The Dead Sea: A day at the beach

In the October issue of Smithsonian magazine, Joshua Hammer, former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek, reports on the slow death of the Dead Sea and the mammoth measures that must be taken by Israel and Jordan if this briny, ancient, liquid treasure is to survive. Dams and agriculture are shrinking the saline sea, and the fresh water aquifers that line its perimeter are receding into the area’s subterranean salt deposits, causing the land above to collapse into great sinkholes. Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), an environmental group with staffers from Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, is, along with other active efforts, lobbying those countries to nominate the Dead Sea for World Heritage site status, which would mandate a long-term protection plan. FOEME is also trying to foment change in agricultural policies that are sucking the Dead Sea dry.

I first looked on the Dead Sea and its stark, blinding white shoreline soon after leaving Karak, a great walled Crusader city rising from the floor of the Jordanian desert like a hulking stone ship. One side of Karak looms over the Desert Highway, a straight, hot shot from Amman to the Red Sea resort of Aqaba. The back door of Karak empties onto a steep, winding road that leads downhill to the Dead Sea. Its cobalt water, ringed by sandstone and white-hot salt cliffs, fills your eyes and imagination shortly after leaving Karak from the rear. It is a harsh, beautiful vision.

I drove down past Jordan’s potash factories. The mineral emits a stink that takes you momentarily out of the Bible, Koran or Torah and puts you very much in the 21st century. The Dead Sea separates Jordan and Israel, and both countries keep watch on this water border. Just out of Karak, at a military post set high above the distant shoreline, I stopped for a mandatory vehicle and document inspection, one of three I’d check in at before picking up the road back to Amman on the sea’s northeast corner. A soldier looked at my passport, asked me where I was going (“Back to Amman. I’ve just been in Petra and Aqaba."), and, with the characteristic Jordanian courtesy I’d been shown since touching down in this gracious country, proffered a “Welcome to Jordan” and waved me through.

When I reached the sea, the hot road hugged the coast and delivered dramatic views of sandstone bluffs caked with salt or sculpted with eight- to 10-foot salt piles. Sodom and Gomorrah are said to be near here, and I swear I saw Lot’s wife a dozen times looking down at me from frozen positions atop various cliffs. These salt pillars looked, for all the world, like women, headscarves drawn over their mouths and thin dresses wind-whipped across their bodies.

I grew up with the Bible, and I felt I was driving through it. Only the smell of potash, the military watchtowers along both shores, the zippy rental I was driving, and the small white pickups parked alongside Bedouin tents signaled the 21st century. Otherwise, it was 2,000 years ago, and I was in it.

The earth was dust and sand, the seashore, sandy mud. I drove slowly past villages of low, wattle and daub houses built under the shade of great, spreading trees that must have provided oasis in Jesus’s time; children in gray and brown clothing running and playing barefoot in the dirt; people in caftans and headscarves squatting at the edge of the road, selling eggplants and tomatoes; sparse but fruitful groves of date palms, the tree of the desert, which needs little water to yield bounty; scraggly farm plots; men riding donkeys and moving them forward by slapping their rumps with sticks; encampments of black goat-hair Bedouin tents, here two tents, there 20; women cooking over open fires; men tending sheep and herding goats, the animals bleating and braying. All of this set along the shores of the salt-encrusted sea.

I wanted to float in the Dead Sea, Earth's most buoyant water body. Years ago, I’d seen a photo of a man reading a newspaper while drifting around in its brine, and I thought it looked like a fun thing to do. I didn’t have a newspaper, but I had a guidebook. I was hoping to get someone on shore to photograph me reading while floating. I looked for a beach where I could stop and have this long anticipated experience. I passed some fancy hotels, which looked severe and unwelcoming (and which, according to Hammer’s Smithsonian article, could be in jeopardy of being swallowed by sinkholes), then came upon a small sign at the end of a mud parking lot: “Dead Sea Rest House.”

Cars and trucks were parked willy-nilly all over the unkempt lot, so I knew nobody was going to kick me out because I didn’t have a reservation. I parked and walked down to the water across a beach that was chocolate-colored, hard-packed mud sprinkled with intermittent patches of sand. Along the mud beach, groups of Jordanians were enjoying their day at the shore.

I didn’t float in the Dead Sea. It wouldn’t have been proper. While I’d worn my swimsuit under my clothes in anticipation of my Dead Sea float, this was not a private beach resort. The only people in bathing suits were the tourists across the sea in Israel. I was in a public recreation area in Muslim Jordan, and respect for the culture precluded any degree of stripdown.

The Jordanian women sat at the shore in long pants, long sleeves and headscarves, and so would I. The travel clothes I’d driven in became my bathing costume (bathing being a relative term) – ankle length skirt, long-sleeved tunic, and scarf covering a reasonable amount of my hair. I did take my shoes off and sink my feet in the salty foam that tickled the shore so I could say I’d been in the Dead Sea. I collected bronze-gold rocks, oily to the touch, and licked them. Salty. I saved them as souvenirs.

Facilities were scant at the Dead Sea Rest House. There were a few Coke, tea and coffee sellers, and several entrepreneurs offered camel rides. Families sat in white plastic chairs and looked out at the water. Only three young boys splashed in the frothy, buoyant sea. Standing there in my tunic, I envied them their fun. Sometimes, you have to be content being a spectator. I crouched in the mud, watching and laughing.

A young boy who’d been sitting with his family enjoying the scene approached me and offered me a white plastic chair. I knew the chairs were rentals and that his family had paid for every chair they occupied. I also knew enough about Jordan’s millennia-old culture of hospitality to graciously accept. I sat for a few minutes, then returned the chair to the boy who’d given it up to me. I thanked his family:"Shukran." They nodded and smiled warmly.

I turned and walked back through the muddy sand to my car. As I drove to Amman, 40 minutes away, I was filled with good feelings. A boy, a plastic chair, and a gesture that will last my lifetime.

The Dead Sea is in danger of dying. The hospitality of the Jordanians who live near its shores is alive and well.

www.LoriHein.com

Cruisin' with the Russian navy

True sailors, these Russian navy men were spending a few hours of their leave on the water, on a scenic boat trip up the Moscow River, centerpiece of Moscow's bid for the 2012 Olympics. I'd boarded the cruise a few stops earlier, and when I first saw these guys standing on the pier, raw and rough, knocking back beer and vodka at 11 a.m. and shouting songs that all ended in “HURRAH! HURRAH! HURRAH!” I thought, Just watch. With my luck, they’ll come to the upper deck and sit next to me.

Sit next to, in front of and behind me they did, and it was, indeed, my luck. I now have Russian email pals. Their designated spokesman, a young, muscled guy with blond spikes and an anchor tattoo, broke the ice by offering me a hit from his beer bottle and asking me where I was from.

“America.”

“New York?”

“Nyet. Boston.” His eyes lit up, and he asked, “Near Canada?” I drew a map in the air, located Canada and Florida, and placed Boston accordingly. The sailors grinned and toasted me. They were very interested that I’d come to their country not on business, but as a tourist, and were intrigued to learn that I was spending the day just walking – and floating – around Moscow. The blond-spiked spokesman asked, “Moscow, good? Russia, good? Russian people, good?”

“Da, da and da,” I said with a smile.

The whole contingent, in their blue and white-striped tank tops and broad hats with patent leather visors and black ribbons down the back, laughed, nodded their heads, and threw down another toast.

United we ran: A tribute

Four years. It can seem like yesterday or a lifetime ago.

Four years ago, Rudy Giuliani decided that the New York City Marathon would take place as planned. We who had entered received an email from the New York Road Runners Club inviting us, if we were able to put our fears aside, to come and stand tall on the start line. Thirty thousand of us did. As we stood on the Staten Island end of the Verrazano Narrows bridge, fireboats in the harbor below, helicopters above and sharpshooters on the bridge towers, we were filled with power by things I can only inadequately articulate.

NYPD officer Daniel Rodriguez lent the morning his velvet tenor voice and led us in "God Bless America," runners from scores of nations singing along. As we loped toward the bridge to begin our run, we sang "New York, New York." Once on the bridge, those of us who knew Manhattan looked to our left to the island's tip and paid pained, silent tribute to the gaping hole in the sky.

Had I to rate my life's days, this was one of its most profound. Shortly after the race, this essay came to me, whole, in one piece. The first draft was the final draft. It was published around the country and emailed around the world. Today I share it again:

United We Ran

I know where hope lives. I know where strength, endurance, passion and pride live. They live in New York City. In November I ran through 26 miles of these affirmations of our humanity.

This New York City Marathon was not about athletes turning in impressive times. It was about going the distance – the distance from profound sadness and loss to a point where collective human goodness and hope carry us toward a finish line we still can’t see. In a city pierced through its core by hate and pain, hope is alive and well. There is no doubt it will triumph.

Thirty thousand runners came to New York to fuel that hope. We came from all over the globe to tell New York it doesn’t stand alone. Runners from Kansas and Denmark and Japan and Algeria and California and Scotland and Venezuela came to show the people of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island and New Jersey and Staten Island and Manhattan and Queens and Yonkers and White Plains and southern Connecticut that their pain is shared. When pain is shared, it is eased.

In turn, the two million spectators who lined the 26.2 mile five- borough route fueled the runners with something far more nourishing to a spent body and mind than any energy drink or quick-acting carbohydrate. They carried us through the neighborhoods, up the hills, over the bridges, past the buildings, down the avenues, around the corners and into Central Park with their humanity. To say we connected is to understate the pure human goodness that permeated every inch of every borough. When we slapped palms with kids in Brooklyn and exchanged high-fives with teenagers in the Bronx and looked into the eyes of young mothers in Queens and smiled at old men on kitchen chairs waving flags and raised defiantly clenched fists to the firefighters watching from their engines and station houses, we said, together and loudly with no words, “We cannot be beaten. We will overcome. We are united.”

Go to New York if you can. You will hear occasional sirens and see a few hazmat trucks roaring down the street. You will likely make the unspeakably painful pilgrimage to Ground Zero to try and take in the enormity of the loss and grief. You won’t be able to and you will walk away numb. You will see billboards and walls with the faces of young people gone forever. You will see the tired eyes of cops operating on adrenaline and resolve. You will see fire stations wreathed in purple bunting and covered with drawings from schoolkids in Lubbock, Texas and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

But keep walking and looking and you will find hope. You will check into your hotel and be given both a key and a smile that thanks you for coming. You will ask an elevator attendant how he’s doing and he’ll thank you for asking. You will eat dinner in a Turkish restaurant with an American flag painted on its window. You will see the colored bulbs strung across Mulberry Street in Little Italy, lighting the hopeful faces of waiters beckoning you to try their pasta tonight. You will see the pulsing neon of Times Square and the lacy spires of St. Patrick’s and the window dressers at work on Fifth Avenue. You will look from the Chrysler Building’s gleaming art deco cap to the Empire State Building, doing justice to its role as New York’s tallest building by beaming its red, white and blue floodlit top like a beacon to the city and the world.

I know where hope lives. It lives in New York City. And it lives in all of us.

www.LoriHein.com

Football diplomacy

A while back I got an email from blog reader Patrick Vickery (a gardener and author who lives in the Scottish Highlands and writes lovely snippets and anecdotes called blethers). He’d enjoyed my post, “The universal language of pigeon,” in which Adam and Dana use the feeding of birds to interact and make friends with people whose language they don’t speak. It’s worked everywhere from Lisbon to La Paz. The entente-building power of a few fistfuls of corn thrown into the air by a kid standing in a big public space is amazing (and fun to watch).

Wrote Patrick, “Universal language of the pigeon…Great phrase. Could also apply (to a lesser extent perhaps) to football – a common 'language' across the world. Give warring nations/factions/groups a football and they may well end up playing together in preference to anything else. I would hope so anyway.”

Football was the vehicle for some cross-cultural bonding during a tour that Adam and I took of Istanbul's Topkapi Palace, a vast complex sitting grandly atop Seraglio Point overlooking the shimmering Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn. Built in the 15th century by Mehmet the Conqueror after he turned Constantinople into Istanbul, and home to four centuries of Ottoman rulers, the sultans' palace turned museum takes hours to explore, and I was worried about boring Adam silly with too many rooms, too many buildings and too much guide commentary. Adam was younger then, and I needed to approach Topkapi in surgical strike mode. We couldn’t do it all, so I had to decide what to see and what to skip.

As the tour guide announced she’d be leading us first to the harem, two Turkish teenagers who’d been kicking a soccer ball on the palace grounds -- just inside the gate and in the shadow of the only Christian church Mehmet did not convert into a mosque in order to give his non-Muslim wives a sanctuary -- held the ball up and motioned to Adam to join them. His eyes lit up.

So did mine. Their timing was perfect. Adam could play soccer in the sun instead of spending a half hour with a bunch of adults inside a dark building full of cells, and I could escape having to answer the question, “Mom, what’s a harem?”

In what was likely Topkapi’s first international football match, Turkey threw the game and let America win. The football diplomacy included smiles, hand signals, pats on backs, and lines and letters drawn in the dirt with sticks. We learned the two boys were 12 and 14 and were allowed inside the palace compound because their parents worked at Topkapi.

When the tour group exited the harem, before we turned to catch up (the next stop would be the Adam-friendly treasury, full of cool stuff like daggers, swords and jewels the size of golf balls), I thanked the teens.

Whether they knew it or not, when they invited the young American boy to kick that ball around with them they became gracious ambassadors. Each kick, each shout, each smile said, “We’re friends. You are welcome here.”

New Orleans: One jubilant statement

After my last post, I tried to write a regular travel story today but found I couldn't leave New Orleans just yet.

Only today (would I have made it to today?) are bits of organized, effective, life-saving relief beginning to touch the tens of thousands who haven't had a piece of food or a sip of water in half a week.

Because I like harmony, I avoid, except when I simply can't, injecting opinions about politics and other divisive subjects into this blog. I'll get back to travel stories in my next post, but I simply can't, at this moment, avoid expressing my disgust at the ineptitude, inaction, finger-pointing and buck-passing at all levels of American government since the moment the levees were breached and New Orleans began to disappear.

Allow me this post to vent.

The epic failure to quickly and decisively deliver food, water and medicine to our fellow citizens in their time of crisis is a breach worse than a levee failure. It's a massive breach of faith. Like so many, I watched and listened, increasingly stunned, as people died, languished and pleaded and no one took responsibility, no one took charge, no one took action.

If news crews, private relief organizations and country singers could get into and out of the city center, then why couldn't all the might of the United States get vehicles -- trucks, tanks, buses, vans, RVs, SUVs, jeeps, Hummers, airboats, rowboats, wheelbarrows, little red wagons -- laden with emergency rations that would keep people from dying into that same city center?

Something was made terribly, awfully clear in the past three days. We are, at all levels of government, unprepared to keep our people alive in the wake of a massive disaster on our soil.

When disaster strikes elsewhere, we look effective and heroic. But elsewhere, we're not in charge. We are not responsible for righting everything. We quickly send people, supplies and money, but our government doesn't have to run the show and make the decisions. Nor live with the consequences. We perform well in supporting roles.

The utter lack of leadership that forced American citizens to survive like animals in a hellhole while bureaucrats in suits talked and talked until I could stand their talking no more, scares me upright. I watched, on all the news channels, a reality show. The reality is that in the event of major disaster, we will, like our fellows in New Orleans, be on our own.

Perhaps we should let the Red Cross, magnificent and fast-moving in this as in all disasters, run homeland security. "Who's in charge? Where's the Rudy Giuliani for New Orleans?" cried one radio commentator.

I listened to a National Public Radio interview this afternoon with Kermit Ruffins, beloved New Orleans jazz trumpeter and vocalist and leader of the Barbecue Swingers. After each hometown performance, Ruffins would treat his audience to barbecue prepared on a pit rigged up in the back of his truck. "My truck's underwater now," he said. "I probably won't see it again." But, asked if he'd get a new truck and start singing and cooking again, he said he sure would, even if it took a year or two to get it all back together.

The jazz funeral is a New Orleans tradition. A ritual. A rite of ultimate passage. A blowout and grand farewell that turns death into a celebration of life. The interviewer, speaking of all the deaths and funerals New Orleans will have to bear in the near future, asked Ruffins whether jazz would be part of those, or whether it was inappropriate at this time because it's "too overwhelming."

"It's too overwhelming," whispered Ruffins. "But," he continued, "once everybody gets back into New Orleans and settles down, there's gonna be a jazz funeral like you never seen."

If you've traveled in the South, you'll recognize in Ruffins's words and spirit and hopefulness the deep faith that's part of the fabric of life there, especially among the poor who need and use it as basic, everyday soul fuel and sustenance. This isn't in-your-face religion that's worn on the sleeve and shouted loudly from anything that might metaphorically be a mountaintop. This is the real thing -- quiet, abiding, tolerant, gentle and true. It's a beautiful thing to be around, and I saw and felt lots of it in New Orleans. People who have the least materially, are often the richest spiritually.

I saw it as the kids and I drove our van, New Paint, on the thin, levee-side roads that would carry us into the city. An excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America:


New Paint meandered toward New Orleans on small roads dominated by oil and petrochemical plants and punctuated by sleepy towns, churches, cemeteries, antebellum plantations and sugar cane fields. Being Sunday, Pinnacle Polymers and Dupont Elastomers were quiet, but churches were open all day for business. We passed one in Ascension Parish about 3 p.m., and members of the congregation, dressed to the nines, were gathered in the parking lot, chatting and socializing. The same at Mt. Calvary Church, where the men wore pressed dress pants and crisp snow white long-sleeved shirts, buttoned up proper even in the stifling heat and humidity. The women’s dresses were jubilant statements in red and orange. The church sat near Pecan Street and looked directly onto the massive levee that hid and held back the Mississippi just beyond. You knew the river was there when a barge or tanker passed, showing only its top as it slid by.


I just watched the news and listened in awe as a young man, trapped for days in the horrific convention center and still with no way out of the city, sat on concrete steps in the sweltering sun and uttered a jubilant statement as he was handed one small bottle of water from the back of a just-arrived supply truck.

He tilted his head back toward the sun. "We'll do alright. We takin' it one day at a time. Thank you, God!"



I will donate half of my book royalties to the American Red Cross for an indefinite period -- $2 per copy if purchased through me or Booklocker and $1 per copy if purchased through Amazon or other online merchants.

A city, gone

America has, effectively, lost one of its great cities.

The area of devastation from hurricane Katrina along and inland from the U.S. gulf coast is now estimated at 90,000 square miles, larger than Britain. Millions of lives and the face of a nation changed. The reports and pictures are unutterably sad, and conditions for tens of thousands of stranded poor are going from bad to unspeakable by the hour.

To find ways to help, check out these links provided by National Public Radio or America Online.

As I did after the Asian tsunami, I'll be donating half of the royalties from my book to relief efforts ($2 per copy if purchased from me or from Booklocker, and $1 per copy if bought through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other online merchants). My donations will go to the American Red Cross, for an indefinite period.

It's beyond hard to grasp that New Orleans is, essentially, gone. A pulsing, teeming city with lore and history, traditions and stories, culture and color, gone. What will rise where it stood? Time, years of it, will tell.

Adam, Dana I became acquainted with the nooks and neighborhoods of this wild, watery city during our journey across America. We walked, drove, rode river boats and chugged along on the St. Charles Streetcar (above). This excerpt from Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America wasn't written to be a remembrance of something lost, but now is. When I read it, what once made me smile now makes my heart ache.


A storm brewed as we entered the Big Easy on the concrete bridge that crosses Lake Pontchartrain. The black cloud that swallowed us, and the ugly swamp and decrepit railroad bridge running next to us made Adam whisper, “VOODOO!” Then, “I’m gonna try it.” He asked me if it works. I said I hoped not, and asked, “Who ya gonna do voodoo to? It better not be me.” The first thing he bought in New Orleans was a voodoo kit. The next day, when Dana’s $160 in trip money, saved up over nine months, went missing from our hotel room, Adam told us one of the sticks he’d played around with in his voodoo kit had read, “You will lose a lot of money.” We didn’t see much more of the voodoo kit.

New Orleans is a steamy ethnic gumbo, equal parts rough and refined. An hour after we discovered Dana’s money had been stolen, a store manager gave us free pralines because the cashier had charged us too much sales tax. Bawdy Mardi Gras beads hung from wizened branches of ancient trees, from elegant railings, from the handlebars of locked bicycles.

We called Mike from the Acme Oyster House in the Quarter to tell him what we were eating. Dana gave the report: “Hi Daddy, it’s us. We’re in New Orleans. Mommy is eating gumbo poopa, Adam has a po’boy, and I’m eating hush puppies.”

The stall door in Acme’s ladies’ room advertised a product I’d never heard of – one that must sell well here. A poster touted Alka-Seltzer’s MORNING RELIEF: “Fast Hangover Relief. TONIGHT You’re Feeling Goooood. TOMORROW Feel Better Than You Should.” Necessary equipment in the Quarter, where even quiet, polyestered couples walk around with cups of beer and tropically flavored alcohol in long neon-pink glasses, filled and refilled at “To-Go” bars.

Acme’s oyster shucker was at work behind the bar as we read the Wall of Fame.

“Those the champion oyster eaters?” I asked.

“Those’re the fools.”

The shucker told me that the name of the new Leader of the House hadn’t been put up yet. “Jes’ las’ week a guy et 41 dozen. He’s goin’ on the Wall. An’ you know what he et after that? Sof’ shell crab. Raw.”

The new champ’s name would join the likes of Bill Poole from Berkley Heights, NJ, who downed 32 dozen while watching Super Bowl XXIV in 1990, and Edna-Sara Lodin who carried back to Stockholm well-earned tales of ingesting 16 dozen Louisiana oysters on May 29, 2000. Way to go, Edna.

We fell in love with the Quarter and returned many times, leaving the late evening and nighttime hours for revelers. We enjoyed early morning and late afternoon walks down Chartres and Decatur, watching the play of sunlight on bougainvillea hanging from the doorways and gleaming iron balconies. Down Royal and Iberville to take in the sherbet-colored facades and long hunter green shutters that hid windows that met the pavement. Down Bourbon and into Jackson Square to see the characters and watch the palm and tarot readers and hear zydeco and Cajun music spill onto the sidewalk from air-conditioned souvenir shops. I pointed out the “horse carriages” lined up to take tourists around and was duly educated on the differences between horses and mules. Dana was amused I could mistake one for the other. Even after the thorough equine identification lesson, it remained tricky nuance to me. I was glad there wasn’t a test.

For a genteel view of the city, we rode the Garden District’s St. Charles streetcar to the end and back. We got a slow, rolling narration of the sights - wedding cake mansions, beautifully painted shotgun houses, shady Audubon Park, the venerable side-by-side campuses of Tulane and Loyola - from a funky little lady who’d ridden the trolley down to Harrah’s on the river, where she’d played the nickel slots. She’d spent 15 cents and won 10 dollars. “I’m rich!” she laughed.

Leaving New Orleans, we drove the eerie gauntlet of Metairie Cemetery’s above- ground tombs, which line both sides of the highway. An endless sea of bright white, cross-topped houses for the dead.