In the end, Fraser won. Although he was granted only 10 percent of what he had asked for, it was still a huge sum: $75,000. The more I read about Fraser, who’d been the former mayor, the more his political prowess became apparent. In one interview, when asked whether Ponce felt he had found the mythical spring, Fraser answered that “he was satisfied he had found something.”
As the lawsuits increased, the Historical Society switched tactics and went on the defensive. I found an internal memo ordering all employees “not to knock” the Fountain of Youth or anyone in the business of selling history. Employees were warned that saying anything derogatory about the fountain would lead to their being summarily discharged.
“Luella Day’s fabrication of stuff she found in the ground does not count as evidence that Ponce de León landed here,” said the librarian. “But we tiptoe around the word fabrication ’cause we like the Fraser family and we don’t want their land sold to developers.”
We spoke about the way reality and fantasy is so fuzzy here, how the real archaeological excavations and the fact of Ponce’s discovery of Florida blended with the weirdness of a diamond-toothed con woman opening an attraction selling well water as an elixir of eternal youth. “Everybody in town knows the fountain is bunk, but nobody wants to be quoted,” the librarian said, laughing. “The Frasers had a real litigious grandpa. But you should visit the original fountain of youth. I’ve never slogged around in it, but it’s near Spring Street. Apparently late-night drug smugglers come in on boats over there.”
“Wait”—I paused—“there’s more than one fountain of youth in St. Augustine?”
“There’s at least three over here, and a bunch all over the state. There’s one in St. Petersburg, another up near Alabama, one around Daytona Beach. Venice, Florida, claims they recently uncovered the real mineral springs sought by Ponce de León.”
* * *
Outside the archive, the sun was starting to set on streets teeming with tourists, all as glazed over as Cinnabon cinnamon rolls. The roads and walls were made from old clam and mussel shells mixed with mortar, just like the cross Diamond Lil had dug up. The seashells poking out of the ground created the impression of walking on water—although perhaps that was just a reaction to the dizzying amounts of disinformation I’d been subjecting myself to since my arrival.
On one nondescript modern building, putatively the erstwhile residence of the royal Spanish treasurer, were two signs: one claimed the home was from the early 1700s; the other stated circa 1750. To my eyes, it could only have been built in the decades following World War II. Nearby, a gaggle of tourists huddled around a monument. It was a sundial, “undoubtedly,” the sign said, left by Ponce de León.
Heading into a corner store to buy a bottle of water, I felt a surge of happiness about being in such a real-yet-artificial place. I picked up a cigar labeled hand-rolled; an asterisk lead to a tiny footnote: MACHINE MADE.
Behind the store, a group of young men were skateboarding, and I asked them about the Fountain of Youth water. “It’s just . . . blech,” said a guy in cutoff jean shorts. “Once you try that Fountain of Youth water you’ll decide to age gracefully.”
“Everybody who’s ever lived here and who’s ever come here gets that cup of water,” explained his friend. “Most of them throw half of it away. I mean, it tastes like rotten-egg sulfur water. But this is where America began, you gotta taste the history.”
“I drank it at ninety-one,” said the first one.
“You were ninety-one years old?” I said, laughing.
“Nah—in ’91,” he said, “1991.”
They told me that every fourth-grader in the state comes here to learn about the history. “Don’t they teach you about St. Augustine where you’re from?” he asked.
I told them how, in Canada, we don’t learn anything about St. Augustine, but that most schoolkids consider Canadian history to be totally boring. “Maybe if we jazzed it up a bit, like you do in St. Augustine, students would be more interested?”
“History,” he answered, “is definitely better that way.”
* * *
I still had half an hour to kill before meeting the historian David Nolan, so I sat down on a park bench to review my findings. Within seconds, a shoeless, fat, balding black woman approached. “Can I use your phone to make a call?” she asked, placing a fist on one hip. Her huge breasts were barely contained by a stained T-shirt. I said yes—on the condition that she let me interview her about the Fountain of Youth.
“I love the fountain: it’s excitement, it’s money, it’s pretty, it’s life,” she emphasized. “Don’t write that down. Gimme your phone and I’ll tell you what you want to hear. You want to know what I really think? I’ll tell you ’cause you my friend. I ain’t gonna go there. When I was a six-year-old, my mama told me, ‘Don’t ever drink that water; it will give you disease. Keep your hands in your pockets and don’t touch the water.’ What? You crazy.”
She said “you crazy” because I was writing it all down. I handed her my phone; she dialed a 904 number. “Don’t write down that number,” she said, waiting for it to start ringing. A moment later, someone picked up and coughed on the other end.
“I heard a cough,” she said, her bloodshot eyes beaming. She coughed back as though communicating in code. She waited for an answer. None came. She coughed some more. A minute went by and then she gave me the phone back. “I ain’t gonna tell you no more,” she said, hiking up her jogging pants. “Can I get five dollars? I’ll tell you things that’ll make the angels come down in light.”
“I don’t have five dollars,” I said. “I’m just writing about the Fountain of Youth.”
“All right then—everything I told you was a lie.” She strutted away. “I was lying.”
Heading back to the Fountain of Youth, I passed a Disney-like castle: Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum. I took a quick stroll through its chambers, filled with oversize gallstones and distorting mirrors, and mused upon our attraction to things we know can’t be true, whether it be stories, myths, or people with tusks. The earliest museums were cabinets of curiosity; only in the nineteenth century did collections start being divided into art museums or science museums or technology museums. At the beginning, all museums were dedicated to the basic sense of wonder, a passion dampened by the Enlightenment. “What we commonly call being astonished,” wrote Descartes, who got people out of their hearts and into their heads, “is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad.” As of around 1700, the sense of wonder became linked to foolishness. People wanted understanding, to brush up against omniscience, to feel that everything was ultimately within our grasp.
Leaving Ripley’s, finding myself lost again, I popped into a bustling leather-goods shop to ask for directions. The woman behind the counter asked why I would possibly want to go to the Fountain of Youth. “I’ve never been, but I drink that water every day,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the same water everybody drinks in St. Augustine, except the water in the Fountain of Youth is not treated. You should have smelled the showers at my university dorm: sulfur water, just like what they give to visitors over there.”
“You know, it really did taste like bathwater.”
“It is bathwater!” She said that I could quote her in the story—on the condition I didn’t use her real name: “Call me Sabrina, ’K?”
For me, her eagerness to be somebody else embodied all of St. Augustine’s ambiguities. Why be truthful when you could pretend? Being something you aren’t is fun, she seemed to be saying, especially in a town where everything is almost real.
* * *
There’s little evidence that Ponce de León ever sailed off in pursuit of the fountain of youth. The patent or charter signed by King Ferdinand authorizing the exploration makes no mention of it. Instead, it guarantees Ponce de León will be named adelantado, or governor, of any lands he conquered—power being a more plausible reason for his journey
. In the logbook of the seven-month-long trip, there’s not a peep about any rejuvenating waters, let alone any talk of asking Indians for directions to the fountain.
Twenty years after the voyage was completed, Oviedo’s Historia General y Natural de las Indias made the first recorded mention of Ponce de León’s searching for any magical waters. Ponce was, Oviedo claimed, looking for the fountain of youth as a remedy for el enflaquecimiento del sexo—for his sexual impotence. Oviedo was an author of chivalric romances whose historical work was denounced as containing as many lies as pages. Still, the gossip stuck.
It became ingrained as fact nearly a century later, when another court-appointed chronicler published his findings. Herrera had access to all of Ponce’s logbooks and, despite finding nary a murmur about the fountain, still chose to build on Oviedo’s rumor, saying, “There was not a river, or brook, nor scarce a lagune or puddle in all Florida but where they bathed themselves in.” Peter Martyr added fuel to the enflaquecimiento rumors. After washing in the fountain, he heard, even old men were able to “practise all manly exercises.”
Historians started accusing Ponce of covetousness, of taking a chimerical cruise. It scarcely mattered that he’d discovered a land frilled with flowers; his reputation, once soiled, was sealed. The memoirs of Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda, a Spaniard marooned on Florida for seventeen years, characterized Ponce’s search as ridiculous—“cause for merriment.” As merry as that may be, Fontaneda also submerged himself in a bunch of puddles hoping to find the one.
Until the Enlightenment, a rigorous presentation of archivally verifiable research was considered less important to historical writing than confecting a riveting narrative. Readers wanted stories about the wonders of the world, whether fully imaginary or only semireal (as with Marco Polo, who may never actually have gone on any of his travels, and the pedantic Thucydides, who inserted speeches by public figures rewritten in his own words). “History was a literary genre in which truth took second place to rhetorical effectiveness,” writes Oxford’s John Burrow in A History of Histories. Strictly fact-based history was considered “uncouth, useless, pedantic . . . dirty and ungentlemanly.”
A “scientific” approach to history only became entrenched in the past few centuries. Before then, historians believed their art entailed storytelling—including making up quotes, fudging details, skewing facts. “History used to mean stories even more than fiction,” explains Jill Lepore, chair of History and Literature at Harvard. “In the eighteenth century, novelists called their books ‘histories,’ smack on the title page.” The Spanish word historia still means both history and story.
Once writers impose narratives on history as a means of interpreting reality, rather than merely recording the happenings of an era, murkiness ensues. History began as a way of documenting wars, and from the very start the relationship with factuality was strained. Herodotus conducted first-person research in Egypt and returned with tales of people who hibernated for half the year in a land full of winged serpents, cows that could only walk backward because their horns were so huge, and fox-size ants that dug gold out of the ground. “My business is to record what people say,” he wrote, “but I am by no means bound to believe it.” His successors, those spicing up their accounts of the Indies’ discovery, were telling a historical tale, not writing empirical history. As they knew, enflaquecimientos—and all other things sexo—have always made for good stories.
In the time before photography, excursions in search of new geographical lands weren’t too different from expeditions into the spiritual quadrants. Only those who’d been there could know what was true and what wasn’t. Even today, with no way to document the validity of the spiritual, we can only heed the accounts of voyagers—at least until we go there ourselves.
* * *
Back in the Fountain of Youth’s parking lot, a sign had been posted over the TODAY’S SCHEDULE: LIVE CANNON FIRING! sign saying SORRY, NO CANNON FIRING TODAY. David Nolan let out a deep belly laugh when he noticed it. Nolan was a pleasant, boyish man whose smooth face and sharp eyes had a gentle, otterlike quality. An advocate of real history, he seemed to find the wackiness of the fake history more than merely humorous.
He’d been part of a commission that had dated all the city’s buildings. “Most of St. Augustine was built in my lifetime, but that’s not what they’re telling the tourists,” he said. “Nobody took down their signs saying BUILT IN 1586 when we told them that it was actually built in 1964. People still put bronze plates up with any old date.”
As we stood in the parking lot, Nolan told me about the rumors that Diamond Lil had been a drug addict who ran a brothel here at the fountain. “There are lots of tacky places here with tawdry tales. There are several ‘oldest houses’ here in town. Not just one. The ‘authentic old drugstore’ was actually part of an old jail.”
“It seems like there are many Fountain of Youths in Florida as well,” I added.
“Basically every body of water here was a Fountain of Youth.” Nolan laughed. “Real estate promoters have always been able to generate buzz by suggesting they had ‘the’ fountain, whether in Bal Harbour or Sarasota. In fact, I want to take you across town to the original Fountain of Youth.”
As we drove, he told me about growing up in St. Augustine. When he was a kid, a friend of his used to be paid five cents a bucket to bring water to the Fountain of Youth when they’d run out or when they weren’t able to pump any more out. Nearing Ponce de León Boulevard, we stopped as a mother hen and her two chicks ran across the road. As though sensing the dumb joke forming in my mind, Nolan grew serious. “You know, I have nightmares about them selling the Fountain of Youth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Waterfront condos. The fountain is so linked to our identity. Every culture manages to tie this age-old symbol into their own needs and appropriate the idea. Florida has always been about getting tourists and selling land. There’s something so essential to our history wrapped up in alligator farms and all these other tacky tourist attractions. They’re how Florida developed itself.”
He started telling me about the state’s oldest businesses, how early settlers had invented glass-bottomed boats so that tourists could watch women dressed as mermaids floating around in the bottom of springs. Sixteenth-century accounts already told of Florida’s mermaids and crocodiles with sweetly perfumed breath. Nolan’s intimations of a dignity within the kitsch connected the city to an obsolete form of historiography, one where fictitiousness and inventiveness weren’t simply tolerated—they were valued.
“The idea of turning something into an attraction that you wouldn’t normally think to be an attraction is so crucial in the history of cracker ingenuity in Florida,” Nolan noted. He explained that he considered himself a cracker, in the positive sense of a wise, humorous person who is close to the land. “Our town’s motto is ‘See things differently.’”
He directed me to pull my car up off the road onto a grassy embankment. A sign said Spring Street. We got out and walked down a path festooned with vines, stopping when we came to an overgrown swamp. “Not exactly a spring of life,” I remarked.
“When you talk about this area, it’s one scoundrel after another. They all promoted the idea that economic salvation lay in promoting our history. What sort of history? That’s another issue.”
* * *
Something about the fictional dimension of history in the Age of Discovery almost legitimizes St. Augustine’s entire tourism industry: it’s simply basing itself on a premodern approach to historiography. There’s little difference between Fraser’s booklet on the fountain and Herrera’s conclusion that Ponce sought the fountain of youth—both share a disregard for objective evidence.
At the time of Ponce’s discovery, objective actually meant the opposite of what it has come to mean. Descartes, in the seventeenth century, spoke of “objective reality” as that which exists in our mind, rather than out there in “formal reality.” Before the Enlightenment, th
e word subjective was barely used, but when it was, it referred to things (subjects) in and of themselves. According to historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, the modern connotation of the word objectivity only took hold in 1817, when Coleridge—a Romantic poet, of all things—used it to describe things in nature that exist independent of human observation. That same year, Coleridge also coined the term willing suspension of disbelief, the notion (perfected by David Copperfield and other magician-storytellers) of allowing ourselves to believe in something while also knowing that it can’t be true. Since then, our faith in objectivity has rivalled our faith in God, yet both remain equally elusive.
Our pursuit of objective reality is precisely that—a pursuit. Reason is a horizon, as Kant explained. We can’t ever get there. It’s something we chase but never attain. In attempting to take it all in, we experience the pleasure and agony of the sublime, the sense that things are bigger and more awe-inspiring than we can ever begin to imagine. The sublime is what happens when the dream of trying to comprehend reality, of getting tantalizingly closer to some ever-receding understanding, leaves us dazed on some dusty Florida side street of the mind.
* * *
1. I’ve changed her name so she won’t lose her job.
2. I looked into whether St. Augustine boasts a higher proportion of longer-lived residents than elsewhere, but couldn’t find it on any of the top-twenty lists of American cities where people live the longest. However, a purportedly secret society billed as “protectors of the Fountain of Youth” claims to have been granted superlongevity resulting from their work.
The Book of Immortality Page 18