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.