Out of the Woods (17 page)

Cabeza de Vaca commanded one of the little boats, each of which held about fifty men. They ran through what supplies they had all too quickly as they followed the coast westward to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Then came the final blow to whatever remained of their original plan: a strong current swept the boats away from land and into the teeth of a hurricane. Only two of the boats survived.

The surviving two, with about forty men, including de Vaca, came to grief near what was probably Galveston Island. The former conquistadors had other names for it: they called it Malhado—Misfortune; they called it The Island of Doom. There they tried to repair what was left of the boats, using their clothes to plug the holes, but fate wasn't done with them—not by a long shot. A large wave crashed on the shore, sweeping the boats away as if they were bathtub toys.

The little band of survivors became smaller still. Tribes living along the coast enslaved the few who were left, tribes whose names can only be guessed now, extinguished as they were by the subsequent waves of men who came to take their gold and save their souls.

At some point, de Vaca and his companions escaped from their captors and set out for . . . what? They had no way of knowing, save for the fact that there were other Spaniards out there somewhere. They were captured again, and escaped again. Soon there were only four men left: de Vaca; two other Spaniards, Andres Dorantes de Carranza and Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado; and Estevanico, a luckless Berber who had been taken in slavery from his native Morocco (and who would survive this adventure only to die at the hands of natives as a member of an expedition led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, another Spanish conquistador).

De Vaca and his companions were as lost as any humans have ever been, naked and defenseless in an unknown country in a harsh climate, without a map, without a bearing, without a clue. They had no words for most of the animals and foliage and wonders they saw; they were the first of their kind to see them.

They stayed lost for nine years. But somewhere along the way they shed the narrative of capture and escape; transformed by hardship, time, the wild and brilliant landscape, and whatever bargains they had struck with their God, they were no longer helpless witnesses to their own catastrophe.

Cabeza and his men traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles barefoot and naked. They explored, as nearly as anyone can piece together, much of Texas, parts of New Mexico and Arizona, as well as what are now the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila, in northeastern Mexico.

From there they walked south, through Coahuila and Nueva Vizcaya, down the coast of the Gulf of California to Sinaloa. They became traders for a time, traveling from tribe to tribe, learning the languages, bartering goods from one place to another, forging a kind of life. Eventually, after shedding his sunburned skin a dozen times over, Cabeza de Vaca became “a child of the sun,” in the language of the people there, a holy man, a seer. He healed the sick, he saved the crops, he raised the dead. The people gave him copper rattles, coral beads, turquoise, arrowheads, and, once, six hundred deer hearts. He and his companions were no longer alone: they were followed on their journey by crowds of the faithful who believed de Vaca had the power to heal and destroy them. Which, of course, was exactly what the lost men had themselves believed when they set out from Castile that fine day so long ago.

Reading his narrative, which he would write and rewrite the rest of his life, you wonder if de Vaca ever lost the man he once had been, if the lust for gold and glory that had propelled him across the ocean ever burned off like a morning mist in the heat of the day.

The facts would suggest otherwise.

Eventually the little band arrived in a place he called “the Village of Hearts.” They were in New Mexico at that point, a terrifying, empty place, deserted, he writes, by those who lived there because of recent depredations by vicious men on horseback. De Vaca knew he had found his people.

He left his followers, promising them he would stop the killing, the slavery, and the theft of their land. The next day he and the Berber Estevanico and eleven of the natives walked thirty miles until they met up with a company of Spanish soldiers out hunting slaves.

At first, the Spaniards couldn't believe de Vaca was one of them and promptly tried to enslave his companions. De Vaca in turn was so angry that he and his fellow travelers took off, leaving behind pretty much everything they had brought with them.

The Indians, for their part, were mystified. They simply couldn't believe the men on horseback belonged to the same tribe as the naked god with whom they walked. As de Vaca explains, “we came from the sunrise, they came from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the healthy; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed horsed and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.” For de Vaca it must have been like walking through the looking glass—what these men were, he had once been.

And, to a degree only he could know, still was. Although in the beginning he could not bear to sleep on a bed or wear European clothes, de Vaca sailed back to Spain in 1537, ten years after he left it.

Perhaps the most astounding aspect of de Vaca's life, and the most difficult to understand, from an idealistic—or naive—point of view, is his return to the world he once inhabited and to his position within its elaborate codes of behavior and measures of success. He had gone through an extraordinary transformation—a redemption, in the eyes of those who see him through the lens of history's bloody coda—and yet he went back to the court of King Charles I, and took up the ways of his old life. There he wrote the account of his travels, having taken care, he said, to remember everything faithfully, so that, if God so ordained, “I would be able to bear witness to my will and serve Your Majesty, inasmuch as the account of it all is, in my opinion, information not trivial for those who in your name might go to conquer these lands . . . and bring them to knowledge of the true faith and the true Lord and service to Your Majesty.”

Eventually de Vaca returned to the New World, as governor of the Province of Rio de Plata in what is now Paraguay. His tenure ended badly—he was arrested, imprisoned, and sent back in chains to Spain, where he was tried on charges of official misconduct, of mistreating the Indians and of raising his own heraldic standard instead of the king's, though some accounts insist that his true crime had been his attempts to protect the indigenous people in his charge.

Cabeza de Vaca ended his days back in his home in Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, old and penniless and brokenhearted, say the more apocryphal accounts, busy ransoming his nephew from the king of Algiers, according to others.

 

C
ancer veterans warn you that the year after treatment is, in some ways, worse than the year in which you are actually fighting the disease, and there is something to that. While you are in treatment, you have a job—there are appointments and pills and side effects, there are blood tests and bone density tests and tests of character and simple endurance, decisions to make, small and large.

I was lucky—the cancer had retreated enough to enable me to avoid a mastectomy and there was no evidence of the disease in the lymph nodes. But still, when it was over, I was caught up short, and the first few months afterward were spent in a kind of free fall. Augustus Egg had made a quiet departure without so much as a good-bye, the adrenaline on which I had lived subsided, and all the emotions that it had bullied out of the way returned. Oh my God, I thought to myself, curled into as small a space on the sofa as I could manage, I had cancer! Everything seemed tentative then, as if I were walking on very thin ice, as if a splinter of light could pierce me. For a while, I could not even boil an egg—the commotion of the water, the violence of the act, the injury to what lay within was too unsettling. How odd it sounds now. But that is the way it was.

I went into hedgehog mode. I had a family of them living with me. My first year in Vermont, there had only been one, a male, I think, who, in the warm early-autumn evenings, would noddle around the rocks and weeds in the space outside the back door where a patio might be someday, if I ever became the sort of person who had a patio. He would look up when he saw me, acknowledging my existence, but rather like the mice in the pantry—or the men who plowed the road in winter, for that matter—he didn't appear to take too much notice.

But during the spring, while I was sick, he must have decided to settle down, because now he had a mate in tow and a fine-looking family of little hedgehogs who had taken up residence in the woodshed that abutted the garage. They were renovating: a small chink in the wall between the two was growing larger every day, and when I would try to impede their progress by moving a jug of distilled water or a log in front of the opening, the evening would resound with the rhythmic thumping of hedgehog tails battering down the latest obstacle to their ambitions.

Harriet's husband, Dean, advised me to get rid of my new tenants immediately. He was the gentlest man I had ever known, but though he could talk for hours about the birds he observed at his feeders in the spring, he took a less patient line toward the more destructive members of the animal kingdom. While some locals used hedgehogs for target practice, Dean took a more pacifist approach. He trapped his own beasties in Havahart traps and drove them to the woods near Reading, the next town over, where he let them go. First mom, then dad, and finally the offspring. When I worried about the pups or kids, or whatever you call hedgehog babies fending for themselves, Dean shrugged. “They're alive, aren't they?” he said. “Best I can do.”

He was right, of course, but I let them be, beyond reading up a little on their habits. Hedgehogs, when they are threatened, curl up into a ball, their soft and vulnerable bellies disappearing deep within a sphere of quills that offer a mouthful of pain to any predator. In those first few months after treatment I could think of no better defense against the frightful option of normal life. I didn't go out, or answer the phone, or listen to music with words—I wanted no emotions or moods to intrude, no opinions or promises or plans.

But life, whether you like it or not, rebuilds itself. You begin with scaffolding; the daily routine—dishes washed, bed made, a numb trip to the supermarket. Then one day in a parking lot a chance encounter with a friend yields a dinner invitation you are not permitted to decline. You drive home from an evening spent around a kitchen table with friends laughing in low voices, and for the first time you notice the clouds scudding across a nascent moon. Something quickens. And gradually you find yourself inhabiting each day more fully, savoring the lift of leaves in an autumn wind, two dogs sleeping in a patch of sunlight, the graceful arc of a young man leaping from a pickup truck. And you promise yourself you will take nothing for granted ever again.

Catastrophe can change you but it doesn't turn you into a better person, at least not for long. After the end of treatment, after the effects of the drugs and radiation have begun to wear off, after the fatigue and the depression begin to lift, you find yourself sitting in a traffic jam on the highway cursing the traffic, impatient, eager to get moving. You remember how, just a few months before, you would have given anything for the normal routine of a life in which a traffic jam is the worst thing that will happen to you that day. You had sworn when the chemo beetles were eating away at your brain, your mood, your sense of self, that you would never take the minor inconveniences of life seriously. But you do. And that in fact is how you know you are moving beyond the shadow that cancer or any of life's big curveballs cast: you have regained your inalienable right to be grumpy about the absolutely unimportant.

 

B
ut still—in those first few months after treatment, I thought often about Cabeza de Vaca, after he returned from his wanderings and resumed his place at the Castilian court. I imagined him buckling on his ceremonial armor, before presenting a petition to the king. Perhaps he took one last look in the mirror just as the sun escaped a cloud and bounced smartly off of the polished metal of his breastplate, blinding him, reminding him for an instant of the infernal glare of the sun in that savage land that had peeled away his skin, and laid bare his unarmored soul. Did he miss the naked holy man, the disaster that had loosed him, had taken away his compass and freed him from the dictates of so elaborate a life?

8

A Sense of Direction

It is better to think of a return to civilization not as an end to hardship and a haven from ill, but as a close to an adventurous and pleasant life.

—SIR FRANCIS GALTON,
The Art of Rough Travel

O
n the other side of Boreas, the North Wind, there was once a hidden paradise, a land temperate and fertile and beautiful. The people who lived in Hyperborea were blessed, and their lives were devoted to Apollo, whose round marble temple stood at the center of a sacred grove of cedar trees. “The Muse is not absent from their customs,” wrote the Greek poet Pindar. “All round swirl the dances of girls, the lyre's loud chords, and the cries of flutes. They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully. No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles they live without fear of Nemesis.”

No traveler ever returned from this paradise. To enter Hyperborea, one had to endure bitter cold and privation, and to pass through places of dread and horror—Ierne, for one, or as we know it now, Ireland, whose inhabitants “consider it honorable to eat their dead fathers and to openly have intercourse, not only with unrelated women, but with their mothers and sisters as well.” Past Ierne lay Ultima Thule, the most distant place on earth, a nightmare land, where, some said, one could find the gates of hell.

Despite, or more likely because of, the dearth of eyewitness accounts, the belief in this perfect paradise has proved so beguiling that it has echoed through the centuries. In Mary Shelley's novel
Frankenstein; or,
The Modern Prometheus
, the eponymous hero describes the Hyperborean paradise to his sister: “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to me as the region of beauty and delight . . . there snows and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.” The location itself has proved flexible: when Admiral Richard Byrd flew over the South Pole in 1947, rumors abounded that he had caught a glimpse of a mysterious subtropical land.

There is something stubbornly human about this longing for a paradise on earth (and our need to make a hell out of other, more accessible places), as if our troubles were a product of geography, as if we could escape them if only we left them far behind.

 

O
n a warm Thursday afternoon in March, a year to the day after I had come for my first session, I left the office on the seventh floor of 30 East Sixtieth Street with a big bouquet of yellow roses. A surprising and touching gesture, by which the three women who worked there—Dr. Reichman; Jane Brown, the oncological nurse; and Ana Oliva, the unflappable office manager—marked the ceremonial end of treatment for each of their patients.

I walked out a little dazed. I don't think it had occurred to me that I would ever stop coming to New York every three weeks to have a needle placed in my left arm. After the humiliation and fury of radiation had subsided, after the depression began to lift and food no longer tasted like weed killer, after the first pale shaft of hair had given way to a half inch or so of curly softness, the trips to Reichman's office were no longer filled with the dread of the sickness that was to come. Instead the office had become a safe harbor, a place where everyone understood and no one had to explain. I realized, as I sheltered my roses from the crowds on Madison Avenue, that I would miss the place.

It was a beautiful day, made giddy by the brilliant cacophonous sunshine—light has a clamorous quality in the city, bouncing off windshields and storefronts and traffic lights, shouting for attention. On impulse, I decided to walk the thirty blocks to the garage where I'd stashed the Jeep, cradling the roses like a piano recitalist who had made it through a particularly intricate bit of Schubert, taking in the city in a way less fettered by memory and experience than it had been in a long time.

Then I headed north toward—home?

As the Vermont hills hove into view, a light snow had begun, and the heavy gray sky subdued any lingering sense of ceremony. In my other trips north I had always welcomed the sight of those hills, but now they stirred more ambivalent reactions.

When I had first started coming to Vermont from New York I loved that moment on Interstate 91 where Massachusetts yielded to Vermont and you knew without looking at any highway sign that you were in a very different place. It was in the light and the air and the blurred outlines of the hills on the horizon, and something in me always lightened. But not this time.

Like any of life's great storms, cancer blows a hole through your life. In the aftermath, you pick your way through the debris, salvaging what you can, leaving what you no longer have the room or energy to take. For a short time, you see things remarkably clearly, no longer quite so blinded by your own mythology or the stories you have concocted to make sense of the life you have led.

What I was beginning to see now was that Vermont was not the place where I could elude the gravitational pull of lifelong worries and regrets, a paradise of simple living. Those starry visions had died quick enough and I'd ended up in a swamp of my own making. Cancer eliminated that swamp of grief and loss and animated gophers, for which I was very grateful. More than that, it had given me something I hadn't bargained on: it gave me back myself. Not the one I had moved to Vermont to become, the recluse who needed no one, nor the one I left in New York, that wretched failure, but someone else both familiar and unfamiliar, gawky and barely recognizable—the self that lies beneath the roles we all accrete as we go along, layer upon layer—good girl, bad girl rebel, failure, success, and exile, all of them. The self I had fought so hard to save was none of these things, not the writer or the mother or the woman who didn't know what mulch was. It was a being that simply wanted to continue to be. That was it.

That self—an identity so bedrock it didn't even have a gender—would disappear again, the moss and lichen of illusion and delusion, regret and longing, would grow over it, and the harping voices drawing attention to my many inadequacies and faults would gradually drown out its voice. But until that time, I realized on the trip back north, I had a window, a small and rapidly closing one, in which I could do anything I wanted. And as I turned up the icy mess that was my road in mud season, I knew what that one thing was.

I wanted to walk in the woods.

 

A
month later, I was driving through flat, windswept country on the New York side of Lake Champlain, to the six-hundred-acre Wilderness Survival Center.

I had met Marty Simon, the director of the center, at a weekend retreat sponsored by the Vermont Organization of Wilderness Guides (VOGA), a group that aims to give women a sampler of outdoor skills and experiences. The Doe Camps, as they're somewhat unfortunately called (somehow the image of skittish brown-eyed ungulates doesn't convey competence), provide a crackerjack group of specialists who will teach you how to cook a moose, bring down a wild turkey with a twenty-gauge shotgun, wrangle an ATV, catch a trout with a fly rod, identify edible plants in the woods, and use a chain saw, among dozens of other skills.

Most of the clinics provided tart servings of humility to this participant—the only thing I was able to hook during the fly-fishing lessons was my own coat—but the instructors were nothing if not patient and the women attending were a hoot. It was a variegated crowd from all over the state. There were a few ringers—women whose older brothers had taught them how to do a lot of this stuff when they were kids and were just brushing up their skills and enjoying the camaraderie—but most of us were members of the virgin incompetent, eager to learn but a bit intimidated by a world that seemed so adamantly male.

There were women who wanted to get back their inner tomboys, and women who wanted to understand what sent their husbands out before dawn to wander around in the cold and the damp all day during hunting season. And there were a few women for whom the woods were an exotic place, but not perhaps as exotic as their ordinary lives must have seemed to the broad majority of those with whom they were sharing moose barbecue—like LaWanda, a young woman who worked nights as a nurse's aide in an assisted-living home, raised three children during the day, and had once been on the receiving end of a bullet in a Newark housing project.

The course I had been most interested in was a two-day seminar in wilderness survival, taught by a gravel-voiced, balding, mustachioed Vietnam vet with the stoic eyes of a basset hound, who tossed out jokes, advice, anecdotes, and patter with the aplomb of a stand-up comedian working the small-town nightclub circuit.

Marty Simon understood women—he didn't condescend to them by dumbing down what he had to teach or by treating them as rarefied beings who couldn't take a joke. He disarmed through provocation, making outrageous, non-PC comments about marriage and women, most of them directed at his wife, Aggie, who sat at the back with their two dogs, and with whom Marty locked eyes with such frank admiration that he immediately inspired trust.

In my first few months in Vermont, I had surfed the Internet in search of a course or a Web site that would teach me what I wanted to know, and was inevitably sidetracked into reading countless tales of what had happened to those who went into the woods without these skills. None of it was of much help—there was a not-so-subtle machismo running through most of these tales, a tone of “here we are being manly men, look at the risks we take,” that made me want to get back to a long-neglected needlepoint tucked away in the linen closet.

The same mixture of arcane knowledge and pumped-up posturing informed most of the Web sites offering instruction, and the choices were bewildering. The orienteering schools offered to teach you how to use a map and compass in about fifteen minutes before sending you off with a timer to compete in a race to find your way to some hidden cache before anyone else did. It was the woods on Ritalin. Then there were the camps for survivalists that taught you how to field-dress an elk so you would have something to eat after civilization had ended, and on the other end of the spectrum, the quasi-mystic types who had learned their craft from Native American spirit guides only they could see. It was during those online expeditions that I had first run across VOGA's women-only weekends, which sounded a good deal less overwhelming.

Marty started us out in the classroom and then, an hour later, we took to the woods. We learned about fire making—never walk in the woods, Marty said, without a bit of cotton steeped in Vaseline and a flint; together they would spark a fire even in damp tinder. We also learned how to start a fire with a stake whittled from a tree, a bow made from a bit of twine (another backpack necessity), and a supple branch. The process was difficult and well-nigh interminable, but it worked. He showed us the flat, dry high ground free of roots and protected from falling branches that offered the best places to build an emergency shelter for the night, and the places not to, where the dew would seep through your clothes and insects would drive you nuts. He introduced us to unassuming little bits of greenery that turned out to be rich sources of nutrition growing right under our noses, pointing out delicate leaf patterns that grew from white carrot-shaped roots that tasted like cucumbers. Pretty soon we were all wandering around looking for choice spots to spend the night, pulling up miniature albino root vegetables, and choosing the best branches for insulating ourselves, with the enthusiasm of young married couples looking for a new home.

Most if not all of us would have little use for this information in our daily lives, and at first it all seemed a bit Boy Scout. But then I got it. Marty had not only made these archaic exercises fun, but he was also minute by minute instilling confidence that would stand us in good stead in any situation in which we found ourselves. Marty made competence a joy in and of itself, tying it to a way of seeing the world that was dazzling in its practicality. That was when I decided he might be the one who could teach me direction.

At the end of Marty's course, I purchased my very own sparking flint, mostly for the sheer elegance of the smooth, dark gray cigarette-shaped bit of metal. Then I hung around until all the other women had left. As he was packing up, I asked Marty a little nervously if he would consider giving me private navigation lessons. He was wary, especially after I told him I would probably want to write about the experience. He had a very low opinion of the press, and besides, he was too busy, he said, but in the end he gruffly agreed to let me write to him and give him a better idea of what I hoped to learn and why I wanted to learn it from him.

I didn't write the letter for a long time. I was afraid, that was the long and short of it, though I didn't admit that to myself at the time. Afraid of failure, of exposing my incompetence to a stranger, no matter how understanding he seemed. And afraid of something else, something I couldn't admit to. Or couldn't before I had cancer. It turns out that after you have stared out a window and seen a bespectacled egg where your vanity used to be, you are ready to admit to pretty much anything.

And what I admitted to myself when I got back to Vermont and put the yellow roses in water was how very much I had always resisted a sense of direction, how hard I fought to go the wrong way, even in the simplest of situations, even when listening to an automated voice telling me to go left on a one-way street. (Wrong street. Had to be.)

Part of it was fear of any information presented arithmetically or for that matter spatially, as well as the anxiety of getting it wrong, of failing the test a map represented. And part of it was the eternal bliss ninny aspect of my soul that always seemed to prefer magical thinking to reality. But the reluctance went deeper than that, went to the heart of what it meant to take responsibility. I could take responsibility for others—my daughter, my husband, my friends. But to take responsibility for myself was alarming, in a way I hadn't understood until cancer forced a reckoning.