by Ed Stafford
The effects of malnutrition and dehydration, compounded over time, were taking their toll and I had become complacent as my body was eating itself up from the inside. I spat out every scrap that was in my mouth and gargled with some fresh water to strip out any last remnants. I could still breathe – check – I could still speak – check. As the reaction subsided I took solace in the fact that it must not have been a severe reaction. But if it had been worse and required hospitalisation I could well have died.
On the way back I scooped up items that might come in handy and shoved them in my basket, like an old bag lady: ropes attached to discarded fishing floats, several more water bottles (I wanted to be ready for that first proper downfall), even a toothbrush wedged between the rocks. The latter find meant that with ground-up charcoal I now had a means of ensuring I got right into the gaps my blunt fingers couldn’t reach. ‘Brilliant – absolutely brilliant,’ I grinned. Then – almost too ridiculous to be true and only on a Fijian island – I found a rugby ball.
I was smiling but, realistically, what on earth was I going to do with it? It wasn’t fully inflated and my chances of finding a bike pump and a needle valve were slim. But I slung it in the basket anyway and it made me feel happy to have such a familiar item, one that reminded me of my love of the sport, the weekly battle alongside lifelong friends that legitimately allowed me to give vent to the pressures of everyday life. I had made a point of not watching Tom Hanks’s Castaway for fear of being tempted to copy certain scenes from it but I knew the gist of it. I had my own Wilson – a volleyball Hanks finds in the film. Or in my case ‘Gilbert’, a leading brand of rugby ball.
Now in full scavenging mode I noted that there were also various long, smooth poles that had washed up from surrounding islands. They had all been cut with machetes and must have been old boating poles used by clans to get their crafts over the reefs. I decided I would drag one back every time I returned to my cave as they could make the base for a very flat, comfortable bed.
As I placed my spear into the sand it snapped. I immediately reassured myself that it didn’t matter because much of the length of the spear behind the hand must be superfluous to my needs. Then I tested it and, of course, the spear was now unbalanced; it required the weight behind the hand to hold it level. I chuckled at the cogs grinding in my brain working things out that I’d never even contemplated before. My primordial survival knowledge and experience were growing.
Back in the cave I smashed the taro root on the wall and I could see that the inside was indeed potato-like and starchy. I could eat it! This had doubled the productivity of the single plant and I didn’t care if you weren’t meant to eat that bit. I would. I picked the tentacled bean-sprout-like roots off it, too, and went for a bean-sprout broth from the menu for tonight’s meal.
The evening was calm. A silver mackerel sky blanketed the peaceful lagoon at low tide. I had done what I wanted to do on the third day of construction. Tomorrow I would lash the rafters on. It was only possible to work about three and a half hours a day on it; the rest of the time had to be spent just surviving: collecting wood, collecting food and fresh water, and on administrative tasks.
I reckoned the taro root would last me over a week if carefully rationed. Before I arrived here I would have said it would last a couple of meals. Life was different here and many of my preconceptions were changing, too. ‘All good then,’ I concluded. ‘I’m getting three hot meals a day and I’m progressing with the construction each day. Nice one, Staffs. Nice one.’
I found that I could now use the semi-inflated Gilbert as a pillow when lying on my side. ‘But I’m not going to start talking to it, though – it’s just a pillow – well, it’s actually a rugby ball – but it’s my pillow,’ I muttered to the camera, clearly toying with my own madness. ‘Do you know what?’ I further confided, ‘I have to really rein my brain in every day. I think if left to just race it would have bizarre conversations and stuff.’ I felt I couldn’t have prepared myself for being cut off from every other human being on the planet. You just had to experience it to understand the weird effects of isolation.
‘A very big part of surviving on this island is holding it together and staying sane and not going nutty bonkers. And it just needs a bit of checking in.’
I powered down the camera and lay down beside the fire to rest.
The new toothbrush worked a treat. I ground the charcoal into the finest particles possible on a relatively flat rock and then dabbed the end of the wet toothbrush into the sooty powder. I relaxed into the civilised rhythmical action of brushing my teeth. ‘There is no other animal on the planet that does this!’ I said to the camera, exhibiting a marked lack of knowledge about the habits of the macaque monkey.
Despite the absence of minty white froth, the charcoal worked even better with the brush than with my finger and as I ran my tongue over my teeth they felt smooth and truly clean again. My image in the camera screen showed Persil-white teeth shining out of my weary, weathered face.
The morning’s scout around the shore for food revealed that no banquet had washed up overnight. My basket had been empty and so I decided to start hauling up large rocks and looking under them. My first find was an eel. It moved like lightning and it was only through pure primal hunger that I managed to stamp on its head and then eventually stun it enough to kill it. I thought I recognised the next find − a sea cucumber as I recollected from a summer holiday in Greece. It was emitting sticky white mucous from its anus.
‘I’m going to take it and put it in the fire and . . . see if it’s edible,’ I said. It was a lesson to me: on days when you didn’t have much to eat, just turn over some rocks. ‘Two things under that rock, an eel and a bizarre-looking animal that looks a bit like a massive shit.’ As ever, when luck was on my side it didn’t rain – it poured – and I found a further six crabs, which meant that for the first time ever I had collected enough for two meals – lunch and supper.
I laid the eel on the fire in one piece, as you might a snake, and allowed it to cook in its skin to retain moisture. The result was better than expected: large chunks of sticky white meat that fell away from the spine. I held it in both hands and ate it like a corn on the cob.
With a belly full of eel I collected a lot of beach hibiscus. In the end I had perhaps 150 metres’ worth of cordage hanging over a stubby branch, all of which would be used over the course of the following days’ thatching. I lashed on the rafter poles from the day before and collected twelve coconut palms with which to start thatching tomorrow. As I dragged the huge palms down the beach I remembered the days of palm leaf collection that I’d taken part in with groups of volunteers to thatch houses in Central America. Now I was on my own and I winced at the scale of the project I was embarking upon solo. It would take hundreds of palm fronds. As I mused on this, large raindrops began to patter onto my shoulders as the skies darkened and growled.
By mid-afternoon it had started to rain steadily. Exciting news for my water collection, but this new climate brought its own overlooked issues. I ventured out and collected a nice amount of firewood from the forest – my wet skin was covered in dirt from the wood as I hauled it all back. Coated in mud, bark and general shite, I quickly dived into the sea to wash myself down and hurried back up the beach shivering in the damp air.
I popped some caramelised coconut into my mouth and shut my eyes as the hot sweetness burst between my teeth. I was eating a coconut a day now that I’d found a way of making it not slimy and my body appreciated every fatty calorie.
It wouldn’t be dark for a few hours but, due to the rain, I hung my grass skirt up for the day. I had decided to have an afternoon off. I sat by the fire and thought about life. About my real life, that is. About Amanda and the kids. I decided that I couldn’t be bothered to go back out into the rain, that I was going to treat myself to just sitting by the fire and thinking of home.
There was something beautifully simple
about boiling water in an old tin can on a fire, when it was raining outside and I was dry and warm in my cave. I think it was because I felt that I was winning and had made my life comfortable enough even in bad weather. The contrast between outside and inside made me happy.
By early evening water was streaming off the front of the cave and I filled my bowl and chain-drank cups of pine-needle tea one after the other. Not wanting to leave my warm den in the storm, I put my faith in the clamshells and knew that I would have plenty of water in the morning. I promised myself two more cups of tea when I woke up as a treat, too.
Firewood was my next concern as the wood that I’d collected was wet and I worried that I might not be able to keep the fire going all night. I positioned the damp wood close enough to the fire for it to dry without catching light. It was a warning to collect enough firewood on dry days to last me when it rained. One more lesson learned. I would make it a priority to build up a huge stockpile of dry wood in the morning. My fire was never going to go out – I was adamant about that.
With less than an hour until nightfall my niggling worries started to get the better of me and I ventured back out into the rain to collect more firewood. I couldn’t chance it. I slipped into the vast wet gloom with just the GoPro (head-mounted point-of-view HD video camera) on my head. The short mission calmed my fears and I began the process of drying out this second batch of soggy wood.
Just as it was about to get really dark I remembered that the sprat catcher was still set in the rock pool. I reprimanded myself for allowing myself to relax too much this afternoon and for letting things slip. And so I had no option but to run up the beach in the fading light in the now torrential rain.
‘Run, Stafford! Run!’
The run in the rain was utterly invigorating. Just breaking into a stride was exciting and I had done it naked as I wasn’t filming. ‘Got it!’ I grabbed the plastic bottle from the shallows and was surprised also to find I had a small catch.
I now needed a bigger fire and one that would be hot enough to dry out the wood. The theory was sound but I was burning through the wood at a pace. It would last – I told myself – and it had the pleasant side effect of keeping the cave warm.
My cave had fared excellently in the wind and rain. I would get a light spray of water in a big gust but on the whole I was dry and protected. The night outside was angry and tormented but I observed the natural chaos from my warm pouch in the belly of the island.
In the morning, much to my surprise, the rain was still cutting down into the beach. Hmm, hadn’t banked on that.
‘Morning – really not the greatest night’s sleep.’ I had been constantly putting wood on and never really relaxed about the fire. I consoled myself that I wouldn’t have had enough firewood if I hadn’t fetched more. It had been a wise last move. Right, out on to the beach.
I shivered as the wind and rain stripped away my night-time warmth. Crouching naked on the beach, undeterred I sucked all the water in the clamshells up and gently blew it into my bottles. Six and a half litres of water – the most I’d collected in one go to date. I felt genuine elation at such a simple thing.
I now had seven litres of emergency water stored at the back of the cave, water that I was never going to touch. With my other four litres’ worth of bottles my plan was to fill up regularly, safe in the knowledge that I would always have a week’s worth of water – one litre a day – at the back of the cave plus whatever I could get each day from the seep.
‘That feels like in my mind I’m in control of the water now. Which is good because the water actually, surprisingly, is quite stressful.’
‘Blowing a hooley out there. Unbelievable.’ I had to raise my voice to be heard by the camera’s recorder.
I collected firewood for the first hour of the day and then – when I’d stacked up the same amount as I had the day before – I went to collect more. I had also brought back a load more plastic bottles. I couldn’t miss this amazing opportunity to collect a massive reservoir. Water might be abundant today but I didn’t know when it would rain next. I was determined to stockpile water and wood in case I got caught out. That way I could begin to relax.
I do see that it seems as though I could never relax – no matter how much I tried to – but I think that’s quite a lesson in itself about living hand to mouth. When there is no energy provider to supply you with electricity or gas, no water company to deliver fresh water on tap and nothing to take away sewage, and no supermarkets selling groceries, you have to do it all yourself. It is striking how the progress of civilisation has taken the provision of these entirely essential needs out of our hands and how we now take them for granted. The only way for me to get to a stage where I could relax like the proverbial man with a beer and his feet up in front of the telly on a Saturday afternoon was to put in the hard yards. Preparation and menial, laborious tasks were the payment for such services in my island world – and if I got lazy all my amenities would be cut off without a word of warning.
I cleaned out the fire. The ashes had built up and spread over the rocks and so the roasted coconut was getting increasingly dirty and grey. I scraped it all out with clamshell and then rearranged the rocks so that they had flat upper surfaces that would accommodate more coconuts for toasting. Nice.
I didn’t want to let the weather slow progress on my first day of thatching, especially after such a productive run. Sitting around idly was a bad plan, too. On top of this, if I left the coconut palm leaves lying on the floor too long the individual leaves would curl up. I’d witnessed it on those that I’d used to lay over my grass blanket to stop the wind penetrating at night. They had worked OK the first two nights but then the once flat leaves began to close like a venus fly trap, leaving large gaps between them and allowing the wind to breeze straight through. So plait them into flat tiles in the rain I must.
I thought back to my first jungle expedition to Belize in Mayflower National Park when we had had almost six solid weeks of rain. The base camp was knee-deep in mud and the mosquitoes relentless. I had been a mere assistant leader at the time, fresh out of the army, and I saw it as my job to motivate the rest of the group into believing that they could not be held back by the weather. There was no option but to work – we had twenty-nine kilometres of trail to cut and days off were not an option. What was an option, I soon realised, was that you could let the conditions affect you. Frustration and annoyance are almost always born out of maintaining resistance to something that is going on. In the case of the weather such frustration is pointless – it will never make conditions better and only make you feel worse. So every day we would go out and smile and sing and work hard in the rain. Soon we didn’t notice the rain any more – we were wet, dirty and happy. I suppose it’s no different from the famous serenity prayer of which I quote the first part:
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
Omit the word ‘God’ if you need to in order to hear what I’m trying to get across. There is nothing serene about being frustrated by the weather, your age or the passing of time. It is utterly pointless and a bloody waste of energy. So you relax about the things outside your control quite simply because they are outside your control. No-brainer. The things that you can influence, you should; and in my experience it is this little internal check as to whether it is one or the other (the wisdom) that can save a lot of unnecessary angst.
After a lifetime of whining, it took me a while to adjust to living by such simple rules. It’s disconcerting – there’s nothing and no one else to blame. But isolation forces you to the point of addressing negative behavioural patterns that you could probably get away with in normal life because you have to deal with the direct results of your own thinking. No one else would pick me up.
I sat down on a rock in front of my pile of coconut palms and attempted to plait the first one in the rain. I’d never done this before but I’d seen it done in Fiji on my arrival and knew that it was the only way to stop the leaves curling. Not surprisingly my initial attempts were pretty amateur and I had to slow my wet fingers down and just ensure that I did each leaf properly. Having reminded myself that it was only me who could make myself happy or miserable, I started to sing songs to myself. Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’, of course, and a few other songs that were played repeatedly on the radio when I had been a painter and decorator and so I knew all the words. Eventually, as ever, when you have been educated at an English boarding school with chapel every day, you resort to hymns. By the time I’d belted out ‘Bread of Heaven’ to the treetops I found I was loving my manual labour in the rain. Once mastered, plaiting is simple; it just requires some basic knowledge to produce a large shiny green tile that is watertight and will last for years. It’s actually very satisfying when you get it right, and I continued to sing while I deftly manipulated leaves into roofing tiles.
In my cave on a tea break late morning I realised that I had enough space to plait in there and so I dragged the palm fronds back to the cave and sat watching the storm play out. ‘Any fool can be uncomfortable,’ I reminded myself as I sipped lemon leaf tea in the warmth of my cavern.
Keen for some visible (and successful) evidence of my work, I decided that each day I should add the completed palm tiles to my roof. I had thatched the roofs of many primitive structures before in Belize and knew that the theory was simple. I would start at the bottom and tie on a full row. Then, the next row would be tied just above the first so that there was significant overlap and so that the rain running off the second row would flow on to the first. It was important to keep the rows close together; the more densely packed, the stronger and more watertight the thatch would be.
