None would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; And from the dregs of life think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give.
—DRYDEN
“So, do you think I’m crazy?”
Ross Porter ends his story. Angela has not moved for an hour as she listened to his convoluted account. At this moment Ross cannot fathom how she feels. Her face is a mask, her eyes green and depthless as the sea. She sits with her back to the apartment window. Afternoon sunlight streams in to illumine her. She almost becomes the light for an instant.
“All because of that dream I’ve had,” he says, struggling to continue. “It’s why I came back. I know it’s not logical but I think there’s a connection. At first I didn’t recognise it, then I fought it and now, well, now I’m resolved. I’ve found no answers in the research but I never really expected to. And I can’t talk to anyone about this. You’re the first person I’ve actually told the whole thing to.”
For a moment the girl does not respond. She stares out through the apartment window into the light. Ross knows it has been an intense, disturbing hour for her. His quixotic tale has frightened yet fascinated her; those jade eyes clouding over with each new revelation until they have become opaque. Yet when he’d tried to stop, fearful of yet another rejection, she had beckoned him on.
“You really believe in this, don’t you?” she murmurs.
“You’d like me to leave?” Ross responds, ready for ridicule.
“No. I ... It’s just so overwhelming.”
“I’ll give you that,” he says, laughing hoarsely.
“I mean, I know there are things we can’t explain, things we aren’t conscious of or can’t grasp, even other dimensions. Everyone’s heard the fountain legend but no one ever gave it credence.”
“No one does, that’s true.”
“But if it is true, if it does exist, why haven’t we heard of it? Surely in all this time ...”
“The Calusa died from disease, Angela: smallpox mainly, like so many other tribes. A plague that killed most of them, I imagine. And with them went their culture. So no one knows much about it. Perhaps this water has healing properties, or maybe it simply prolongs the lives of the healthy. There was mention of a sacred water in Spanish chronicles. That’s what I’ve got to go on.”
“So you have no idea where this might be?”
“None. But it must be somewhere here. Why would Ponce de Leon come back to a place where he knew he’d meet resistance?”
“That historian ...”
“Bush.”
“Yeah. She told you it was about better harbours?”
“Yes, but why, later on, did the Spanish build their capitol at St. Augustine? The Atlantic side: to protect the Gulf Stream.”
“And you know he landed here?”
“Not exactly. Even she admitted his second voyage isn’t clearly documented. But it had to be near a large concentration of Calusa; otherwise, how could he and his troops have been defeated? They were conquistadors, armed and trained and experienced, the best fighters in the world at that time, quite capable of victory; unless there were so many against them they didn’t stand a chance.”
“So this, you think, is the logical choice?”
“There’s not a lot of logic. I know so little of this area ...”
“That’s why you wanted the top-maps?”
“Well, they’re something.”
“The maps can’t show you what you’re looking for.”
“It could be anywhere,” Ross mutters despairingly.
She is quiet again, studying his face. It is the drawn, lined face of a man who has felt too much, lost too much, given too much to this obsessive search. He no longer looks like the man who came into the library. He is older now, somehow, though so little time has passed since then. His face is filled with the trepidation that she might ridicule him, send him packing, call him a desperate old man. She would never do that.
“Have you thought any more about my guiding you?” she asks again.
“Are you certain you want to?” He almost cannot believe her.
“I’ve got three more days at the library. While I’m doing that you could get what we’ll need, maybe plot a search grid on the maps.”
“You’re sure?”
“This is just the thing for me. Whatever happens I’ll have lots of experience when we’re done. Or, perhaps I’ll have no need of a job in the end.” She smiles wryly. “Oh, it might seem a bit mad ...”
“You’re telling me?” He laughs again. She hears relief and fixation at the same time. It does not trouble her. She is accustomed to the years of her parents and their friends. They could be manic about things yet still, they were kind and loving. She craves this adventure.
“I’ve got time,” she replies. “So why not? I can’t even imagine the fountain exists but why not give you the chance to look? We can search for places where nobody goes and I might find some great routes for eco-tourists. It wouldn’t hurt my chances with outfitters.”
“I’ll pay for everything; whatever we need. Just give me a list. Ange, I can’t thank you enough.”
They have tea to toast their new partnership, then Ross leaves with a list Angela has given him. He will spend the next few days shopping. He walks east, down Periwinkle toward his hotel. The sun is setting behind him.
He is calm within the dream now, having grown accustomed to it. The horrors of before: the heat, the black water, the brambles and grasping vines, those faces and their laughter are now simply part of the passage he must endure to find an end. We humans somehow adapt to things, even the most dreadful. He ignores his clothing, even shucks off his jacket as he struggles along in his wingtip shoes. For there is hope beckoning him. Now, as never before. There is faith in reaching the unknowable terminus of this claustrophobic path. Even the voice: “Don’t go in there, Ross, don’t go in ...” has softened to mere suggestion.
And he knows that voice now.
Their search begins. Angela is a wonder. She falls into the spirit with youthful vigour. For the next two weeks they drive, boat, and hike the area as far south as Bonita Springs to as far north as North Port. They do not travel known roads. Instead they search in such places as Myakka River State Park, or Cecil M. Webb Wildlife preserve. They visit Pine Island often, hoping for some clue from the Randell Centre, some Calusa titbit they might discover where others would not suspect. Ange selects obscure markings on the maps, old trails leading nowhere specific. And each time they come upon some possibility they stop and search. They wander through late spring in Florida and Ross marvels at the blooming flowers and thickening foliage as the hot weather and the rains arrive. Sprays of poinsettia blossom crimson among the deep greens of vines. Wildflowers speckle the roadsides and riverbanks with a host of colour and life. The abundance of rebirth encourages him. He takes it as a sign, a metaphor of his vision. It is a law of nature. Regeneration. And if it is so common then there must be hope.
Angela takes him places he could never have found on his own. She works hard, searching her memory to recall cloaked lanes and pathways. They come upon hidden places so feral Ross hardly believes they are real. It is a primordial world at once forbidding and seductive: a world of crystal ponds and meadows abundant with flowers and trees stretching skyward, of clear pools shaded beneath cool ferns and blossoming orchids. They glimpse rare birds like the hot pink of roseate spoonbills, or green herons perched motionless on branches by streams, or the sudden beauty of snowy egrets stalking their prey with patient wading steps.
Often they camp in the wild. Angela, hiking boots and long, slim legs, prepares campfire dinners. She is good at this, having done it so often. As they spend time together, he comes to think of her as a kind of daughter. He will not go beyond this. Not after Darlene. Not even in his tent at night, fleeting visions of that healthy, robust young body so active and full of life passing through his mind; he will not abuse this gift. In the evenings they talk across their campfires. Angela believes in natural spirits, animism. She knows all things have souls. Trees, stones, even water.
“It’s not the way we think of a soul,” she explains, “but a life force. You can feel it around us, can’t you? My parents believed in it. My dad would take us, mom and me and some other friends, out into the bush for what he called spiritual regeneration. Oh, there were drugs back then but he used only natural ones: marijuana, peyote, that kind of thing. He’d read a lot of Carlos Castenada. He still thinks of himself as a medicine man.”
“He thought beyond logic,” Ross says, feeling a bond with a man he has never met. “In a way, Ange, you’re far ahead of me. It’s taken me so long to realize. I kind of wish I’d had your childhood.”
It is all so simple really as he recalls what he once was and how he has changed. He remembers a woman named Ilsa Pendereki who shook his hand, and his world as well, at a meet and greet teachers’ staff meeting. She’d been hired to teach Theatre Arts. Ross had argued against this. He simply could not see the sense in a theatre course. It would take students’ time away from more scholarly pursuits. It would take them away from the real world.
To Ross the school musical was one thing: bringing kids out to enjoy themselves; a solid promotion of the institute. He’d even helped with a few, building sets and props. But Ilsa would have none of that. Not for her Oklahoma or Bye Bye Birdie or even Gilbert and Sullivan. She said she wanted kids to explore themselves. Ross thought this was dangerous ground.
She was dark-haired and dark-eyed and looked far too avant-garde to be a teacher. She wore black clothing and left town each weekend for Toronto or Montreal. Ross found her suspicious. And then he saw her first productions. They were strange and alien to him, involving writhing body movements and ghostly voices. The sets and the lighting made the plays seem like dreams. Ross hated them and could not comprehend her success; for she was successful. More students enrolled in her classes each year. She won prestigious drama awards. Others on staff said she was an artist. Ross gave it no credence. She had bamboozled them with the arcane. In Department Heads’ meetings he began to wonder aloud what was happening when students relinquished the basics in favour of the esoteric. And to the woman herself he became aloof. She had asked him several times for help. Ross had refused. He thought her efforts worthless. But Emily didn’t.
“I happen to like her work, Ross.”
“But you know how I feel about what she’s doing.”
“Yes, and now you know how I feel.”
“There’s no place in school for that kind of self-indulgence. She manipulates them.”
“And are your students, when they come to you, when you explain things, are they being manipulated?”
“Of course not; it’s different.”
“I don’t think so. You give them history that lives. You let them see the humanity in it.”
“That’s what history is.”
“Not the way I was taught. All I remember is wars, politics and memorisation.”
“No wonder you don’t like it.”
“I like it when it’s human, when it touches me, when I know those were people like you and me who struggled to make better lives for themselves. Why do you think I prefer historical novels?”
“You think I do that? Teach like that?”
“I know you do. You have a gift, but so does Ilsa. You can’t close down new ways of thinking, Ross. History has to have taught you that much.”
“And I am, therefore, the old,” he said, suddenly hurt by her words.
“You’ll have to think that one out for yourself, Ross.”
Now Ross Porter finds himself a changed man. He is no longer the obstinate conservative. He has opened himself to the cryptic.
I wish Emily could see me now.
Still, as the search proceeds through weeks, nothing strikes him as familiar. He works on the premise of the dream, no matter how raw, to bring some recognition. This does not seem at all strange to him. He has discarded the old ways: the research, the studied hypothesis, the objective viewpoint, the things he has valued since he can remember. Nothing at all he has done before aids him in this. He finds himself on a quixotic journey within the primordial forests and swamps which recognise nothing more than themselves. They have lived for epochs, their secrets beyond human comprehension. And to gain those secrets one must, Ross thinks, return to the mystic. There is wisdom in the arcane, unrecognised by those who have lost touch with the source. And that wisdom of visions and dreams and signs may be the only true knowledge of man.
But the search begins to seem hopeless. So much of the land has been subsumed by development. The secret water could now lie beneath some shopping mall or condominium, its precious liquid lost underground, seeping into sewage systems or simply stopped up completely. And there is so much to search. As day after day passes with no progress, Ross feels a growing discouragement. He had hoped for a kind of ethereal guidance, some direction that would bring him to his goal. It had all seemed so fixed before, all fallen into place: the feelings, the dreams, Emily, Angela, all of it leading him to his destiny.
Yet slowly it has become less clear.
Still Angela pushes where he would have glided. The young woman offers him urgent purpose because she possesses it in abundance. She is in her element, discovering more and more of herself with each day as they trek through those subtle, hidden places. She becomes more confident and commanding, assuming leadership but leading now in an altered direction. Somehow as they have travelled, their visions have grown apart. She has something else now, removed from Ross’ fixation; dreams of her own.
“I keep remembering places we’ve been,” she tells him, “but they never seem right to you. Can you describe this dream path any clearer?”
“I’m sorry; intuition is all I’ve got.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t got you what you want, Ross. I have to thank you though. You’ve given me such a chance to explore.”
“So how do you feel about me now?” He tries bantering, but she will not take his bait. Her mind is elsewhere: caught up in the real.
“I’ve been thinking, with all this exploration, eventually I might even start my own business. I just need a business plan.”
So there it is. Youth and future. Peering into the distance where he cannot go.
She plots and plans their every day. But now it is more about eco-tourist routes than searching for an obscure spring. Now it has function for her beyond his nefarious dream. For her dream, despite her spirituality, is more actual and attainable than his. She arranges meetings with guides, naturalists, fishermen. She wants to know their secret places, the ones the maps cannot show: pools of beauty, orchid plots, places where people might revel in nature’s perfection. There is never a mention of sacred water. What they had shared becomes depleted, overwhelmed by Angela’s new agenda. The search for the fountain is too much like crawling, and the young have ever wanted to run.
He finds more and more he is helping her rather than the reverse. He is envious of her energy, jealous of her vision, or perhaps just hopelessly lost in his age. If the water will bring him youth again, it will give him the wisdom to govern that youth. For the water will not erase his experience. He admits to himself ageing does have its benefits: patience, a calmer demeanour, the knowledge one gains, the mind that grows as the body falters.
And there is the rub.
Angela begins to notice his irritability. She tries to assuage him. She is loyal but he knows very well she could leave any time. If their separate visions grow further apart, she will realize she has made a mistake and, as youth does, find a way out: perhaps with sensitivity, hopefully that, but more likely with brutal youthful decision.
And he must abide by it.
It comes to him then why the search has been empty. He has begun to follow the path of a youth. That track leads nowhere but toward the obvious. His track is the numinous. The road has not yet been made which leads to the mystical fountain. He must make his own.
I’ve done this the wrong way. I’ve been searching others’ routes, trying to find the unknown through the known.
The unknown will only be found within. Deep.
Where youth fears to go.
Their search ends one day by mutual agreement. She cannot find what he is seeking and he can no longer follow her. They pack up their gear and return to the town, each to their own places, brief goodbyes as he drops her off. Her green eyes are dreary like a turgid sea; they no longer sparkle.