The Mystery of Home

Jehanne Moharram

In November 1996, I was nursing a broken heart and decided in a fit of independence that I would get in my car and drive the five hours from Dallas to Galveston, a barrier island an hour south of Houston that I’d never visited before. Galveston: because the only thing that I felt could offer solace after such landlocked misery was the sea. This was my first solo road trip, at age twenty-seven. Apprehension stared balefully at me from the passenger seat—“Didn’t we read about Ted Bundy years ago? What are you doing?!”—but I ignored her and drove on southward through the twilight, the land flattening out before me, descending.

It was dark and raining when I rolled into Galveston. I was a bit lost and feeling foolish, until I began to sense a pulse vibrating through the floorboards of my ancient Honda, through my feet and all the way up to the ache in my chest. It pulled me forward—slow, heavy, elusively familiar. My tired brain didn’t make the connection until I reached the end of the road I was driving on and saw, emerging and growing in height through the darkness until their white crests broke through, the equally dark waves breaking on the shore—and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I had come to Texas from Alexandria, Egypt, at age twenty-two, full of optimism for the land of opportunity, ready to “start my life.” On the wall of my older brother’s tiny Dallas apartment kitchen hung a poster showing a kitten, adorably awkward and yet utterly relaxed, asleep in a too-small flowerpot. Underneath the picture was the declaration, “When you are at peace with yourself, any place is home.” But I had underestimated the effect of uprooting myself, and clarity of purpose eluded me. It was difficult to connect with others, and the culture shock was real, even for someone like me who had studied American culture for years in anticipation of finally living there. A love affair was a welcome distraction from trying to figure it all out, but its disappointment sent me into a tailspin. I searched for the familiar. I missed Alexandria, and my gaze turned southward.

Both Galveston and Alexandria, each about twenty-five miles long, are built on long, skinny spits of land bravely, and perhaps foolishly, facing a sometimes-treacherous sea. They were both backed by even more water, although Alexandria’s Lake Mariout has mostly been filled in over the centuries, whereas Galveston is still caught between the Gulf of Mexico and a large bay at its back. Alexandria has far more people, its 6 million dwarfing Galveston’s 50,000. Each city is named after a conqueror of Mediterranean origin. Both were busy trading ports in their heydays, often developing reputations of troublesome independence. Both were seen as dens of sin; both are now faded and a bit sad. They are geographical mirrors of each other: Alexandria faces northwest, Galveston faces southeast, both hovering near the 30° N line of latitude.

***

I have only ever felt at home by the sea, “the heart’s blood of the earth,” as Henry Beston called it in his classic memoir of a year spent on Cape Cod, The Outermost House. Alexandria did not truly become home until the pivotal age of twelve. Until then, due to my parents’ unwilling and painful exile from Egypt, I had grown up on the shores of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. We lived in Kuwait, where my brothers and I attended a British grammar school. Several years older than I, my brothers left, one after the other, for secondary education in the UK, and I found solace in books and in nature, creating a home within these two great comforts. To a child who paid attention, Kuwait’s richly inhabited beaches and its skies full of myriad migrating birds were full of natural wonders. Among my favorites were the bright green bee-eaters, whose feathers winked in the sun as they called urgently to each other across the telephone and electrical wires crisscrossing above our villa’s flat rooftop. Kuwait may have felt like home for me then, but not so for my mother, for whom the flying emerald wirwar brought to mind the Lebanese singer Fairuz’s ubiquitous songs of exile and longing.

Our years in Kuwait were punctuated by summers spent back in Alexandria, a chance to reconnect with our extended family. For me they also provided a window on a very different world from dry and dusty Kuwait City. Alexandria was still beautiful in the 1970s, and my parents were still hopeful. With a crowd of paternal and maternal aunts, uncles, and cousins, we frequented the beaches in the former playgrounds of royalty at Montazah and Maamoura at the eastern end of the city, and the enclave of Agami at the western end. My memories of those years are hazy but filled with music and dance in storied theaters, movies in open-air cinemas, and lively get-togethers in relatives’ beach houses.

We moved back there at the start of my teenage years, to reclaim farmland and begin to rebuild. With Sadat in power and the country’s economy on a more even keel, my father felt it was time to return. My dad, in his usual jovial way, talked up the move to stoke my enthusiasm. My mother, ever the realist, tried to temper my expectations. To my mind, the only awful drawback was leaving our dog behind with the neighbors: Snowy was a feisty Samoyed who kept running away from a Palestinian family a couple of streets east of us, and ended up at our house partly because we would let him come inside, where the air-conditioning had cooled the tile floors of our apartment to an iciness comfortable to such an out-of-place northern species. My mother’s designation as the family’s Cassandra was solidified when, four months after we moved back to Egypt, Sadat was assassinated and the Mubarak era began.

Alexandria is not a barrier island like Galveston. Alexander the Great lassoed the true barrier island, Pharos, to the mainland, his ambitions taking physical form in the link he envisioned and that his followers built between the two: the Heptastadion that now carries much of old Alexandria on its back. This was to be a city like no other where, according to Islam Issa’s Alexandria: The City That Changed the World, “welcoming rather than othering people was an economically sound plan.” Its architect, Deinocrates, studied the prevailing weather throughout the year and used Aristotle’s principles of an ideal city in its design, angling the roads to both take advantage of the sea breezes in the summer and provide shelter from stronger winds in the winter. Here the written word reigned supreme, built on the Ancient Egyptian foundation of medu netjer, or “god’s words”—translated by the Ptolemies into “hieroglyphs” (holy carvings).

Alexandria had its share of natural disasters. In AD 365, following a strong earthquake in Crete to the north, the sea receded and people ran out to collect the flopping fish and loot the ships that were now sitting on the sand. They were caught by an enormous tidal wave that swept three miles inland, submerged the tallest buildings, and threw ships up onto rooftops. Outside the city, entire villages were swept away. The toll was estimated at 50,000 dead.

Alexandria has survived, from its glittering beginning through centuries of alternating neglect and stability, pockmarked by several more earthquakes. Today, it’s one of five cities in the Mediterranean Sea that UNESCO says needs to be “tsunami-ready” by 2030. The triple threat of the sinking delta as a result of the building of the Aswan Dam, the rising sea level, and more earthquakes to come have led some experts to predict that most of Alexandria will be underwater by 2050, forcing around 1.5 million people to relocate. And yet, most current residents seem blissfully unaware of danger. Every year, massive concrete blocks are thrown into the sea as wave barriers. Public spaces have shrunk dramatically: The wide beaches I remember from childhood are either covered with these unsightly blocks, or the sea view is blocked by cafés and restaurants and hotels, so that access to the sea, which is supposed to “refuse no river,” is now often only available to those who can afford to pay.

None of this was on my mind as I grew up in the city. My fellow middle schoolers’ animosity gradually eased as I gained fluency in Alexandria’s polyglot Arabic, with its multitude of Greek, Italian, and French terms. As I read and learned more, I began to hear the ghosts walking next to me in Alexandria’s streets, whispering at my shoulder as the sea pulled at my vision, turning my chin no matter where I stood. In my teen years, I crisscrossed the city, making full use of the iconic, sluggish blue trams and the cheap orange-and-black taxis that all seemed to be on the verge of falling apart, held together with duct tape and their voluble drivers’ patience and bonhomie. I walked the length of the Corniche, the seafront road built upon a limestone ridge, and roamed through cemeteries, notebook in hand, attempting to decipher inscriptions in Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Armenian, and old Turkish as well as Arabic. Folktales of the aphrodisiac properties of the sea turtle’s blood (tersa) lived side by side in my head with my dawning realization of how many species in Egypt had already been hunted to extinction. I discovered the Moroccan and Moorish influence of the medieval age everywhere in the names of the city’s mosques, beaches, and tram stations.

College classes were so boring that I frequently skipped them, now driving my own falling-apart family heirloom of a car, to escape to the sleepy beaches of Montazah, walking for hours among the trees, reading on the beach, diving for ritsa (sea urchins), and chasing crabs. I shuddered at Clea’s harpooned hand in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, before eventually losing patience with his bigotry and tossing the entire book aside. One particularly calm day I decided I would swim all the way out of the bay, around the little lighthouse, and back under the bridge to the beach. Apart from a few surprised fishermen on the other side of the lighthouse, no one even noticed. On a crystal-clear December day, I stepped to the edge of the fishing pier to look into the water and came face-to-face with a small, rose-pink octopus clinging to the rocks. To my surprise, it blushed a deep magenta, making me laugh out loud as it made its escape.

***

Perhaps it was that remembered joy I had known on the beaches of Alexandria and Kuwait that I sought to rediscover when I first drove down to Galveston. The sea was an earthy green rather than the bright turquoise blues of the Med or the deep navy blues of the Persian Gulf, but the familiarity of its motions and sounds still soothed me. I spent my three days there walking the windswept beaches, admiring the old-world elegance of the majestic Hotel Galvez, clambering around the nineteenth-century tall ship Elissa, and being quietly horrified by the depiction of the 1900 hurricane—still the country’s deadliest natural disaster—in a tiny little museum. I took tours of historic homes and discovered architecture and city planning similar to Alexandria’s, taking advantage of the seasonal wind directions. Like Alexandria, Galveston was fought over by competing powers, but differences also intrigued me: stories of the nineteenth-century pirate Jean Lafitte declaring the island his “pirate kingdom,” and of massive mollusk-shell middens left by the area’s Indigenous peoples along the coast thousands of years before.

Ten years after my first trip, I returned to Galveston in my eighth month of pregnancy with my first child, accompanied by the very same heartbreaker of a decade before. Of the many conversations my husband and I had as we compared the different religious traditions we each grew up in, the one I’ll always remember is our discussion of the temptation of certainty, the nature of faith, and how important it is to be comfortable with the mystery that is God.

On our drive south from Dallas we listened to Glen Campbell singing an ode to the city we were visiting, a song released the year I was born. He sang as a soldier in Vietnam, longing to return to his beloved beach and his girl but, reflecting the turmoil in American society at the time, Campbell’s version omitted the line, “I’d go home if they would let me / Put down this gun / And go to Galveston.” My ankles swelled as we navigated Houston’s crowded freeways, so this time the relief of the salt water and my long-forgotten buoyancy as I floated in my husband’s arms was physical as well as emotional. Ponderous pelicans zoomed low over the water. As twilight crept up on us in our rental house on stilts, we sat on the back porch and watched insect-hunting nighthawks flit over our heads, the waves shushing in the background. I felt that I had come home again.

Although our life together took us north from Texas, I tried to make yearly trips back to Alexandria, often with my oldest child—until 2011, when decades of frustration erupted into the Arab Spring. Travel became harder with the second baby, and I was unable to be present at my mother’s passing. She was buried west of the city that had always been her home, deep in the desert by the shores of the long-vanished lake.

Now we live by the “prairie ocean” of grasslands in the lower Great Plains. Although my old consolations of books and nature often pull me and my family back to the closest coastline, it was years before I returned to Galveston for a third time, months into the COVID pandemic when the four of us were desperate to escape the prison of our house in Oklahoma. Our oldest transferred his love of fishing from the inland creeks and lakes he had been growing up with to the wide expanse that opened up before him. The kids squealed with joy as they drove a golf cart round and round the house. Up above them, I revisited the 1900 hurricane as I read Erik Larson’s book Isaac’s Storm on the porch, the house swaying gently around me.

The protagonist of Larson’s book, Isaac Cline, worked for the Weather Bureau, which itself “faced a nation of skeptics” who weren’t too sure about this newfangled science of meteorology, leading to funding cuts and the dismissal of competent scientists. Compounding this state of affairs, the bathymetry, or undersea landscape, of Galveston Bay is very similar to that of India’s Bay of Bengal, the site of many disastrous cyclones. Both coasts are low, with a shallow shelving foreshore. This perfectly sets up the conditions for immense storm tides to inundate the surrounding flatlands. But in 1900, no one in Galveston really knew that yet.

The sea level continues to rise (far beyond the global average here since 2010), and yet coastal populations continue to grow, and developers continue to build. Perhaps hubris has no memory, or perhaps human ingenuity will yet prevail. After Hurricane Ike hit in 2008, plans were drawn up for “the Ike Dike” to be built by the Army Corps of Engineers, using millions of cubic yards of sand mined from offshore sources in the Gulf, to protect not only Galveston from storm surges but also Houston and its ship channel—and the sprawling petrochemical infrastructure that lies behind it. Climate scientists and skeptics alike seem to agree that defending the coast “will require perpetual vigilance.”

Our fourth trip there was in spring break of 2023, to the neighboring Bolivar Peninsula. A few months before, we had been in Alexandria again, all together, but with my parents both gone, the empty apartment had felt cold and unwelcoming. Now the Gulf breezes were still a little chilly, our marriage was facing challenges, and I was beginning to feel my fifties. I took refuge once again in nature: my husband had brought a small aquarium along in the back of the truck, and set it up below the rental house. We found shrimp and crabs and tiny fish, and plopped each in to observe for a while before returning it to its ocean home. The most exciting find was a tiny Portuguese man o’war jellyfish, shining bright purple and blue where it had washed up on the wide beach. We drove east to the Smith Oaks Bird Sanctuary to view its rookery, full of nesting snow-white egrets and bubblegum-pink spoonbills, and meandered along its elevated wooden walkways, glimpsing an alligator in the water below us. I returned to Oklahoma with my mind swept clean by the sea breezes.

***

Aside from life experiences, I am drawn to the coast because it’s the meeting place of three different worlds: earth, sea, and sky. It is a place between states, much as I am a person between worlds. So despite the threat of natural disasters, I and many others like me will continue to flock to there, knowing full well that these places we love—Galveston, Alexandria, many others—will one day disappear. In Samantha Harvey’s lyrical space station novel Orbital, her astronaut characters alternately marvel at and long for the shifting, shimmering Earth that spins below them. We all know that some clichés exist because they are true, and I cannot make my peace with the inevitability of change until I accept that it is the only constant. If the sea has taught me anything, it has taught me that.

“Home” is a loaded term. The laptop I am writing this on sports a sticker adorned with a snail and the pithy saying “Home is where your shell is.” When I consider that mollusks create their shells out of secretions from their own bodies, it makes me wonder anew at this concept of home and how to go about creating it as a mere human. Are my “secretions” the memories I have built up over the years, and the relationships I treasure—both with people and with places? Does the seat of my consciousness contain growth rings like those found in seashells and trees, tracing my expanding awareness? I am still mulling this over in the second half of my life. Perhaps all I need is to be comfortable with the mystery.