Sand

by Jess Gill | 2008

The sound of sand shuffling while the sun beat down on us was all that could be heard. Some murmurs overlapped, of people talking, but mostly, it was quiet.

We walked, foot over foot, up a crag, down into small valleys. We tripped over roots, hard rocks that had yet to disintegrate into sand. The sand was a thousand different colors, every shade between yellow and brown and gray one could imagine. The sky blazed blue, almost gray when juxtaposed against mountains of yellow.

All we could see was sand. We stood on the edge of a crater, watching where our ancestors had walked thousands of years ago, nature shaping itself into a solitary existence where there was nothing but rocks of sand. This was the Israel that I had always imagined. This was where I finally stopped wondering "What if," and finally said, "When." I came across myself there, in that desert, as though I had been there before and was waiting for me to return again. It somehow instilled a sense of calm, one I hadn't had in a long time. We were close to the end of our trip, close to exploring Masada and the Dead Sea, but I couldn't remember feeling so relaxed. As though finally, my father's native Israeli roots had sprung out from inside me and reclaimed me as its own.

It has nothing to do with being Jewish. It has everything to do with being Israeli. I'm proud to be able to call myself half-Israeli. I'm proud that the small country that my father was born in is one that reveals its contradictory nature upon first glance. I identify with the contradictions, being a walking one myself.

I had expected sand, only sand, sand everywhere with the deserts and the beaches of my father's childhood. I never expected the waterfalls, the forests glens, the meadows, the creeks and the luxuriant flora that could poison you if you drank its stems in water. I didn't think when we would hike miles a day, that we would do so under the cover of trees, finding abandoned buildings made of stone, disabled by the ages. Even the scorpions held an aura of mystery around them, which I found when our tour guide placed one in my hand for me to feel.

The natives I met, compromised by a sense of concern for the next war and a sense of laissez-faire for it's going to happen anyway stunned me with how different their attitudes were, how willingly they accepted their challenges, living in a politically charged country. I was just a visitor; willing to absorb as much of my father"s culture as possible. He hasn't returned to Israel since he was twenty-one. I first went when I was twenty one, having just graduated from college and barely on my way to graduate school. I was lost, saying goodbye to my college years, and welcoming a future that was uncertain at best, hopeless at worst.

I started to find myself beneath a waterfall, where we splashed and laughed. On the rocks, which I climbed forty feet or so barefoot, just because I felt like it, where I stretched out and faced the sun, while I waited for the rest of the group to catch up. And finally, in the desert, among the sand, where each shuffled step was muted somehow, silenced by the sun and the overwhelming expanse of the desert, as it valleyed and dipped around us. Somehow, I thought, each of us was in a grain of sand. That our stories lie there in the desert, tracked by the footpaths of our past. I wasn't home. But I was found.

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