holds degrees in philosophy and political science. Her website is mariaspicone.com, her Twitter @mspicone.