Naked and Marooned

by Ed Stafford

  I hung up and broke down again. Loud raw sobs that I didn’t fight but embraced. I allowed the release. It felt good to let go. To allow myself to crumble at last.

  I lowered my skinny frame to the sand and sat waiting for the crew to arrive. ‘Would I do that again? No. No. Never.’ I sank my fingers into my thick wiry beard and blinked, absorbing the end of something that would never need to be repeated.

  Resorting to trivia, I began to chat to the camera. ‘Lost a bit of fat and a tooth. Gained quite a bit of hair and a beard. I don’t think there is a snail left on this island!’ I’d eaten over 800 snails since the goat meat ran out so I calculated I’d eaten easily over a couple of thousand in total. I was sure they’d helped keep me strong throughout.

  It seemed there were fewer unknowns now. This was my little island and I knew every inch of her. As I sat facing the sea I felt connected to her energy as if she was my horse on a long journey. I had tried to steer and influence the experience as well as I could but she had the real power to decide where I went or what I’d found. In many ways I had simply been a passenger.

  Olorua was also me, I knew that now. Sure, she could always be viewed as being isolated and exposed, battling the Pacific storms, but that was only part of her story − the obvious, superficial part. Below the surface she was physically connected to, and an integral part of, the earth. She was a peaceful entity that didn’t need to fight for her survival. She would always be there. She would always be safe. She wasn’t alone.

  I was interrupted by an alien noise. ‘That is the sound – not of a boat – but a helicopter!’

  The heli’s round belly lowered on to the sand by Snail Rock. Camera in hand, I got a thumbs-up from the pilot and hurried to the escape pod. As I got to the door I saw Steve Rankin’s familiar round face sitting in the back, filming. ‘Hello, mate!’ I smiled, genuinely thrilled to see him.

  After having some pictures taken, I climbed into the helicopter and sat heavily on the soft, cushioned seat. The pilot turned around and asked me to put my seat belt on. I pulled the stiff nylon across my bare chest and clipped it in at the edge of my grass skirt. The engine rose in pitch and intensity and the aircraft roared and rose from the beach. As I gazed out of the glass bubble at the treetops I could see Olorua in all her splendour. My mental picture of the island had been almost exactly correct and I was in awe at sights that, while familiar from the ground, fascinated me from this new perspective.

  The rocky outcrop; the amphitheatre; was that the Faraway Tree? The lush green-quilted island now seemed nothing short of magical. She had protected me and taught me so much and I knew I would never see her again. As we drew higher and further away she began to shrink into the distance. I was sad but I also knew that she would always be there and always be within me. We had been through something unique together and, like a World Cup-winning rugby team, we had shared an experience that was beyond words. She would always be visible in my eyes.

  I turned away from the window and gave out a long, tired sigh.

  ‘Mission accomplished.’ The weariness on my face said it all.

  I’d done it.

  • • •

  I stepped out of the helicopter on the island of Komo to the most incredible reception from the Komo women, who embraced me, kissed me and covered me in colourful flower garlands. From the Fijian men, I was struck by their genuine appreciation of just how hard it must have been. I could see in the wise old faces that somehow they understood and it moved me to tears.

  Back in the privacy of the painted wooden hut, I took off my coarse grass skirt and let it drop to the floor for the last time. I pulled on my khaki shorts and laughed at the gaping waist. The rusty old scales flickered at seventy-nine kilos. I’d lost almost ten.

  I felt emotionally in better shape too. The experience seemed to have shown me what really mattered in life. Before, I’d been all about proving myself, achieving goals, seeking recognition and the approval of others. Now I could concentrate on just being myself and, at last, enjoy what I already had.

  As I prepared to come home I felt I’d come a long way. I could no longer go through life without being accountable for everything that I did. In taking back this responsibility I’d in turn found a new strength. Everything was in my power and I would not so easily give that away now.

  EPILOGUE

  One year, two months and twenty-one days after day sixty.

  5 January 2014

  ‘Ed, is there a bit of you that would be relieved if I rang the doctor?’ Amanda asked, as I lay, deflated, on our king-size bed in the middle of the afternoon. I was due to depart to film episode six of my new series for Discovery Channel in the Golden Triangle the next day. I hadn’t packed. I felt weak. Christmas and New Year had been shit. It had been my fault. I was confused.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied softly into the pillow, tears once more forming in my eyes.

  ‘Stay there. I’ll call Kenric now.’ Amanda left me and I could hear her ankle socks tiptoeing down the wooden stairs.

  What was going on? What was wrong with me? I felt like I was unravelling again. When was this island nightmare going to end?

  I was so sensitive I could have cried at the slightest thing. Equally I could take offence and just as easily become angry and frustrated. Was I paranoid? Was I finally going mad? I was scared of going away again. Of taking my clothes off yet again. Of being put in the position where I had to start from scratch yet again.

  I could hear the gentle footsteps once more. ‘Eddy S, are you awake, my love?’ I cocked my head and gazed at the woman I love, the woman for whom I had caused so many problems, the woman who, despite my destructive behaviour, was still sticking with me. Standing there, she was the embodiment of kindness. Her face was tired but compassionate, her eyes windows into a world of sacrifice, of having to be patient and strong.

  ‘They are sending a specialist, a psychiatrist; he’s coming from Chiswick and he’ll be here in half an hour.’

  Nowhere to hide now, Stafford.

  Fuck me.

  Thirty minutes later, I heard the doorbell ring. Amanda answered it and I walked through to the kitchen as if I was being brought into the headmaster’s office after he had found out that I had somehow got away with being a truant for months on end. I shook hands with the grey-haired man, a psychiatrist named Mike, and showed him through to the lounge while Amanda made us coffee.

  ‘You must be Ed,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mind sitting there?’ asked Mike. ‘I normally sit at forty-five degrees to my patients.’ I dutifully obeyed, having already acknowledged that I was handing over the controls to this well-mannered man. I was relieved to do so.

  Mike asked many questions. When he had finished he looked up, put his pen down and cleared his throat. He described what I had been feeling as if he had known me for years. It was both disarming and utterly reassuring at the same time.

  ‘Do you know what the best method of torturing people is?’ he opened. I visualised James Bond strapped down with a laser pointing at his privates; or sitting naked on a chair with the seat cut out ready to be whipped from below. ‘Solitary confinement,’ Mike went on. ‘It’s the ultimate punishment in prison and it’s the best guaranteed way to break somebody. Thumbscrews came about because of pressure to get results fast − but, if you’ve got the time, the best way to turn a perfectly healthy man’s brain to mush is to lock him in a dark room and leave him alone for two months.’ I logged the timespan he referred to. Sixty days in isolation. He continued: ‘After this time I could be your worst enemy but you would beg to be my friend. You would be putty in my hands.

  ‘Take Terry Waite − he and his family suffered hugely after he came back because of all kinds of symptoms that are very similar to you. Did you also know that many Auschwitz survivors developed eating disorders after they became free?’ I winced at the pain of acknowledging how much
of a pickle I’d got into about food. It occupied my brain for much of every day and I couldn’t look in the mirror without seeing an excess of fat around my waist. I sometimes weighed myself more than twice a day and made sure that I put the scales back exactly as I’d found them so that no one knew I’d done it. What an admission for a thirty-eight-year-old man.

  ‘There is no doubt that what you are experiencing is the effects of psychological torture. The unique thing about your case is that you opted to be put in this situation.’

  Winding back the extremity of his comparisons, Mike continued. ‘There is a reason that lighthouse managers are hard to come by. And why few of them remain in their job for more than a year. Most of us do not function very well on our own − and the fact that you’ve experienced these effects actually makes you 100 per cent normal.’ He smiled and I could feel a cool breeze of relief beginning to stir.

  ‘It is my opinion that those who experience no emotional stress when isolated have something missing in them. Some of the greatest explorers do not require an emotional connection to be happy and as a result have the ability to do extraordinary things without any particular psychological issues. But I would suggest that if you looked at their family life you might find that their relationships were detached and dysfunctional. There is a cost to such cold independence.’

  When you already know something to be true you absorb it there and then. There is no need for deliberation or analysis and I could tell I was hearing a wise voice of experience who had dealt with the minds of many people who had undergone periods of intense mental trauma.

  ‘Take Bradley Wiggins,’ Mike continued. ‘He will never do another Tour de France. He spent a year in the mountains away from his family and friends, drinking sports drinks and training every hour of the day. It worked − he won the Tour de France – but at what cost?’

  My eyes were welling up again. The fact that someone sitting in front of me was recognising the extent of what I felt was happening to me was a phenomenal relief. I wasn’t going mad after all. These were expected side effects of isolation and if I hadn’t suffered them it would have made me abnormal.

  I looked at Amanda and felt how much sadness I had caused by not facing up to what was going on and trying to cover up for my deteriorating mental state by pretending to be fine. No wonder she felt desperate and had had to reach out for help. What a woman. I welled up again; this time tears spilled down my cheeks.

  • • •

  As I write, two months have passed. I’ve been signed off as having fully recovered by Mike, and I feel rebuilt and stronger than ever. But there is a reason this book does not have the fairytale ending that might have been expected – I felt a compulsion to be honest right to the end. If you sit in front of the TV and admire adventurous people who seem to have a far more exciting life than you, I urge you to consider the following.

  Having a moderate amount of adventure in your life is healthy – the last thing I want to encourage people to do is sit on the couch playing computer games all day. Of course there is also scope once in a while to have a lot of adventure in your life. But if adventure becomes your life you have lost something. You have become addicted to a thrill, a rush, and have lost sight of balance, responsibility and meaning. You have become a serial escape artist and need to stop and work out what you are escaping from.

  It seems the more I tried to escape my own pain and problems the more complicated and unhappy life got and the more I felt the need to escape and destroy everything around me out of blind frustration to find a scapegoat. And somehow, despite all the experiences on the island, I still hadn’t managed to face my own demons.

  You can’t avoid pain, and to do so would be to stop growing, to stop learning and seek a life of avoidance. Addressing and working through our problems and our pain makes us wise. I did everything on that island to stay busy and keep myself away from my own inner pain. In everyday life my distraction techniques could have been excessive exercise, smoking, chocolate-chip cookies, or perhaps binge drinking – but in such an exposed existence I found myself creating my own drama in order to perpetually live in my tangled thoughts, as neurotic as they were, because at least it meant I was distracted from my real darkness.

  And so despite the experience on the island and the lessons it taught me I realised that I still must have issues to face – and face them I had to. It was the only way to heal and the only way I would ever be able to live a good and honest life.

  There is a theory that every adopted child experiences trauma as a result of the separation from their mother at birth. A newborn baby is inherently dependent; it cannot move or feed itself. The only thing it can do in order to survive is to form a bond to its mother. As a result separation is said to be experienced as a suffering of the same magnitude as death. This pre-memory experience becomes the blueprint for how the child learns to manage in life: deeply traumatised − feeling abandoned and worthless. If left unaddressed this will never change.

  They say we subconsciously recreate situations in our lives, even negative ones, because it’s what we know and we naturally seek out familiarity. Victims of domestic violence often unconsciously seek out new abusive partners. Crazy, but sadly true. I was adopted as a baby and I think it is no coincidence that, as a man in his late thirties, I somehow construed my job as being abandoned naked on an island with no meaningful contact with the outside world for two months. It’s laughable – but it wouldn’t be funny if there wasn’t an element of truth in it.

  So I had my issues to confront. Who doesn’t? I needed to know I could survive on my own in life and yet at the same time I acknowledged that I also wanted the sympathy of the televisual onlooker. My insecurity was so deep I needed the world to see that I could thrive on my own in the most extreme of circumstances.

  Mike clearly did his job, for which I am very grateful, but to put my entire recovery down to CBT and psychiatric sessions alone would be a disservice to my family and friends who are listed below in the acknowledgements. There are also some unsung heroes here who, out of respect for who they are and what they do, shall remain deliberately unsung.

  We can all get by in life muddling through, doing a bit of unconscious grumbling, and catching fleeting moments of fun and happiness, often with the help of a couple of drinks. But for me, something deep within me wanted to understand more. Why did I have a tendency to judge people or situations? Why was I not content with what I had? What was the underlying restlessness all about? I had to know and I hoped that such an isolated experiment would surely give me the opportunity to turn myself inside out and find some answers.

  We live in a world of ego, consumption and accumulation of wealth. But there is an inherent incompleteness to such a life. To desire to own something or someone, to grab onto it or them, is a needy and insecure place to live and it is a poor substitute for real happiness. Go sit on an uninhabited island in that state, I dare you. The removal of all the crutches is terrifying. I was left with a giddying, maddening sense of ‘Who the fuck am I?‘

  But in the same way as I felt I had no option but to expose my struggles, I feel compelled to share my own personal realisations too. It seems almost too simplistic, but the ability to just sit back and let go of everything has been infinitely more valuable to me than anything money could buy. This could only come about after a painstaking look deep inside, a reconnection to everything that I know to be true, and a new-found love for myself as a part of this world. Nothing and noone could make me happy until I was honest with myself and prepared to face parts of me that were not at all pretty.

  I worked through layer after layer of neurotic behaviour until I eventually got to a true place of self. And despite never having lived in such a clean place I immediately knew this me so well. The good person that I’ve always protested to be. The conscience that has soaked through all the layers from time to time. The light, funny, confident me. The loving me.

&nb
sp; Paradoxically, by letting go of my frantic struggle to keep things as I wanted them, the people and things that I had clung onto so desperately remain there with no forced effort. I have more in my life than I ever did.

  Does this change who and what I love? No – not one bit. We are who we are. I never want to lose my rage, I love the reprobate in me, I love my adventures, I love to push myself hard, and most of all I love to come home again. My family is the core of who I am and they are what gives me a purpose. The only change is that everything comes without fear, guilt or struggle. Life, quite simply, feels great.

  Survival in this world is not a lone battle. It is about respect for, and acknowledgement of, a higher consciousness that oversees everything and has everyone’s best interests at heart. I know it will carry me where I want to go and protect us all on our journey through life as it guided me in the Amazon and on Olorua. Nobody has told me this – I just feel it. This universal force flows through, and is part of, us all. All we need to do is acknowledge it, surrender to it, and laugh.

  But don’t try and work that out with your logic brain – it will send you bloody mad.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To Craig Langman, with whom, over a cup of Lady Grey tea, I conceived this thunderously life-changing experiment. It seemed like a simple fun idea at the time . . .

  To Julian Bellamy, Dan Korn, Liz McIntyre, Helen Hawkins and all at Discovery for commissioning and facilitating the entire experiment. Thank you for believing in me.

  To Dick Colthurst, Steve Rankin, Steven Ballantine and everyone at Tigress Productions for making the entire experience physically happen. You were the guys who took the dream and turned it into a reality. Thanks so much.