Maybe you remember the first time you saw a jellyfish. Maybe you were lucky enough to stick your head under the ocean’s surface, wearing a mask, and watch the primal undulations of a jellyfish dancing to some internal rhythm. Maybe you felt a biting sting in the water and turned to see a gelatinous blob disappear like sinking mucus. Maybe you stood against the glass and watched the elegant clover on the back of a moon jellyfish or the graceful train of a sea nettle in an aquarium. Or maybe it was footage of jellyfish hawking a cure for memory loss.

I don’t remember the very first jellyfish I saw. I grew up in a time before aquaria were full of jellyfish tanks, in a very landlocked in St. Louis. I never spent an extended period near the ocean until I was in college. In my junior year, 1987, I attended an English-speaking study abroad program in Tel Aviv. From a New England school where getting ready to go to a party meant putting on tattered jeans, a flannel shirt, and duck boots, I was a misfit among the other American students, who were a lot less style-challenged. I found the Israelis my age no easier to get along with. At nineteen, they were required to serve in the army, while I had the freedom to jaunt off to college unencumbered.

[The guests at the WorMotel each get a private, cozy room. But the catch? They can never leave.]

I stuffed my loneliness down with the hummus and baba ghanoush sold from a cart on the street corner near my cinder block dorm. At about the same rate that my weight increased, my spirits sank. One day, I opened the door to the building where my class on Middle Eastern politics was held and spotted a sign out of the corner of my eye. It advertised a marine biology course: a week in Eilat, at the southern tip of Israel, studying the ecology of the Red Sea. Knowing next to nothing about biology or Eilat, not to mention the fact that I was hardly able to squeeze into my swimsuit anymore, I scrawled my name at the bottom of the list. It was clear I needed to put some distance between me and the pita cart.

A few days later, with about twenty other students, I boarded a bus headed south at dawn. After a five hour ride through the desert, we were offloaded and handed snorkels, masks, and fins. I think there was a quick instruction on keeping hands away from urchin spines and fire coral. I shuffled down the beach backward, the only way to walk in fins. When I slipped my face below the water’s surface, it was as if I were Dorothy stepping into Oz. My dull, sad world erupted in a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and textures. I glided over creatures that I could never have imagined existed in my mostly landlocked life. Pink, purple, and yellow coral that branched, encrusted, and mounded. Blotchy lavender anemones, creeping crimson shrimp, twirling buff-colored worms, filigreed fans, spiked black urchins. A day-glo orange sponge with a violet slug curled around it. Bowls of lemon-, lime-, and watermelon-hued clams. Here, astonishingly, was paradise.