In 2002, I traveled to Australia and New Zealand as part of a medical forum for college students potentially interested in healthcare careers. Having long ago decided that a doctor's life was not for me, I went along anyhow, considering it was a trip to Australia and New Zealand--and God knows when I'll ever get the chance to go back.
During our stay in northeast Queensland, we visited an aboriginal community healthcare center. Because of metabolic differences between the aboriginal population (which is by no means a singular entity--there are many different populations and tribes of aborigines in Australia), the incidence of diabetes was a particularly strong cause of rising morbidity among the locals. To peoples whose hereditary background included long times of famine, extraordinary physical exertion to support a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, and the relative lack of suitable plantlife for agriculture, the simple carbohydrates of European food are murderous.
The head of the community healthcare center spent a bit of time discussing the challenges specific to treating an aboriginal community from both the cultural viewpoint and the symptomatic side of the issue, and at the end of the lecture we had a short break to get a snack and stretch our cramped legs. Most of the seventy other students went outside into the Cairns sunshine, but I stayed in the cool of the classroom--the midmorning light in Oz has teeth, and it takes only fifteen or twenty minutes to feel bruises stemming from the gold light in the empty blue sky.
For the four or five of us left, the director began a story of a patient he'd treated, whose Anglicanized name was Michael. (The Australian colonial government in the 1910s and '20s began a movement toward isolating and "breeding out" aboriginal bloodlines by separating families and enforcing surgical sterilization, much akin to the United States' own activities against American Indians.) When he was a younger man, he'd lived in an aboriginal boarding house with other young people who'd been separated from their families by the Australian military.
Michael loved a local girl, an aborigine woman he'd met while tending officers' stables at the garrison adjacent to the boarding house. Her new, European name was Angela, and from all accounts Michael believed the young woman was his angel, sent from Heaven to allow him a measure of peace and happiness in his harsh life. Michael had planned to marry Angela, and had gathered traditional presents and artifacts made by members of a neighboring tribe as wedding gifts. With the presents in hand, he began the four-mile walk back to the boarding house and the outpost.
When he arrived in the little farmstead he planned to cultivate with Angela, he found an Australian military officer and two cohorts waiting in his living room. Angela was not to be found. Concerned, Michael asked the officers what had happened to his fiance; the officer told Michael that he had asked Angela to marry him, and she had accepted. Michael could not provide her a lifestyle in this environment, whereas the trappings of the officer's salary would make quite a comfortable homestead. That this served to further dilute the aboriginal genepool was a benefit to social policy, but finding himself with a beautiful girl as his wife was surely not objectionable to the officer.
Stunned, Michael left the homestead and walked to the stables. There he found a machete used to clear scrub. Entranced, scattered, his thoughts distant and broken, he walked back to the homestead that was no longer his, and buried the half-moon blade in the back of the officer's skull. Leaving the body bleeding behind him, Michael shed his Anglican name, his linen clothes, and with nothing covering him but shadow and anger he ran into the bush. He was 20.
In 1985, an old and sun-scarred man came out of the jungle to live in the city. He lived a normal life, visited restaurants, and haunted the outskirts of town. He had no children and no family, and the local government--in an act both of contrition and kindness--provided him a modest stipend to live in a one-bedroom apartment in a low income complex.
During the next twelve years, the man without a name changed. His body, muscular and thin, lost its tone. His lungs lost their air; the arches of his feet collapsed. He could no longer run for miles, could no longer run from the first whispers of morning until the sun collapsed in exhaustion and the stars sparkled above. As he became accustomed to the European diet, his health decayed.
In 1998, the director of the aboriginal clinic oversaw an operation on the old man: the amputation of his left foot just above the ankle. The ravages of diabetes destroyed his body, and the ulcers on his foot had become septic and gangrenous. One of diabetes' hallmark symptoms is neuropathy, the tingling and pain that comes from the slow death of the nerves in the extremities. He could not feel the cuts on his feet, and the swelling from edema had bloated them so that his shoes, once a stylish fit, had become tourniquets. Without circulation, flesh cannot heal; and without pain, he never knew anything was wrong.
Two months after he lost his foot, the old man died.
When he had emerged from the wilderness those years ago, the old villagers had recognized him, had known he was the man they talked about in local histories and folktales. The man who'd returned to the bush, the man who had spent fifty-one years in the wilderness, who had returned as fit and healthy as the day he had left. The old man had left his name behind, and in the lonely Outback had no need for another. The white Australians just knew him as the crazy drunk who'd come in from the jungle. The aborigines knew him by a different name, spoken sadly.
He was the man who had left to find the Dreamtime, before the changing ways, before the shaping of the world. He had sought out the Dreamtime and the formlessness and the magic of the old days.
The man who lost his way.
The man who died without dreaming.