1.
Every history has a history. Stories about the past have life spans: They are born, and they die, as we do. For example, you may have learned, in some distant unrecoverable scrap of your childhood, that the 16th-century Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León was obsessed with the Fountain of Youth. This obsession led him to discover Florida, through whose impossible jungles he drove his men on suicide missions. Bugs, bears, alligators, snakes, sinkholes, natives: Nothing could stop Ponce. He was the Spanish inland Ahab. He had to have his sip of the magic water. What’s a suicide mission if it leads to eternal life?
Ponce, of course, never found the Fountain of Youth. If he had, he’d still be here to tell us about it. Instead, he died. In 1521, on the Gulf Coast, he was shot in the thigh with an arrowhead carved out of a fishbone. The wound festered and eventually killed him in Cuba.
Ponce’s actual Fountain of Youth, it turns out, is probably the legend of the Fountain of Youth itself — the Spaniard and his insatiable thirst for eternity — which has outlived him now, in spite of most historians’ objections, by almost 500 years.
Hope Springs Eternal
CreditDolly Faibyshev for The New York Times
2.
I went to Florida recently to follow the traces of the traces of the legend of Ponce. Also, obviously, to drink the water, just in case the rumors were true — just kidding, ha-ha, I don’t believe in the Fountain of Youth — but really, just in case. What did I have to lose? I am old. I am fat. I have felt this way at least since I was 21 — a long time ago now. My hair is thin. My dog has died. My children’s fish have died. My body has been annotated, top to bottom, by injuries I can’t even remember suffering. I breathe hard when I walk up short flights of stairs. Sometimes I feel basically done. Yeats: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick.” I may not be to that point yet, but I am at least a faded windbreaker flapping on a chain-link fence.
Just getting to Florida turned out to be an arduous Old World ordeal. Air traffic was snarled; pilots were late. I had to drive three hours in the dark through one of those freakish Southern thunderstorms in which the rain is almost a solid object, horizon to horizon, and your windshield wipers are useless even on full blast and everyone drives around with emergency flashers on, not seeing. It was almost midnight — an entire day of my life had spilled out — when I finally reached the small town of Punta Gorda.
For more than 100 years, Punta Gorda has claimed to have the Fountain of Youth: an artesian well that once drew such long lines of tourists that, according to National Geographic, the fountain’s handle had to be replaced every six months. I walked there as soon as I woke up. I knew I was getting close when I started to see kitschy images of Ponce de León everywhere: murals on the sides of restaurants, fake motorized galleons parked at an Oktoberfest carnival. Ponce: his bulging armor, his pointy beard, the cockatoo crest of his helmet plume. He always seemed to be gesturing at something. “Go over there,” he seemed to be saying. “The important things are just out of the frame.” It was hot; after only a few minutes of walking, my face was pouring sweat. My plan, while I was in Florida, was to drink exclusively out of self-described Fountains of Youth, which meant I was already very thirsty. When I reached the spot where the fountain was supposed to be, it was nowhere. There was just an empty small-town intersection — restaurant, bank, chiropractor, stop sign. No special plaque, no burbling fountain, no crowds of elderly people leaping out of wheelchairs and dancing with joy. I worried, for a minute, that the trip had been a waste.
Then I saw it, and I laughed out loud. The Fountain of Youth was tiny, shabby and neglected: a blocky little drinking fountain, not much bigger than the garbage can it stood next to, covered in green tile that must have been decorative 90 years ago but was now cracked and stained. Today nothing identified it as the Fountain of Youth. In fact, the only sign on it was a warning from the Florida Department of Health: “Use Water at Your Own Risk: The water from this well exceeds the maximum contaminate levels for radioactivity as determined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
I turned the little spigot, and sure enough, water sputtered out. It smelled sulfurous. I bent down and drank. It was not refreshing, not at all. It tasted exactly like hard-boiled eggs. But I was thirsty, so I kept drinking. It seemed to have a little more body than regular water — maybe the high mineral content thickened it, I thought, or the radiation was already warping the nerves on the inside of my cheeks. Every mouthful felt like swallowing a single, liquid hard-boiled egg. I started to feel ill. But I had come all this way, and it was hot, and there was a long day of driving ahead of me, so I kept gulping it down. I filled a few plastic bottles to get me to the next fountain.
Half an hour away, down the back roads of strip-mall Florida, I found another place that claimed to be the Fountain of Youth. This place, in fact, claimed to be the Fountain of Youth rather a lot. It was called Warm Mineral Springs, and its signage featured a painting of Ponce, with his pointy beard and his feathers, along with the words “Juan Ponce de León’s Original Fountain of Youth.” Outside was an old plaque that said: “According to authentic historical documents, this warm salt spring is the Fountain of Youth sought vainly by Ponce de León. . . . While on their way here, his party was ambushed by hostile Indians, and Ponce de León was mortally wounded.”
Warm Mineral Springs is a big, natural pool of water — almost a small lake — filled from below by a gushing salty spring. Deep down is an ancient cave system where divers have found the remains of sabertooth tigers and at least one prehistoric human. In the 1950s, the pool became a popular health spa. Later there was a nice restaurant, a massage parlor, acupuncture. Today, however, the place has fallen on hard times. The spa services are all closed. The restaurant is stripped and empty. For a while the property itself was closed, but the city recently took it over and now operates it very minimally: no towels or lockers for rent, no meals available, no apparent cleaning. For a fee you can walk down a shabby hallway with a waterlogged carpet and climb into the sinkhole. There are locals who do this every day, as well as a large contingent of international tourists, many of whom are from Eastern Europe. That afternoon there were about 20 people swimming, most of them large old Russian women in sun hats, floating with pool noodles, rolling their Slavic R’s. I must have been the youngest person there by a good 25 years, which in itself made me feel slightly younger. The water was murky — I couldn’t even see my feet — and there were little translucent fish in it.
Somehow, despite the dubious history of the place, despite the shabbiness of the current facility, despite the fish that (I’m fairly sure) bit me on the back, the pool felt powerful, primordial. I hadn’t planned to get in it at all, but I ended up swimming around it several times. The water, I was told, is 250 feet deep in the middle, and I thought I could feel currents rushing up at me out of the depths. It smelled very mildly sulfurous. It has one of the highest mineral contents in the world, and like the water from the Punta Gorda fountain, it felt unusually thick. My body felt squeezed and buoyant — I could feel the air working its way down into my lungs. There were chunks of muck floating around, but I drank a mouthful of water anyway. It was extremely salty. The pool was surrounded by classic Florida greenness: palm trees, huge dark oaks with pale Spanish moss, grass that gushed mud up every time you stepped on it. After my swim, I washed my feet off in the spa’s old locker room; there was a dead cockroach in the shower. It occurred to me that I was seeing the remnants of an old and dying version of Florida, the kind of attraction that preceded Disneyworld and the Interstates: natural, shabby and on the edge of extinction.
The next Fountain of Youth was 70 miles north, in St. Petersburg, near the Salvador Dalí Museum. This fountain was a little more put together than Punta Gorda’s radioactive eggwater fountain (Punta Gorda has a population of 17,000; St. Petersburg, 250,000), but it seemed to get no more attention. Thirsty people seemed to prefer the Starbucks across the street. The city had built a little “area” for the fountain — it looked like a tiny white shrine, with “Fountain of Youth” carved in fancy script in a white stone out front. The fountain itself was white and pentagonal, with a little stainless-steel tap on top. The whole scene was vaguely reminiscent of a cemetery. Its stream was steady and odorless. There was nothing to indicate, in fact, that it wasn’t coming from the city’s regular water supply. It gave me no special feeling at all. Someone had tagged its rim with graffiti. I filled a plastic bottle and drove away.
I drove all the way across the state, to St. Augustine. This is on the Atlantic Ocean, where Ponce de León actually (supposedly) originally landed, and it was the most and least authentic of all the Fountains of Youth. It was as kitschy as kitschy gets. There were statues of Ponce everywhere — classic bronze monuments, Chuck E. Cheese-style modern figures. Peacocks roamed the grounds. Again, the vibe was of old-fashioned, pre-Disney roadside Florida. Demonstrators in period costume fired off guns and cannons. There was a historical diorama showing Indians leading Ponce to a burbling spring, and next to that was the spring itself: a stream of water, dramatically lit, pumped from underground and pouring in a steady stream. Paper cups were stacked nearby, as at a dentist’s office. The water had a very slight sulfur tinge. The attendant suggested that it might be better with whiskey.
“Fountain of Youth,” in this case, was a particularly inaccurate description: There was no evidence that the spring was ever considered as such by Ponce de León and his men — it was perhaps just a great source of clean drinking water near the coast. (Indians lived near it for thousands of years before the Spaniards came.) Historians suggest that Ponce de León was never even there, that his landing in St. Augustine was largely the invention of a local real estate huckster. Fountain of Youth tourism seems to have started there in the 1800s. Today the gift shop sells souvenir bottles that you can fill from a tap labeled, “real fountain of youth water filtered to remove smell.” Another attendant told me that the water is disappearing. She said that in the 1500s, when Ponce de León arrived, the spring would have been bubbling up out of the ground. By the late 19th century, she said, Florida’s booming population started to tap out the groundwater, and to get to the spring they had to dig down 11 feet. Today, she told me, they have to go down 250 feet. (These numbers, like so much about the history of the Fountain of Youth, are questionable.) All the industry and agriculture and subdivisions and resorts and bottled-water companies have diminished Florida’s aquifer. Science suggests that this has most likely helped to accelerate the formation of cataclysmic sinkholes that occasionally swallow houses, roads, cars.
I went to the gift shop and bought some souvenirs: little bottles, a shirt, a book about Ponce. When I got outside, a blue peacock was standing next to my blue rental car, staring at his own reflection, apparently thinking that he was seeing another bird. He jumped up and attacked it, leaving scratch marks in the paint. I drove away drinking radioactive eggwater, which (perhaps I was imagining things) had begun to make me feel buzzy, as if I’d had a lot of caffeine. Later I Googled “radiation poisoning” on my phone.
3.
The story of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth is now, factually speaking, dead. It was too perfect to be true. Modern historians have debunked almost everything about it. In all of his many journeys, Ponce never once made documented mention of the fountain. He was a hard, practical, violent, political man — an exploiter of natives and a crusher of their rebellions — not some idealist skipping around in search of fairy tears and unicorns. When Ponce was still young, back in 1493, he sailed to the New World with Christopher Columbus. He knew how costly these journeys were, as well as all the possible ways they could go wrong. He actually sailed to Florida in search of the usual colonial obsessions: land, gold, slaves.
The legend, it turns out, is mostly just bad history. Years after Ponce de León’s death, the great Spanish chronicler Oviedo wrote about the conquistador’s adventures and indicated that Ponce hoped to find a cure for impotence (enflaquecimiento del sexo). Over the centuries, his account mutated, picking up the flavors and body of legend. In the 1800s, Washington Irving mythologized the story into what we know today: a full-blown quest for the Fountain of Youth. From there it passed into history books, tourist itineraries, monuments, etc.
The myth is also too perfect, however, to simply abandon completely. We are all going to die, just as Ponce did, and we will all probably do so while on some kind of quest — conscious or unconscious, literal or metaphorical — for a Fountain of Youth. Aging is the only eternal thing in human life; it’s one of our basic dumb paradoxes. We have raged against it from the beginning, and we will rage against it to the end. As we should. Aging makes no logical sense; it is not, in any meaningful way, a part of our experience. As any fledgling Buddhist will tell you, we live life only in the now — a now that feels present, urgent, immediate, singular. But in fact those nows are plural, and each one costs us. The nows accumulate. The way we know this is age. It’s not something we’ve done or something we deserve. We can’t even feel it happening, except abstractly over time. Our brains are justifiably confused. There must, we think, have been some mistake. We are angry. We are Ponce de León.
The Fountain of Youth, whatever it is, would feel like justice. Time is a liquid — it flows, unfairly, through us and past us; we ingest it without effort, without chewing — so it only makes sense that we would look for a liquid to save us. A liquid cure to a liquid curse. Generation after generation, like the mythical Ponce, has chased eternity in liquid form: the patent formula, the fish oil, the coconut water, the juice fast, the wheatgrass, the lotions. Twenty-first-century science promises to chase this myth into the very liquids of our bodies: nanocures that will flow in our blood and restore the fluid inside our cells. Ponce’s quest rages on, and perhaps this is the fountain he was pointing to: the perpetually flowing quest to the horizon — the next, next, next, next. We turn to look where he was pointing, and then suddenly we are gone. Next.