by Lynn Darling
In my strange dream state, I kept looking for a place to be safe, while at the same time being vaguely aware of Joanne’s hands placed on my stomach, and then around my knees. Eventually I left the cave and was standing on a hill looking into the woods that covered the slope beyond. There was the weasel, running in great looping circles. He was free, I thought, and I was thrilled. And yet, to my surprise, I was also sorry to see him go. He looked so alive. That’s when I noticed that in my hand I held a long leash that kept us connected. I understood what it meant. The rage I had felt was scary, but it was also powerful; it had given me an energy I hadn’t felt since the diagnosis. A part of me didn’t want to let that go.
Joanne ended the session by cupping my heels and then my toes in her hands, which left me with a sensation of tremendous safety. Finally I opened my eyes and she handed me a glass of water. She asked me how I felt. I thought about it. I wasn’t exactly a cup of softened butter, but I was much more relaxed. Having been given shape and form, my emotions no longer consumed me. I knew the anger was still there somewhere, but it was contained now. It wasn’t me.
The next day’s radiation session was easier. I was still anxious, and after three different people in the reception area told me to go to my “happy place,” I was cranky, but calm. On the table I closed my eyes, and this time I saw myself in a room that was not unfamiliar. Then I recognized it: it was the room in Castle Dismal I had planned to make into my office. In reality the room was filled with unopened boxes and bags, but just then I saw it as it could be—neat, orderly, a place to work and be whole. A promise of life after cancer.
In 1527, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish nobleman, set sail for the New World, one man among a grand armada of men intent on conquest and glory. He served as one of the king’s treasury officials accompanying the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez on an expedition bound for the northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico and the war with the indigenous population that would follow in its wake.
As they were approaching landfall, a great storm wrecked the fleet. What had begun as a well-supplied expedition of six hundred men and ten women eventually dwindled down to an epic struggle for survival by four men over the course of nine years in a vast and violent land.
Bad luck and their own folly plagued them from the moment they landed. Because the expedition’s navigators didn’t know where exactly the remains of the fleet had landed, de Vaca advocated they hug the coast and keep to a course that would establish their bearings. But Narváez was eager for gold and sent his men in the direction that rumor said it could be had. Both the land and sea forces marched into the immense Florida swamp, a nightmare trek that left them decimated by disease and their battles with inhabitants less than eager to be occupied. By the time the expedition reached Apalachee Bay, there were only 242 men. Hope, however, had survived.
Starving, wounded, sick, and lost, they decided to take to the sea. They slaughtered and ate their horses—an act of desperation that stole from them their very sense of identity, of what they had been born to be—caballeros, knights, set apart and above. They fashioned a bellows from deerskin, melted their stirrups and horseshoes, their spurs and shields, and turned them into nails and tools. With these they constructed five rough-hewn boats and set sail for what they thought was the coast of Mexico and the other Spanish forces they believed to be nearby. In fact, they were 1,500 miles away.
Cabeza de Vaca commanded one of the little boats, each of which held about fifty men. They ran through what supplies they had all too quickly as they followed the coast westward to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Then came the final blow to whatever remained of their original plan: a strong current swept the boats away from land and into the teeth of a hurricane. Only two of the boats survived.
The surviving two, with about forty men, including de Vaca, came to grief near what was probably Galveston Island. The former conquistadors had other names for it: they called it Malhado—Misfortune; they called it The Island of Doom. There they tried to repair what was left of the boats, using their clothes to plug the holes, but fate wasn’t done with them—not by a long shot. A large wave crashed on the shore, sweeping the boats away as if they were bathtub toys.
The little band of survivors became smaller still. Tribes living along the coast enslaved the few who were left, tribes whose names can only be guessed now, extinguished as they were by the subsequent waves of men who came to take their gold and save their souls.
At some point, de Vaca and his companions escaped from their captors and set out for … what? They had no way of knowing, save for the fact that there were other Spaniards out there somewhere. They were captured again, and escaped again. Soon there were only four men left: de Vaca; two other Spaniards, Andres Dorantes de Carranza and Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado; and Estevanico, a luckless Berber who had been taken in slavery from his native Morocco (and who would survive this adventure only to die at the hands of natives as a member of an expedition led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, another Spanish conquistador).
De Vaca and his companions were as lost as any humans have ever been, naked and defenseless in an unknown country in a harsh climate, without a map, without a bearing, without a clue. They had no words for most of the animals and foliage and wonders they saw; they were the first of their kind to see them.
They stayed lost for nine years. But somewhere along the way they shed the narrative of capture and escape; transformed by hardship, time, the wild and brilliant landscape, and whatever bargains they had struck with their God, they were no longer helpless witnesses to their own catastrophe.
Cabeza and his men traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles barefoot and naked. They explored, as nearly as anyone can piece together, much of Texas, parts of New Mexico and Arizona, as well as what are now the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila, in northeastern Mexico.
From there they walked south, through Coahuila and Nueva Vizcaya, down the coast of the Gulf of California to Sinaloa. They became traders for a time, traveling from tribe to tribe, learning the languages, bartering goods from one place to another, forging a kind of life. Eventually, after shedding his sunburned skin a dozen times over, Cabeza de Vaca became “a child of the sun,” in the language of the people there, a holy man, a seer. He healed the sick, he saved the crops, he raised the dead. The people gave him copper rattles, coral beads, turquoise, arrowheads, and, once, six hundred deer hearts. He and his companions were no longer alone: they were followed on their journey by crowds of the faithful who believed de Vaca had the power to heal and destroy them. Which, of course, was exactly what the lost men had themselves believed when they set out from Castile that fine day so long ago.
Reading his narrative, which he would write and rewrite the rest of his life, you wonder if de Vaca ever lost the man he once had been, if the lust for gold and glory that had propelled him across the ocean ever burned off like a morning mist in the heat of the day.
The facts would suggest otherwise.
Eventually the little band arrived in a place he called “the Village of Hearts.” They were in New Mexico at that point, a terrifying, empty place, deserted, he writes, by those who lived there because of recent depredations by vicious men on horseback. De Vaca knew he had found his people.
He left his followers, promising them he would stop the killing, the slavery, and the theft of their land. The next day he and the Berber Estevanico and eleven of the natives walked thirty miles until they met up with a company of Spanish soldiers out hunting slaves.
At first, the Spaniards couldn’t believe de Vaca was one of them and promptly tried to enslave his companions. De Vaca in turn was so angry that he and his fellow travelers took off, leaving behind pretty much everything they had brought with them.
The Indians, for their part, were mystified. They simply couldn’t believe the men on horseback belonged to the same tribe as the naked god with whom they walked. As de Vaca explains, “we came from the sunrise, they came from the sunset
; we healed the sick, they killed the healthy; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed horsed and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.” For de Vaca it must have been like walking through the looking glass—what these men were, he had once been.
And, to a degree only he could know, still was. Although in the beginning he could not bear to sleep on a bed or wear European clothes, de Vaca sailed back to Spain in 1537, ten years after he left it.
Perhaps the most astounding aspect of de Vaca’s life, and the most difficult to understand, from an idealistic—or naive—point of view, is his return to the world he once inhabited and to his position within its elaborate codes of behavior and measures of success. He had gone through an extraordinary transformation—a redemption, in the eyes of those who see him through the lens of history’s bloody coda—and yet he went back to the court of King Charles I, and took up the ways of his old life. There he wrote the account of his travels, having taken care, he said, to remember everything faithfully, so that, if God so ordained, “I would be able to bear witness to my will and serve Your Majesty, inasmuch as the account of it all is, in my opinion, information not trivial for those who in your name might go to conquer these lands … and bring them to knowledge of the true faith and the true Lord and service to Your Majesty.”
Eventually de Vaca returned to the New World, as governor of the Province of Rio de Plata in what is now Paraguay. His tenure ended badly—he was arrested, imprisoned, and sent back in chains to Spain, where he was tried on charges of official misconduct, of mistreating the Indians and of raising his own heraldic standard instead of the king’s, though some accounts insist that his true crime had been his attempts to protect the indigenous people in his charge.
Cabeza de Vaca ended his days back in his home in Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, old and penniless and brokenhearted, say the more apocryphal accounts, busy ransoming his nephew from the king of Algiers, according to others.
Cancer veterans warn you that the year after treatment is, in some ways, worse than the year in which you are actually fighting the disease, and there is something to that. While you are in treatment, you have a job—there are appointments and pills and side effects, there are blood tests and bone density tests and tests of character and simple endurance, decisions to make, small and large.
I was lucky—the cancer had retreated enough to enable me to avoid a mastectomy and there was no evidence of the disease in the lymph nodes. But still, when it was over, I was caught up short, and the first few months afterward were spent in a kind of free fall. Augustus Egg had made a quiet departure without so much as a goodbye, the adrenaline on which I had lived subsided, and all the emotions that it had bullied out of the way returned. Oh my God, I thought to myself, curled into as small a space on the sofa as I could manage, I had cancer! Everything seemed tentative then, as if I were walking on very thin ice, as if a splinter of light could pierce me. For a while, I could not even boil an egg—the commotion of the water, the violence of the act, the injury to what lay within was too unsettling. How odd it sounds now. But that is the way it was.
I went into hedgehog mode. I had a family of them living with me. My first year in Vermont, there had only been one, a male, I think, who, in the warm early-autumn evenings, would noddle around the rocks and weeds in the space outside the back door where a patio might be someday, if I ever became the sort of person who had a patio. He would look up when he saw me, acknowledging my existence, but rather like the mice in the pantry—or the men who plowed the road in winter, for that matter—he didn’t appear to take too much notice.
But during the spring, while I was sick, he must have decided to settle down, because now he had a mate in tow and a fine-looking family of little hedgehogs who had taken up residence in the woodshed that abutted the garage. They were renovating: a small chink in the wall between the two was growing larger every day, and when I would try to impede their progress by moving a jug of distilled water or a log in front of the opening, the evening would resound with the rhythmic thumping of hedgehog tails battering down the latest obstacle to their ambitions.
Harriet’s husband, Dean, advised me to get rid of my new tenants immediately. He was the gentlest man I had ever known, but though he could talk for hours about the birds he observed at his feeders in the spring, he took a less patient line toward the more destructive members of the animal kingdom. While some locals used hedgehogs for target practice, Dean took a more pacifist approach. He trapped his own beasties in Havahart traps and drove them to the woods near Reading, the next town over, where he let them go. First mom, then dad, and finally the offspring. When I worried about the pups or kids, or whatever you call hedgehog babies fending for themselves, Dean shrugged. “They’re alive, aren’t they?” he said. “Best I can do.”
He was right, of course, but I let them be, beyond reading up a little on their habits. Hedgehogs, when they are threatened, curl up into a ball, their soft and vulnerable bellies disappearing deep within a sphere of quills that offer a mouthful of pain to any predator. In those first few months after treatment I could think of no better defense against the frightful option of normal life. I didn’t go out, or answer the phone, or listen to music with words—I wanted no emotions or moods to intrude, no opinions or promises or plans.
But life, whether you like it or not, rebuilds itself. You begin with scaffolding; the daily routine—dishes washed, bed made, a numb trip to the supermarket. Then one day in a parking lot a chance encounter with a friend yields a dinner invitation you are not permitted to decline. You drive home from an evening spent around a kitchen table with friends laughing in low voices, and for the first time you notice the clouds scudding across a nascent moon. Something quickens. And gradually you find yourself inhabiting each day more fully, savoring the lift of leaves in an autumn wind, two dogs sleeping in a patch of sunlight, the graceful arc of a young man leaping from a pickup truck. And you promise yourself you will take nothing for granted ever again.
Catastrophe can change you but it doesn’t turn you into a better person, at least not for long. After the end of treatment, after the effects of the drugs and radiation have begun to wear off, after the fatigue and the depression begin to lift, you find yourself sitting in a traffic jam on the highway cursing the traffic, impatient, eager to get moving. You remember how, just a few months before, you would have given anything for the normal routine of a life in which a traffic jam is the worst thing that will happen to you that day. You had sworn when the chemo beetles were eating away at your brain, your mood, your sense of self, that you would never take the minor inconveniences of life seriously. But you do. And that in fact is how you know you are moving beyond the shadow that cancer or any of life’s big curveballs cast: you have regained your inalienable right to be grumpy about the absolutely unimportant.
But still—in those first few months after treatment, I thought often about Cabeza de Vaca, after he returned from his wanderings and resumed his place at the Castilian court. I imagined him buckling on his ceremonial armor, before presenting a petition to the king. Perhaps he took one last look in the mirror just as the sun escaped a cloud and bounced smartly off of the polished metal of his breastplate, blinding him, reminding him for an instant of the infernal glare of the sun in that savage land that had peeled away his skin, and laid bare his unarmored soul. Did he miss the naked holy man, the disaster that had loosed him, had taken away his compass and freed him from the dictates of so elaborate a life?
8
A Sense of Direction
It is better to think of a return to civilization not as an end to hardship and a haven from ill, but as a close to an adventurous and pleasant life.
—SIR FRANCIS GALTON, The Art of Rough Travel
On the other side of Boreas, the North Wind, there was once a hidden paradise, a land temperate and fertile and beautiful. The people who lived in Hyperborea were blessed, and their l
ives were devoted to Apollo, whose round marble temple stood at the center of a sacred grove of cedar trees. “The Muse is not absent from their customs,” wrote the Greek poet Pindar. “All round swirl the dances of girls, the lyre’s loud chords, and the cries of flutes. They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully. No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles they live without fear of Nemesis.”
No traveler ever returned from this paradise. To enter Hyperborea, one had to endure bitter cold and privation, and to pass through places of dread and horror—Ierne, for one, or as we know it now, Ireland, whose inhabitants “consider it honorable to eat their dead fathers and to openly have intercourse, not only with unrelated women, but with their mothers and sisters as well.” Past Ierne lay Ultima Thule, the most distant place on earth, a nightmare land, where, some said, one could find the gates of hell.
Despite, or more likely because of, the dearth of eyewitness accounts, the belief in this perfect paradise has proved so beguiling that it has echoed through the centuries. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the eponymous hero describes the Hyperborean paradise to his sister: “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to me as the region of beauty and delight … there snows and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.” The location itself has proved flexible: when Admiral Richard Byrd flew over the South Pole in 1947, rumors abounded that he had caught a glimpse of a mysterious subtropical land.