Marooned

I was rowing a small boat many years ago, fighting the wind and the current after a day of fishing. It seemed futile in the weather I had and night was coming, so I decided to spend the night on an small offshore island. It was here I found a wild and solitary man sitting by a fire. I had come a long way, and it was getting late, and as I sat with the man and shared my fish, he shared his fire and he shared this story of how he came to be there, alone and naked in the night…

I woke up cold and a little damp, with the usual hangover. I was lying on moss at least, which mustn’t have been hard for me to find before I passed out, because it was everywhere. A thick carpet of it surrounded me, covering the forest floor in all directions. I would have been disoriented, except for the fact that this wasn’t the first time I had woken in the woods after a bender. I must have really gotten into it the night before, because I didn’t yet remember how I had gotten there. Once I sat up and looked around I knew right away that I wasn’t anywhere near the village. I know the woods surrounding my village, as I’ve lived there all my life. I could hear and smell the ocean as I stood up, which cleared my head and then it came to me. Last night they had brought me here and left me.

A blur of memories was all I had. Arms carrying me along “to the next party” they had told me. Lies, lies, lies. They tricked me onto the boat, telling me we had to go get more booze. That was the sure-fire way to get me to come along. More booze, always more booze, more drinks! They had warned me weeks ago, those village elders; they had said if I didn’t knock it off with the drinking I’d end up on an island. It was the traditional way they said, to break the cycle. Nature’s rehab center. Cold turkey. They had told me I had done things while drunk, but I couldn’t remember the things. They said I became a different person, with a demon inside. Lies probably, I thought back then. I didn’t believe them, I had thought they were jealous of my ability to have a good time. I liked to party, so what? That’s how I framed it. But there I was, alone on the island.

The first few days on the island were tough. It was summer thankfully, because my marooners had left me with nothing but a knife. Apparently that was the traditional way. I was so angry, so incensed! How did any of them even know what “the traditional way” was? Because some old guy said so? That old man could have been full of it, like so many of them are with their stories about “how things used to be.” Pah! What did they even know? If you can’t name one guy who ever got left on an island for punishment, how traditional can it really be?

Anyways, there I was alone on the island with no food, no booze, no nothing. I was hungry, I was starving, I was thirsty. I got the shakes. I had heard about those. My dad used to get them, and they’d call the boat to take him to the hospital. “Delirious trembles” the doctor said; or something like that. He would see crazy things, my dad, water filling the ambulance, dead elders speaking to him, and his hand would go up in the air and wiggle, like he was waving to a ghost. I wondered if it would happen to me. Maybe it was a family trait. I was so hungry, with the shakes, hallucinating and delirious that I decided to swim to town. Fuck those elders and their traditional treatment, I thought. I’d show them what a real man does. I can make it to town, I’m a waterman, I’ve lived by the ocean all my life. Fucking leave me on an island. I wasn’t going to stay here, to dine on roots and mollusks and go insane.

So I swam. I remember taking off my clothes in the water, they were wet and heavy and were slowing me down. I just held a big breath, dunked under, and pulled them off. I swam naked towards the next island. My plan was to make it there, take the trail across, and maybe catch a ride with someone on the other side. There were cabins on the other side of the island I knew, and if I could make it there I’d be set. That’d show them. I’d get a boat to town, and they could look for me on that island as long as they wanted. I’d be enjoying a drink while they tried to figure it out.

It was a farther and colder then I expected. I swam and swam, front crawl, back stroke, breast stroke, but it just seemed that the shore wasn’t getting any closer. I was cold and heavy and I couldn’t swim anymore. I started to worry. My shoulders burned with a heavy ache and I could barely feel my legs. I looked back at the island I had left, and it was as far as the island I was headed to. This had been a mistake, I realized. I was in the middle. I had come too far to go back, and I couldn’t go on. I thought maybe I could find a fisherman’s float to cling to, maybe a crab trap float, but there were none, and I realized I might die. I could only float, and then the tide started to change and the current began to take me out to sea. I was just a head, one little head above the water, wet and gasping. Holding in big swallows of air while my arms sought purchase in the slippery silky sea. I was very small all of a sudden, and the ocean beneath me seemed infinitely deep. 

I would die. No victory drink for me, no rehab marooned on the island. Death seemed quite certain. It was only a matter of time.

And then came salvation. I heard it first.

It was the unmistakable bursting , wet exhalation of a whale. I heard the sound behind me and spun to look for a fin or a tail, but saw nothing. It came again, nearer this time, but there were three, then a fourth. PFFT, PFFT and PFFFT, spray there, right in my line of sight, and the unmistakable slicing up and through the water of sleek black fins. Orca.

Besides the one who no one remembers being put on an island, another person no one can name in my village is one who’s ever been eaten by an orca. However, my nakedness felt suddenly very apparent as I floated directly in the path of the whales. I thought for the second time that I could die, but in a different way.  I was right there, they could see me, they could no doubt detect every trembling finger and toe with their radar. I swear I could feel sonar clicks bouncing off my naked skin. Then they were beside me in the water, their weight and presence transmitted to me through some sense I have never felt before, it was like the echo of their size through the water. And then they passed by. I was uneaten, ignored, as if I was irrelevant.

“BUT WAIT!” I yelled aloud to the whales and the waves. I will die! I will die either way, eaten by whales now, or by crabs later. I didn’t want to die.

PFFT! again.

And then there was salvation. A whale, smaller than the rest, appeared beneath me. I saw its white oval eyepatch coming through the water, and then it was beside me. It blew beside me, and I felt its skin rub against mine oh so gently as I heard the whale inhale. It paused, and then its fin appeared under my arm, and joy flooded my body at the feel of something solid touching me in this unsupportive sea. It felt like I would not die if I held on, and so I did. My body held on of its own accord, as if this new best friend was land itself. I held on for my life as the whale pulled me along. Anything was better than letting go, to sink. We were going faster than any man could swim. The whale went under, and I held what little breath I had until it surfaced again. I took a deep breath and held it once more as the whale dove. Up and down we went, over and over again, until it became rhythm to me, this breathing, and holding, and breathing again. The young orca could sense it I think, my relaxing into its rhythm, for we went longer before surfacing now and again, dove deeper, and I could hear his family, calling and clicking.

When we came up for air I could see that we were getting close to the island I had been marooned upon. I was being brought back. The whale was bringing me back. If only the elders could see this, I thought, they would call it a divine intervention. Someone would wave their hands in the air and call it a sign. I was suddenly very cold, as if the sight of close land and the realization that I may not meet a watery end stopped the flow of will that was keeping me warm. The island suddenly drew nearer, as if I had skipped distance, and then it was there. The gravel of the beach was under my feet as the whale nosed right up on the shore. Cold, and with leaden limbs I crawled ashore, and watched as my salvation stayed there, right in the shallows, rubbing and spinning in the gravel, making what I can only describe as squeaks of pleasure. It was singing its orca-song like I had seen on TV, but I could hear and feel it right beside me. The other three whales were there too, rubbing on the gravel. I sat there numb, frozen, and naked and just watched, and listened to the squeals of joy and pleasure. And then I cried.

I cried for the beauty and purity of the whales, and I cried for the past, and all the things that I had done and that had been done to me. I cried for my wife who had died, and I cried because it may have been my drunken fault. I cried for the abuse, both taken and received. The salt of my tears was milder than the salt of the sea, and I cried when I though of going back to the village and having to undo these things, and explain the why and the how to the who’s. I cried until I was out of tears, and I realized how cold I was, and was struck by the fact that even now, after this experience, I could still die here.

It was then that I heard the quiet crackle of fire. I turned around to see a small fire on the beach, and a small figure sitting beside it. I could summon the strength to make it at least that far, to the fire. I got up and stumbled through the falling light to the fire’s edge, where I saw a man unlike any I had seen before. He did not speak, but welcomed me with his hand, beckoning me closer, to come warm myself. He was a small man, yet seemed larger than his size. Much like how I had felt the whales in the water, I could feel a power in this being, a presence, a displacement I still find hard to describe. Also, in the firelight and the twilight, his skin seemed a sheen of green. The fire was warm, and sat in the sand and I got as close as I could, knowing that this man would not care about my nakedness, for he was next to naked himself. I shook and I shuddered, I have never been so cold, it was a cold I didn’t know was possible and I thought I may never be warm again. We sat in silence, the green man and I, as my body shivered and he fed wood to the fire and poked at it with a stick. I relaxed after awhile, as the heat of the fire slowly beat away at the cold in my soul and soaked into my body. I don’t know how much time passed, but eventually I became curious and asked the little man who he was. “Who am I?” he responded, as if it were a silly question, his voice sounded like warm rocks.“But who are you? Who are we? How am I you, and how are you me?” and he laughed at his own clever rhyme. I had to laugh with him, such was the infectiousness of his joy, his eyes crinkled into slits and his mouth open wide and bursting with a pitched cackle and guffaw.

“You have a choice to make, it seems to me. To return to the drink or return to the sea.”

Another rhyme, but what he meant exactly I wasn’t sure. Did he mean return to drinking booze or return to the ocean? To drown? What kind of choice was that?

I asked him what he meant, but he only rhymed again.

“What do I mean? What will you do? The power for choosing is right there for you!” As thankful as I was for the heat of the fire, I was still feeling absolutely horrible and badly needed a drink, so strong was my physical desire for a shot or three of vodka, or a tall, cold beer, or a bottle of wine to guzzle and let spill over my face like a celebrating Roman. I was in no mood for riddles. I sat there in sullen silence and stared into the flames, feeling at once angry and pitiful. I didn’t want to make choices. The fire stared back at me in its way; uncaring, burning, and hot. I resolved to say nothing to the little green man. That didn’t matter however, because he was in control, not I.

He got up from his seat by the fire and began to chant quietly. A she did so, he gathered branches from a nearby tree and began to dance around the fire and I. He circled around us both, and waved the branches in the air. Then, to my surprise, as he passed behind me the third time he whisked me with the branches, not hard, but softly. He did this a few more times, chanting as he did so, and then he threw the branches into the fire. The branches appeared to be unaffected at first, but then burst into sudden and violent flame, and I had to scrambled back from the bright anger to avoid being burned. As I did so I bumped into the green man, and he held me there, and told me to watch. I don’t know what I saw, but as I watched he picked up a small piece of charcoal and drew on my back, right in the center, between my shoulder-blades. He whispered to me then.

“I can make it easy for you to never drink again, rub you with branches and soot, paint the design on you, then you go to the sea for a breath of new life. Breath of the waterwolf, and you will swim as you wish, but you will never taste a drink, even of water… or into the fire you go, to burn it out of you, to be reborn again, to perhaps drink all you wish, and live the other life of thirst and love. What will it be? The fire or the sea?”

The fire burned hot, and naked as I was I could not imagine getting into it. I could imagine the coolness of the water though, and at this point I thought it might be time to cool myself. “It’s the water for me.” I told him, and he laughed again and put his forefinger and his thumb into his mouth and blew a long and haunting whistle. I walked towards the beach that had spat me up not so long ago, the same beach where I had been betrayed and marooned, and in the moonlight I walked back in, thinking to wash off the heat and the smoke. I was waist-deep when I hear my friend the young orca again, his blow now familiar to me after my rescue. His black head rubbed again on my hip, and then once again his fin was under my arm. The markings on my back grew hot suddenly, and I thought perhaps the green man had burned me an I had only just regained feeling, so I dunked myself in the water to cool the pain. My orca friend turned and with my arm around his fin I let him pull me out into the little bay. I found then that I was transformed, and away I swam with my young friend. As we had before, we surfaced in unison often, and swam for many miles, wherever we liked. I found I was never thirsty again, and did indeed never even drink water. Sometimes I still come to this beach, and we rub ourselves on the gravel. I sometimes come here and sit by the fire, and think about my old life, but the mark on my back gets hot and begins to hurt, even now, so I must leave you and return to the sea.

With that, the man got up from the fire and bid me farewell. I realized only then that he was naked, and had been so the entire time, beneath his mat of woven bark. As he walked away towards the water I saw on his back a drawing of a blowhole, like a whales’, done in black soot. I thought perhaps this had all been an elaborate joke by an eccentric, but then he slipped into the water as quick-as-a-fish and disappeared. A few seconds later I heard the distinctive blows of two whales, and the man did not return.