by Mireya Mayor
Sitting in my dugout canoe one day, I noticed my hands were an unusual shade of pink as I lifted my binoculars to watch the squirrel monkeys wreaking havoc in the trees. Squirrel monkeys, known for being extremely hyperactive, jump from branch to branch squealing with delight and make for wonderful entertainment. I immediately forgot about my pink hands.
The next morning I woke up to hands a much brighter shade of red, with purplish, eggplant-infused accents. I attributed the odd rosy-magenta hue to the South American sun on my fair skin. I go from ghostly white to rosy pink and inevitably to lobster red. Never a golden tan. After applying sun lotion with an SPF level so high it neared triple digits, I continued on in the canoe that for the past several weeks had been my home. By dusk my hands were the size of basketballs. Had anyone decided to cut them off, they could have had themselves a good game on me. I should have been worried by then, but I continued to blame my mother for passing on her freakishly ashen skin tone.
The following morning, I could not bring my fingers close enough together to button my pants, tie my shoes, or hold a toothbrush. With much embarrassment, I asked one of the male researchers to button me up. I also made a mental note to pack more T-shirts next time instead of shirts with infernal buttons.
The fact that my wrists and forearms were oddly disfigured was concerning, but it was the wounds now covering my thighs that screamed, “Something is freaking wrong!” I was so upset about the open sores and inability to dress myself that I didn’t even notice the long red streaks leading up to my heart. Yes, folks, as I would soon learn, I was on a fast track toward death.
Making my way out of the jungle meant days of hacking through dense forest, something I couldn’t do without holding a machete, so I hired a villager to clear the way. The people in the village looked at my blistered hands with repugnance; my attempt to cover them in silvery white lotion and bandages had only made them look more ghastly. I would spend the next 48 hours with my hands suspended in front of my chest as I made my way back to Georgetown, Guyana’s capital.
Once there I went immediately to the local hospital, where dogs and chickens outnumbered patients in the waiting room. The doctor brought me into a private room with busted-out windows and asked how I had burned my hands. The dog staring up at me looked puzzled, too. I explained that the swelling and blistering all began from tiny cuts I had acquired during the expedition. He proceeded to apply a silver cream used to treat burn patients. Severe burn patients. I could have stopped him, but at that point I didn’t think it could hurt. Its only effect was to make my hands look like they belonged to a deformed tin man.
He then walked over to a little table where several open (and quite obviously used) syringes lay on a dirty tray. When he picked one up and announced, “This shot of calcium will do the trick,” I knew it was time to get out. Fast. The flights back to the States were all booked; however, as this was a true medical emergency, the airline found me a spot on the plane (I actually think the clerks could no longer bear to look at me). Once back in the States, I was not allowed off the plane until a wheelchair escort arrived. Apparently, I looked incapable of making it on my own.
Odd, I thought, as the problem was my hands and not my feet, but rolling out of the plane would mark the first time during the entire ordeal that I was scared. Not scared that I might die; I was still blissfully unaware of that danger. I was scared of what my mom would say.
You see, my mom wasn’t exactly thrilled with my decision to go explore one of the most remote and unknown regions of South America. My overprotective mother, who had cried and begged me not to go, stood there crying once again as she looked down at my balloon hands. Seeing me wheeled off the plane had just fueled the drama. The very thing she had repeatedly harped on was that if anything went wrong, there’d be no hospitals around. I still hate it when my mom is right. More than that, I hate to admit it. So as I was wheeled up to her, her pale, tearful face watching me in horror, I wished I was back in the jungle figuring out how to brush my teeth. As we headed into the emergency room, I assured her that I would be fine. I could see she didn’t believe me and waited for the words “I told you so” to come flying out of her mouth. But staying true to her Cuban woman’s persona (that of a martyr), she did something worse. She said nothing.
After several physicians inspected my bloated hands and scratched their heads, medics from the U.S. Army Special Forces were brought in. The SF medics seemed just as puzzled, however, and, before leaving, photographed my hands for reference on the off chance they’d confront such a condition again. I continued to reassure my horrified mom, until we heard the doctor telling the nurse, all too loudly, that this was the worst case of systemic blood infection he had ever seen. To Mom he added the words that may have cost her ten years of life: “If she had been delayed by just one more day, your daughter would have died.” I apologized to my mom and then (in my head) strangled the doctor with my giant basketball hands.
Fact is, it’s not uncommon to find me surrounded by a wild troop of chimpanzees, or waist deep in a swamp with thousands of hovering sweat bees buzzing inside my ears, or with worms living in my feet, or carrying a parasite load so heavy a doctor was once prompted to ask if I lick the insides of toilets. That is how the media labels “the female Indiana Jones” and “the real-life Lara Croft” were born. But while it might be an easy thing to give me a catchy label, “simple” would not describe my journey here.
As the sheltered daughter of Cuban immigrants, I was expected to become a nurse or a schoolteacher, something respectable and conducive to marriage and children, like my “normal” cousins. For years, on school career day, I flaunted a little white nurse’s uniform that my grandmother made until one year I rebelled and announced that I wanted to be a ninja. This, you need to understand, was a very bold move on my part. All the women in my family were nurses or homemakers, and I was already showing signs of becoming a black sheep.
A tight-knit family with little means, we never ventured very far. Miami was my universe, and New Jersey, where most of my cousins lived, was as foreign and exotic as it got. A trip to New Jersey might as well have required a passport, as far as I was concerned. The world, to me, seemed small and uniform except for some differences in weather conditions. Summer vacations consisted of a four-hour car ride to Disney World, with landfills along the way the only mountains I’d see for many years to come. Truth be told, the only time I visited a foreign country as a nonadult was at Epcot. To this day, I have to remind myself that China isn’t really next to Norway.
In my mom’s efforts to show me the world beyond my driveway, we took frequent trips to the zoo, where I was mesmerized by the variety of creatures and the re-creations of their jungle environments. I pictured myself living in mocked-up rain forests, and that, I truly believe, is where my love affair with nature began.
At four years old, I frequently rearranged my dining room into a “jungle,” lining up the chairs into a makeshift canoe and warning my mother to watch out for the swarming crocodiles. I was also freakishly good at climbing trees and may have even then felt a strong affinity with monkeys. My backyard—particularly the enormous mango tree, which provided excellent climbing and the opportunity to see some wildlife—became a place of refuge. Birds loved it, insects were bountiful, and the occasional Cuban anole lizard made for hours-long entertainment.
Little Havana was that homogenous—even the reptiles were Cuban. The long, slender tail of the tiny anole (which makes up about half its length) breaks off at the slightest pressure and continues to wiggle on the ground, distracting would-be predators. At six, that predator was me. I spent countless hours observing and collecting lizards. Mostly, I observed them from afar, but if I needed a closer look, I took a long stem and tied the end into a loop, creating a noose, a skill I would have perfected, I’m sure, if I had been allowed to join the Girl Scouts. I would sneak up behind an unsuspecting lizard and slip the noose around its neck, pulling ever so gently, so that I wouldn’t choke it, but
I did accidentally break the tail off one of my hostage lizards. I became entranced by that left-behind tail, unattached but still moving. After that, you would have been hard pressed to find a lizard with a tail within a five-block radius of my house.
Don’t get me wrong: I never killed a lizard. But I admit to mutilating the tails of five or six. Not to worry, however; the lizard’s tail grows back over several weeks to once again serve as a quick getaway aid.
Another striking feature of the anole is its dewlap, or throat fan. It is attached to the throat and displayed by means of a flexible rod of cartilage that the lizard can swing downward and forward, revealing a brightly colored patch of skin. Males display their dewlap during courtship and when defending territory. This display is often accompanied by a series of head bobs and push-ups. Years later I would observe similar behavior in overly muscular males at the gym.
Though I thought of myself as a tomboy and was hardly squeamish about worms and lizards, I was also very much a girlie-girl who loved pink and shopping. To this day I am a walking contradiction, setting off for remote jungles carrying pink boots, a little black dress (should an unforeseen occasion arise), and a machete. A budding fashionista even at four, I would capture the little lizards and latch them, still living, onto my earlobes as earrings. Most girls wouldn’t touch them; me, I thought they completed the outfit.
Despite my adventurous spirit and the imagination that would transport me to distant places, my mom dismissed my desire to experience the natural world. I’ll never forget at age seven asking if I could join the Girl Scouts. I could already see myself rubbing sticks together, learning to identify bear tracks, and watching the stars outside my tent. But Mom said no. Joining the Girl Scouts would no doubt lead to camping, and that, my mom said, was far too dangerous. Before I could earn my first badge, I was officially a failed Girl Scout. Instead, I was to go back to the piano and practice for an upcoming recital—a most grueling weekly task for an outdoorsy child. And when finally released from my sentence on the piano bench, I would need to get into my tights and leotard for ballet class. My mom, the parole officer overseeing my after-school activities, couldn’t possibly have dreamed that I would one day lead expeditions to the most distant, remote, and unexplored jungles in the world. God forbid if I had dirtied my leotard.
It should have come as no surprise to her that I followed my Girl Scout dreams right into the River of Darkness. As much as my mom might hate to admit it, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Though in our case, the fruit was a mango.
Seeking political asylum, my mom left Cuba at the age of 20 with literally nothing more than the clothes she wore. She was a refugee venturing to a strange land in which a different language was spoken, with no idea of what she’d do once she got here. I often ask my mom to tell me the story, despite having heard it a thousand times. Each time, she vividly describes stepping onto the boat, holding her gaze toward the water, swearing never to look back at the island she loved. She was, in my eyes, an explorer, one I greatly admired. However sheltered she’d been as a girl, she would now have to provide for herself, her younger sister, and her parents. She had grit, the kind I like to think made its way to me.
Despite raising me to become a traditional woman, my mom had earlier tried breaking that mold herself. Hardworking and resilient, she had been accepted to medical school in Cuba in 1965, the very year Cuba’s sole political party was renamed the Cuban Communist Party, but she was expelled before she could hold her first scalpel when she refused to sign papers professing loyalty to Fidel Castro’s regime. Under that regime, her father and brother had been jailed without explanation, her opinions had been suppressed, and her sense of security had been destroyed. Even at the expense of her dream, my mom refused to sign away her freedom. I think she always hoped I would follow in her never taken footsteps and become a doctor myself. In the end, I did become a doctor but, as I am reminded by my cousins, “not the normal kind.”
My upbringing itself was not traditional with a mom-and-pop scenario. I was raised in Miami by not one but three very opinionated and headstrong women: my mother, whom I call Mami; my aunt Ica; and my grandmother, forever remembered as Mima. My father, as my mother would later explain, was in medical school when she became pregnant. They’d met while taking an English class at the University of Miami. He was an exchange student from Madrid—tall, handsome, and witty. My mom fell hard. When Mom announced she was pregnant, my father replied that he didn’t want kids. To him, having children at that time would interfere with his career plans and mean giving up on the very dream my mom had relinquished years before. My mother never married, and I would never have any brothers or sisters. I would also never meet my father. I suppose that technically I did meet him once, but from what I’m told it was only for a few seconds when I was nine months old. A few seconds was all it took for him to slam the door once he saw it was us. My mom thought if he met me, he would change his mind. I sometimes felt a void because of this, but my mom was both mother and father to me, and I observed the strength and integrity with which she handled both those roles. I may have lacked the physical presence of a father, but I never lacked a strong role model in my life.
The majority of the more than two million Cuban exiles in the United States live in or around Miami. So, though I was born and raised in Miami, I might as well have called Cuba my motherland. Only Spanish was spoken at the house, as neither my mother nor Mima spoke a word of English. I didn’t learn to speak English until I was five years old and had entered the American school system. To this day, when I’m asked my nationality, my immediate response is “Cuban.” That response nearly got me arrested in Mexico, when officials thought I must be presenting them with a fake passport. But that’s how strong my Cuban roots grow.
It wasn’t always the case. Like most kids, I disliked anything that made me different. Not knowing a word of English at the age of five was a nightmare. As a little girl, I thought my Cuban roots were a hindrance. I’d have given anything to be named Jennifer or Beth, something other than the very Spanish and weird-sounding name bestowed on me (which no one could pronounce). I would shudder when my mom started speaking her foreign tongue in front of my friends.
My upbringing was fit for a princess, a Cuban princess, complete with homemade frilly dresses that my grandmother sewed and more dolls than I could have ever hoped for. But to my mom’s dismay, I would get home from school and instantly rip the dresses off, opting for shorts and tees. I often thought I would have made the perfect son. My interests all involved the outdoors—climbing trees, catching lizards, and going fishing. To feed my girlie side, Mami, Ica, and Mima countered with pink dresses, ballet, and piano.
Fortunately for them, growing up in a big city, I didn’t have too many opportunities to experience wildlife in the backwoods. But we did spend lots of time on the beach, and while most kids were playing in the surf, I would wander off with a net, collecting anything unlucky enough to swim into it. Occasionally, I was swift enough to catch a hermit crab scurrying into a sandy hole. I spent hours observing the birds hunting for meals, and many times supplied the bread from my ham and cheese sandwich.
Despite not supporting my desire for merit badges and sleeping in the great outdoors, my mom did tolerate and even encourage my love of animals. I had a lot of pets as a kid. The family room was lined with birdcages; tanks of fish quickly took over the rest of the house.
Our house was basically a zoo, and I considered charging admission to support my animal habit. The menagerie included several dogs of various colors, shapes, and sizes; cats abandoned by neighbors; rabbits; hamsters; fish (both saltwater and fresh); birds; and even a chicken named Maggie, an Easter present. She came to me as a chick small enough to fit in a teacup and quickly grew to be my favorite pet. Despite county zoning laws against chickens, my otherwise law-abiding grandfather, Pipo, built her a huge, wire-mesh cage. I pretended, or perhaps really believed, I was a farmer. I still have memories of throwing on overalls and g
etting ready to feed my chicken. In the mornings I would collect the eggs that Maggie had left for us and then go in for breakfast. It would be years before I realized those eggs had been planted by Mima. Such was the life of a Miami farmer.
My menagerie grew exponentially when I became old enough to walk home from school. Growing up, I thought myself a dog whisperer. If there was a stray dog within a two-block radius, it found me and followed me home. Once there, it became part of the extended family. But as much as I loved my pets and capturing bugs and lizards, it was mostly the freedom of animals I reveled in. Butterflies were of huge interest simply because they seemed to embody more freedom than any other creature, with their aimless, carefree fluttering. My interest led to a butterfly garden that enraptured my mom and me each morning over our cafés con leche. To this day, I am mesmerized by the beauty of butterflies, and my garden is full of the kinds of flowers that attract them.
Unbeknownst to my mom (Mima knew), I kept snails, worms, and an array of creepy-crawlies under my bed. Technically, it was our bed: mine, the snails’, the worms’, and my mom’s. It was a small house, so I had to share a room with my mom, and my secret was safe until she accidentally freed them while cleaning under the bed. The memory of her shriek still sends chills down my spine. She unequivocally put her foot down when I wanted to leave the bedroom windows open with lights on to attract moths.
In the end, it was a turtle that got me into the worst trouble. My fascination with turtles began not by the water but on my front porch. One day, there sat a turtle no bigger than a softball. My mom agreed that I could keep it after much whining and wheedling from me, skills I mastered to talk her into every animal I wanted. My plastic pool became the perfect island home for the turtle. I loved watching it swim, its little legs pedaling like crazy. So I named it Bicicleta. It quickly grew, and in hurricane season we would transfer it to our bathtub for protection. During one of those bathtub transfers it refused to let go of my grandmother’s finger. I had made my first personal scientific discovery: a snapping turtle!