Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Long after the discovery of the western hemisphere, rumors about the fountain’s possible location persisted. There were rumors of revivifying waters known to the Maasai people in the steppes east of Kilimanjaro. Others went looking for it around the mouth of the Nile. Perhaps it was in the South Pacific? In 1831, a missionary’s collection of Polynesian Research told of the wai ora roa: a life-giving fountain in the Pacific that healed any internal malady or external ailment. Its salutary waters also granted immortality. The mythologies of the region told of idyllic spirit-lands in the underwater ocean. Samoan chieftains looked forward to a place called Pulotu, where the “water of life” bestowed eternal vigor. The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia describes an island called Tuma, where the inhabitants bathe in a spring called sopiwina (washing water) whose brackish liquor morphs them into kids. This can be done repeatedly, allowing for a never-ending return to childhood. “When they find themselves old, they slough off the loose, wrinkled skin, and emerge with a smooth body, dark locks, sound teeth, and full of vigor. Thus life with them is an eternal recapitulation of youth with its accompaniment of love and pleasure.”

  Nowhere had as much potential as America, though. The Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, published in 1900, recounted the Cherokee tale of an invisible lake near North Carolina and Tennessee that could cure any wound. Unfortunately, the report concluded, “no man can see it.” Five years later, two springs in Florida alone were claiming to be the veritable Fountain of Youth sought by Ponce de León. One of them was around Ocala; the other was Green Cove spring. When I started looking for it, the fountain that got the most Google hits was located in the town of St. Augustine, Florida. While awaiting Copperfield’s response, I decided to find out whether it was worth a sip.

  * * *

  1. Nestorius was charged with “dividing the invisible.”

  2. Which may have overlapping connections with the Indus.

  3. In a 1905 essay for The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Yale professor E. W. Hopkins concludes that the idea of a Fountain of Youth derives from India, but also notes (regretfully) that his sixty-eight-page attempt to pinpoint the source of the fountain, “though longer than at first intended, is yet still too short to be definitive.”

  4. A beverage of immortality was also spoken of by Zarathustra, the Persian prophet who lived around the same time the Rigveda was composed. His teachings formed the core religion of Iran until Islam arrived in the seventh century. Their elixir is haoma, best drunk at the end of time near the junction of the great gathering place of all the waters.

  5. The Alexander Romance depicts India as a place boasting fleas as big as frogs and ship-size lobsters that could swat fifty-four soldiers off a deck with one flick of the claw. The human inhabitants were taken straight from Ctesias’s imagination, including a race of headless people with eyes and mouths on their chests. Some men were lion-faced, others had a half dozen feet, and there were giants whose hands ended in serrated knives.

  10

  Almost Real

  “You see,” he went on, “it’s very much like your trying to reach Infinity. You know that it’s there, but you just don’t know where—but just because you can never reach it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth looking for.”

  —Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

  The history of America begins, like that of the Ancient World, with legends in which it is not easy to recognize the exact proportion of reality and imagination.

  —Leonardo Olschki, “Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth”

  THE VOICE on the other end of the line sounded pleasantly corporate: “Fountain of Youth, this is Michelle Reyna speaking.”

  “Hi, Michelle,” I said. “Could I please speak to the fountain’s media department?”

  “Why, that would be me!” she said, her excitement suggesting a dearth of such requests. “I’m the creative marketing director and special events coordinator for the Fountain of Youth. How can I help you?”

  I told her I was a writer considering a visit.

  “If you come to St. Augustine, I can promise you’ll learn everything you ever wanted to know about the Fountain of Youth,” Michelle explained. Clearly, this fountain would be a lot less challenging to see than David Copperfield’s.

  Michelle embarked upon an account of the fountain’s origins. “It was opened over a hundred years ago by Diamond Lil, based on evidence she uncovered that Ponce de León—who came looking for an eternal spring—found it right over here.”

  “So Ponce de León actually found the fountain in St. Augustine?”

  “Absolutely. Although some people claim he may not have made it this far north. We agree to disagree with those people. In either case, because this is known as the Fountain of Youth, and it has been here for over one hundred years, we’re going to say that he was here, because no one else is taking the lead on it. If no one else can produce any evidence that he landed elsewhere, then why not?”

  Her argument had a kind of simplistic complexity that momentarily suspended my critical faculties. I just wanted to keep listening to her speak. “So why was Ponce looking for the Fountain of Youth?” I asked.

  “As far as I know, he heard about it from some Indians, and then King Ferdinand sent him to find it. You know, Ferdinand was being fed arsenic—their version of Viagra at the time—trying to get healthy enough to make a male baby—and so Ponce set sail. We have some historians here who’ll be able to tell you more about that.”

  She recommended a handful of authorities I’d be able to interview, including the fountain’s owner, somebody from the city’s tourism department, and an amateur archaeologist. The number one historian she wanted me to meet was named David Nolan. “Some institutional historians look down their nose at him because he doesn’t have a PhD, but he’s extremely charming,” explained Michelle. “He’s more of a storyteller and less of an academic. He’s very popular. And I’ll also give you a personal tour of the property. Did I mention I do occasional work as a costumed storyteller? I become Diamond Lil.”

  “Diamond Lil—you mentioned her name earlier. Who was she?”

  “Doctor Lil was quite the little lady,” continued Michelle coquettishly. “She came here from Alaska with a diamond in her teeth. She had lots of jewelry and ermines, so you can imagine what it was like when she blew into town. She kind of put on airs. Lil would tell people that she was related to Napoléon.”

  “Was she?”

  “She said she was. But we never found any genealogical evidence. She did own one of Joséphine’s evening gowns, made of spun silver and mother-of-pearl, which was a gift from Napoléon.”

  “Just so I’m clear on this: Diamond Lil found the Fountain of Youth?”

  “Ponce found the fountain,” Michelle said, her benevolent rebuke making me feel like a kid. “Lil rediscovered it and opened it to the public. She found the cross and the parchment proving that Ponce had been here. Then she started selling the water for twenty-five cents a glass.”

  Michelle and I agreed to meet in a few days. In the meantime, I started researching. A government website devoted to important Floridians noted that Diamond Lil “fabricated stories to amuse and appall St. Augustine residents.” Her 1906 memoir is unrelentingly melodramatic. Brawls, murders, hangings, fits of spleen, apoplectic rages, rascality—Tragedy of the Klondike has it all, including a notarized statement testifying that none of it is false or exaggerated.

  She had traveled to the Klondike during the gold rush, wearing sealskin coats and fox-fur robes. Her companion—a massive Saint Bernard named Prince Napoleon—saved her from drowning in icy waters but was then swept into a whirlpool. When panning in the bullion fields didn’t pan out, she became a doctor, a hotel owner, and a treasurer overseeing hillocks of gold dust. She had affairs with men who’d found walnut-size nuggets and married a hustler named Edward “Easy Money” McConnell.

  The money may have been easy, but life in the Arctic was
hard. She was accused of libel and of robbing sluice boxes. Once she found steady work, she said, she had to endure frequent poisonings. On one occasion, she was stabbed with a veterinarian’s horse hypodermic full of cyanide. On another, she was fed raw eggs laced with arsenic. Her stomach rapidly rejected them: “When they came up, the whites of those eggs were really cooked.”

  The story of a woman with a diamond in her teeth rediscovering Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth and selling it for twenty-five cents a glass seemed to make even more sense once I came across a passage in her book about gold rushers paying twenty-five cents a bucket from a waterhouse in Dawson City. Diamond Lil had actually sued the Canadian government to remove the well on the grounds that it was a public nuisance. Although her lawsuit flopped, she seemed to have learned something up there about selling water for a quarter.

  Almost every other document I came across regarding Lil was peppered with contradictions. Nothing about her was certain—not even her name. Official papers referred to her as Dr. Louella McCollum until somewhere shortly before her death in a car crash, by which point her name had been changed to Luella Murat Day (to reflect her direct link to the Napoleonic Murats). When she died, two copies of her will surfaced: one leaving everything to her ex-husband Edward McConnell, the other leaving everything to her ex-husband’s blind brother. The officiating judge claimed that he had never before been associated with a case with so many multiplying complications.

  The only thing that seemed certain was her eccentricity. She placed classifieds offering a liberal reward for any information leading to the capture of her forty-five-year-old gardener (he disappeared, the ads explained, while sailing off to get seed potatoes). She was arrested for shooting at a policeman she believed had tried to feed her tainted apples. Writer Theodore Dreiser’s Florida diary from 1925 recounts the time she insistently told him how the new Messiah was going to land on the property—presumably the same way Ponce had. She told Dreiser that people were trying to poison her with watermelons, gas, and Coca-Cola. Once she was dead, she said, they’d wrest the property from her hands.

  Legal documents characterized her as a meddlesome paranoiac with a complex of self-pity. Her occasional public-speaking engagements were described as “the maunderings of a disordered brain.” In a 1909 speech at the St. Augustine Tourist Club, she claimed to have proof that local families were being killed for their land. In the talk, she told of being unafraid of death, and of being able to read the shadows reflected from seditions coming from the four quarters of the globe. The best part was her opening rhetorical salvo: “There are three things, my Christian friends, which I have not got. I have not got Insanity. I have not got Hysteria. And I have not got any Ladylike complaints. But what I have got is indisputable evidence which I brought with me from the Rock of Gibraltar in 1908 . . .”

  * * *

  As soon as I arrived in St. Augustine, I was lost. The map I’d printed brought me to a defunct beauty salon called the Fountain of Youth Spa. One sign said TAKE YEARS OFF YOUR FACE—WE HAVE THE ANSWER! Next to it was another: OUT OF BUSINESS.

  After passing signs for the oldest schoolhouse, the oldest jail, the oldest pharmacy, and a host of other “shoppes,” I stopped to ask for directions. A bearded man decked out in galleon attire handed me a flyer for some ye olde tyme butter-churning events and gave me a complicated set of instructions to go the wrong way down several one-way streets. “It is confusing,” he said. “This is St. Augustine.”

  After driving along a canopied avenue, I pulled through the arches of the Fountain of Youth National Archaeological Park. At the end of the parking lot, beneath elms draped with Spanish moss, two male peacocks were going at it. Formidable plumage fanned out, Mohawked heads bobbing, they circled each other and then charged, butting chests in midair, swirling into a metallic-purple cloud of beaks and talons. One ran out of the dust, shedding feathers and cawing oww oww owwwwww! The victor strutted daintily along toward a gaggle of peahens down the lane.

  A stocky, redheaded woman in a gold silk top waved at me from across the lot. She was standing next to a concession stand offering ICE-COLD PICKLES ON A STICK in dripping, ice-blue letters. I walked over and she finished up a call on her Bluetooth, waving aside the $7.50 cover charge.

  “Welcome!” Michelle Reyna said, shaking my hand with fingers covered in oversize rings. She wore so much jewelry she seemed to be shining. Her emerald bracelets matched her emerald heels. She was in her fifties, with a solid build, and smelled bracingly of perfume. “Did you find your way easily?” she asked, taking off the headpiece and adjusting her big crystal earrings.

  As we turned toward the garden, another peacock leapt off the roof. “That’s a male indigo,” she told me, raising a painted-on red eyebrow in its direction. “They’re pretty feisty. They’ll even attack their reflections in shiny cars. We also have white peacocks. People think they’re albino, but they’re not. When they’re together, they’re a party of peacocks. I’m really precise about that.”

  Several honked in approval.

  “Also, to be precise again, the Spanish moss on these trees is not Spanish, and it is not moss,” she said in her genial, no-nonsense manner. “It’s called Spanish moss because it looks similar to an old, gnarly Spaniard’s beard. It’s actually an air plant related to pineapples.”

  As we walked down a stone path into the park, I hoped we’d be getting more precise about the Fountain of Youth. “The grounds are bigger than most people imagine—fifteen acres full of fountains and Florida flora,” Michelle alliterated, as I craned around at all the water features, wondering which, if any, was the actual Fountain of Youth.

  Descended from Spanish Minorcans who’d settled here in the eighteenth century, Michelle had been raised Catholic. As a child she was groomed to be the next Singing Nun. Recounting the story, she burst into the chorus of “Dominique,” the unlikely hit song from the sixties about the saint who founded the Dominican order. But then, in her teenage years, she’d discovered boys.

  We came to a little shack overgrown with vines. “You’re not allergic to sulfur, are ya?” Michelle asked, pausing in the doorway.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The springhouse was lit low to convey gravitas. A large cross lay on the floor. A diorama showed Spanish ships rolling across the ocean. Pelicans soared motionlessly through the wave troughs. On land, an Indian in a loincloth was holding an ax that lifted and dropped mechanically.

  All through the shed, not a fountain could be spotted. In the middle of the room, a hole in the ground had a rickety little gate around it. Plastic mouthwash cups full of water were laid out next to the cranny. A few silver jugs were there to give the impression of old Mother Spain. A whirring fan rotated back and forth.

  “Think of it as a small, underground river,” said Michelle earnestly.

  I looked at her. I looked back at the fountain. It was actually a hole in the ground.

  She launched into a convoluted story about the fountain’s having gone beneath sea level and how they’d put in a pump similar to one you’d find in a goldfish pond. “People have this image in their mind of a fountain, so they used to leave unhappy,” she said, handing me a small plastic cup. “Since we put the pump in, everybody is satisfied. Anyways, take a sip! It has forty-two minerals in it.”

  It tasted like bathwater.

  “People say it tastes like old well-water from their grandparents’ backyards.” Michelle smiled. “How was it?”

  “Pretty good,” I lied. “You can really taste the sulfur.”

  She beamed.

  “I haven’t turned into an eight-year-old yet, though.”

  “You just took ten minutes off your life with one sip.” She laughed. “People say, ‘Is this going to make me younger?’ ‘Yes,’ we say, ‘but only in ten-minute increments.’”

  She then brought me down to the waterfront, where we came to a statue of Ponce de León wearing a silver hat and puffed-out pumpkin pants. The paint was peeling near
his scabbard. His skin was a shiny gold color.

  “It’s not real gold,” said Michelle. “Probably plaster or something. We just paint it gold. But it looks cool and people like it, so . . .”

  I tried to focus on certainties. “Do we know whether Ponce de León really did land here?”

  “That’s what we can’t prove,” she answered, puppy-eyed. “But the cross shows that he did.”

  “You mean the cross that Diamond Lil dug up?” I asked skeptically.

  “Yes.” Michelle held her arms open and shrugged.

  Just across the lawn was a church with an enormous cross standing high into the air. “That’s the cross of Our Lady de la Leche,” Michelle said. “It’s the second-largest freestanding cross in the world, after Rio. It’s two hundred and eight feet tall. It has nothing to do with Ponce’s cross, but it’s another historically important cross. When JFK came out here, he said this is the most sacred acre in the United States.”

  “Why did he say that?”

  “Because this is where Christianity began in the US.”

  “Okay . . . who was Our Lady de la Leche?” I asked.

  “Our Lady of the Milk is the patron saint of breast-feeding. The church was started by a friar whose wife was having trouble breast-feeding, so he named it after her. It may have roots in a fourth-century grotto in Bethlehem. When Menéndez arrived, he laid a cross right here and proclaimed the land in the name of Spain. That marked the beginning of America’s colonization by Europeans.”

  “I’m confused,” I admitted honestly. “I’m trying to figure out who landed here, who was first, what was first. Are you saying that Ponce landed right here and Menéndez arrived here, too? Both at the same place?”