Personal Journeys: Two Tales of Recovery in the Canary Islands

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 21 Juli 2013 | 17.35

James Rajotte for The New York Times

A view of the island of Tenerife from a portion of the fire-damaged Parque Nacional de Garajonay.

The Parque Nacional de Garajonay on the Canary Island of La Gomera offers many things: dozens of hikes to suit everyone's ability level, dazzling views of the island's dry canyons, cascading terraces of banana trees, and misty laurel forests.

But I was in search of something else. I had read — and seen photos — of the burned forests on La Gomera from last summer. Fires, caused by arson, had swarmed across the island, charring roughly a fifth of the park and causing close to $90 million worth of damage to this Unesco World Heritage site. Was there a trail that would lead me through that? I asked a guide at the visitors' center on a trip there over the winter.

"You should know that no one died in the fires, which is a miracle," she quickly told me. "It's sad, but there's also a lot of new growth. It's just that it's slow." And with that, she pointed me in the right direction.

I didn't tell her why I wanted see the blackened hillsides and skeletal trees. A circuitous route had led me to the visitors' center, much like the one I'd later follow on a hike that wove through acres of startling devastation. And yet on that hike I also saw distinct beauty, small bursts of green pine and gray laurel here and there, an unmistakable — indeed heartening — herald that renewal and recovery were indeed possible.

Two months earlier, I had sat across from my radiologist as he described the seven weeks of treatment that I would have to undergo for my early-stage breast cancer. He warned me of the possible side effects, and asked me if I wanted to be written out sick from my job at a medical research society for the duration of the treatment.

As an American who has lived and worked in Germany since 2000, I've grown somewhat familiar with the ample health care benefits there. But seven weeks off — in addition to the six that had been offered following the lumpectomy to remove the tumor — sounded overly generous to me. I didn't take the doctor up on his offer. I had recovered quickly from surgery, was back at work a day afterward, and while I had some mild swelling and redness from the radiation, I had none of the dreaded fatigue the doctors kept warning me about.

After radiation, however, my radiologist suggested an extended (up to six weeks) recovery retreat, or Kur, as the Germans call it. Alternately translated into "cure" or "regimen," a Kur may be spent in the Alps or at the Baltic Sea, and is paid for by both public and private insurers. A staple of German health care, the Kur dates from the reign of Otto von Bismark, who established it as part of his extensive social welfare reforms in the 1880s. Germans — employers and employees alike — remain proud of the tradition, recognizing it as essential to one's recovery from serious illness.

I had no frame of reference for a Kur, other than Thomas Mann's plodding "Magic Mountain," in which his characters are secluded at a Swiss sanitarium, take the waters at natural springs and kvetch ad nauseam over illness, death and fate as they recover from tuberculosis. None of this appealed to me, but as my radiation treatment was about to end, it was winter, the darkest in Germany since 1951; at the end of January, the German weather service announced that the country had all of six minutes of sunshine for the month. I eschewed the Kur, but I still needed out — a place in the sun, away from the ice and snow and dismal talk of fate.

I wanted a vacation. A travel agent friend suggested La Gomera, which seemed to satisfy my wish for quiet and warmth. I went online to find out more, and that's when I stumbled upon stories about last summer's fires, and horrific photos of scorched ravines.

La Gomera, I read, is not the most popular among the attractive Canary Islands, which beckon flocks of sun-seeking Northern Europeans in winter. The waves can be rough and the beaches are mostly rocky, but it's ideal for hiking. The fires I had read about were not the first on the island; La Gomera, I learned, has almost mystical powers of renewal and recovery, regularly rising from the ashes, defying blistering flames, not to be undone by adversity. The fires, however, were a bit of a conundrum, considering that much of the island's national park is a moist cover of dense foliage and jungle. But still it had happened, not unlike my diagnosis, I started to think, for I had had no known risk factors for the disease.


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