The Cartwheel Brims

At thirteen, Freya Stark was helping at her mother's carpet factory in Dronero when her hair caught in a loom. The machine kept her right ear, part of an eyebrow, and most of her scalp. She spent four months in a Turin hospital while surgeons attempted pioneering skin grafts.

She then spent the next eighty-seven years going wherever she wanted.

At thirty-seven, with a weak heart and doctors who had forbidden her the stairs, she rode a donkey alone into the Elburz mountains to map the Valleys of the Assassins. She caught malaria and kept going. She discovered that the official British maps had whole ranges plotted on the wrong side of the valley, and corrected them by hand. She was five foot one. They gave her the Back Award.

Through all of it, and every photograph afterward, she wore enormous Dior hats with cartwheel brims. She had her Baghdad tailor copy riding outfits from a Sears Roebuck catalogue, and over them she tilted the brim to one side and combed her hair carefully to the other. Cairo. Baghdad. The Hadhramaut. A donkey in Luristan. The brim, always.

The machine had taken half her head. She spent the rest of the century deciding what the world was allowed to see of it.