Otherwise featureless, the egg-shaped stone, now wrapped in a yellow ti leaf, would be her offering to Mo’o, the serpentine god she’d never actually seen, (though she’d once felt his cold hand upon her leg). Mo’o lived at the bottom of the pool where the twin waterfalls cascaded over a ninety-foot embankment and plunged into the largest of seven descending pools. From the water she drew her vitality.
As she danced to the rhythms of the tropics, lost in time, the rain forest was her only partner. Inveterate ferns cloaked the forest floor like decorative ruffles along the hem of a full skirt, and were contrasted by the vibrant and prolific red blooms of the Poinciana. The aerial roots of the banyan trees sought the moisture of the volcanic earth, and tall palms opened like umbrellas overhead. The yellow, red, and green ti leaves and arching bamboo shoots filled every open space, and broad-leafed philodendrons wound round and round the gnarled bark of the monkeypods. The twisting trunks of the dracaenas reminded her of her own divergent destiny. Shortly after her arrival on the island—immersed in the largest of the seven pools—she had chosen to re-christen herself. The relinquishing of her outworn persona came after an incisive and perilous twist of fate—a crash landing. Marooned and quite alone in Paradise, it was essential that she befriend herself without qualification, and she bestowed upon herself the immutable and loyal appellation, Amie.
Placing her offering on top of a volcanic stone at poolside, she heard the distant rumble of thunder. Last night’s storm was moving away. During her time spent as a castaway, Amie had weathered countless storms, yet this morning she felt uneasy. Something unspecified, and perhaps unwanted, remained in the wake of the tempest.
Tossing her long hair back she unfastened the sennit rope that held her skirt round her waist and let the garment drop to the ground. She took the flower lei from her neck and carefully placed it nearby. Bending down, she noticed a small spider spinning its gossamer web among the ferns. The tiny arachnid’s home was an intricate network of connections, as was her own. With eyes raised and arms outstretched she paid homage, as she did each morning, to the spirits of earth, air, fire, and water. Bathed in temporal light she stood naked and unashamed.
Amie moved to the side of the pool, her lengthy stride declaring a propensity to motion. Gazing innocently into the crystalline water she drew a single, amazed breath, for she barely recognized her own reflected image.
Her blue-gray eyes shone clear and lucid, her face tawny and smooth. Spreading over her cheeks, nose, and forehead, a precipitous field of freckles lent her face comic relief. A small gap between her two front teeth, which she’d had since childhood, continued to make her self-conscious about her smile even though there was nobody here to see it. Over time her lips had grown fuller, and the tiny crow’s feet around her eyes had mysteriously disappeared. Amie admired her fine neck and proud shoulders and recalled how her long legs and slim hips had once been perfect for Coco Chanel’s nouveau fashions. The passing years had not diminished her figure in the least. If anything, it was even better now.
Indulging a moment of recapitulation, she tossed a pebble into the pool and watched as concentric circles spread out over the top of the placid water. How many years had passed? There was really no way of knowing how long she’d been marooned on the island. Seasonable variation was quite subtle, and the meridian at which the sun rose and set deviated not more than a couple of degrees. The procession of days came and went without tangible distinction, and weeks turned into months, months into years.
In the beginning the establishment of rituals had helped her maintain her sanity in the face of isolation and loneliness. Over time such routines became a spiritual comfort. Ephemeral symbols evolved and deepened; her daily devotions became more joy than habit.
Shortly after her arrival Amie ventured away from the sandy, palm-lined coast to explore the inland territory. The beach front surrendered suddenly to a razory cluster of peaks. Each one, she estimated, rose to an altitude of greater than a thousand feet. While scrambling up an immense stone platform that lay nearly hidden by the dense overgrowth, she came near the cinder cone—a crater measuring as much as seventy-five yards in diameter. From her narrow foothold she looked down from the summit at the reef that encircled the island.
While the atoll was apparently now untenanted by other humans, certain discoveries led her to suspect past habitation. In a clearing near the mouth of the volcano she came upon what appeared to be an ancient temple. Stone seats surrounded a great altar. Indeed, no artifact could have spoken more eloquently of the island’s extinct culture.
Looking southward she observed hardened black lava fields. Parched and faded grasses grew between the cracks and fissures of the brittle pumice. What an awesome display of power and beauty such a cataclysm would have unsealed! Now the volcano laid mottled green across pearly waters.
Wading into the pool and treading water, Amie returned her attention to the present. She cupped her hands and drew cool water over her face. Instantly she felt renewed. The morning’s illustrious sunlight reflected off the ripples in the cool water, and Amie swam near a great protruding stone, where she rested on a ledge. Only then did she hear a voice—the first, other than her own, in what seemed an eternity.
“I only have eyes for you...” came the song from a source hidden somewhere within the prolific, overhanging vegetation. Such an unexpected incursion rattled her sensibilities.
The shiny, blue and yellow plumage of a macaw parrot shone through the deep green depths of the tropical rainforest, and with perfect vision Amie segregated the first-time visitor without difficulty. Hardly accustomed to receiving company, she laughed aloud, and the macaw, in turn, imitated her laughter. “What are you doing here?” she asked innocently.
“What are you doing here?” he echoed.
“I was marooned here a long time ago,” she offered. “What about you?”
Through the misty spray of the waterfall, Buenaventura perceived the island’s only resident in a spectral array of light, and he was first inclined to liken her splendor to that of a rainbow.
“I’m a mutineer,” was all he elected to disclose.
“After all this time spent alone, you can’t know how wonderful it is to finally hear the sound of another voice,” Amie said. “Even if you are a parrot!”
Amie climbed out of the water and lay down upon a flat rock to dry herself in the sunshine. With both hands she wrung water from her wavy, riotous hair, then tried to untangle its curly ends. “Why not perch closer so I can have a better look at you?” she suggested to the bird.
Buenaventura ignored her request; rather he responded with a bit of original poetry:
“People think I’m timid,
And people think I’m tame,
But that just goes to show,
I’m wilder than you know,
Fate turns on the axis of my name.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” said Amie, delighted.
“Keep in touch!” said BV as he spread his wings and flew away.
Amie’s world was truly a private place. She barely separated herself from its earthly cadence, though it had not always been so. Walking from the bathing pool downstream toward her home near the beachfront, she contemplated the unexpected encounter with the loquacious parrot and was suddenly conscious of how accustomed she’d grown to living alone. Perhaps over time she’d even come to cherish the solitude.
Of course integration had not been easy. During those first uncertain days, procuring basic needs superseded all else. Thankfully, fresh fruit was obvious and plentiful, though finding adequate shelter was an issue not easily resolved. The very thought of going back to the plane made her shake uncontrollably, so she slept on the warm sand, where the seafront vegetation edged the strand.
At first she dreamed repeatedly of the crash—the initial loss of control, the sensation of time slowing down, and finally the jolt of impact. She’d prepared for a water landing, but in dense fog the plane had grazed the side of an
indiscernible mountain. Tumbling end over end, the mangled craft came to rest in a field of ferns. The only passenger, her navigator, had died in the defining moment of his life, and she was barely able to contain her grief and guilt. In the confusion of her own survival she had crawled from the ruined aircraft. Looking for help she hobbled, in amazement and denial, through the dense rainforest, but met with only the profound and eerie silence of a deserted Shangri-La. Following the course of a swiftly running stream she was able to reach the shoreline, where she collapsed in shock.
When she regained consciousness, she bound an open leg wound with the remnants of a torn shirtsleeve. She tried to unsnarl strands of hair matted with dried blood. She washed her face with sea water. The salt stung her eyes. Trying to reconcile her situation she searched sky and horizon for any sign of a rescue party. The Cutter, Itasca, must be nearby... Feelings of desperation surfaced, and she tried not to give way. Of course a massive search would be launched once it was determined that they were delinquent at Howland Island. G.P. was a person of action; he knew how to set a plan in motion. And the president would not disavow knowledge of her mission... So she lit a fire on the beach, and kept it burning day and night.
During her third night on the island it began to rain just after dark. The castaway huddled beneath the wide canopy of a spreading monkeypod tree in a futile attempt to stay dry. Next morning, soaked to the skin, she determined to make herself a shelter.
Among the branches of the rain tree, Amie constructed her house. Making rope ladders from banyan vines for access to the tree’s lower branches, she industriously fashioned a wood floor from the fallen limbs of a nearby koa tree. Lashing together two-inch thick branches with braided sennit rope, she planed the wood with an adz fashioned from a piece of sharp coral. And weaving together dried grasses found up-shore with freshly-gathered, spiky palm fronds, she fabricated a thatched, conical roof that she covered with philodendron leaves laid like shingles to shed rain water. In place of solid walls she made large bamboo shades that could be raised by a drawstring in good weather, and lowered when it rained.
Determined to survive, she gradually assembled the elements essential for day-to-day living. And though she dreaded a return to the site of the crash, she gathered her courage and made her way back to the plane’s wreckage. She knew she could re-fashion parts of the Electra into much needed items for this new and imposed lifestyle.
Reaching the crash site she was caught off guard by the devastation. Such chaos poignantly certified the end of erstwhile goals and aspirations, and she wept for connections she might never again engage. So massive was the damage that she was forced to disregard the notion of her plane as a phoenix; and with angry determination she stripped leather off the seats, peeled rubber from the flattened tires, and disconnected steel rods.
From twisted metal she created several essential items: cooking pots and utensils; a system of gutters, funnels, troughs, and spouts to deliver water from the running stream directly to a manmade reservoir near her dwelling. She managed to forge a combination shovel/ax from the smashed tip of a propeller blade, and she used fragments of shattered glass as magnifying elements to kindle fires by sunlight. She salvaged the rubber life raft to use as an inflatable bed; as well as a compass, a thermos, and a canteen and two cups. From the first aid kit she took scissors, tape, gauze, and a needle. Her mechanic’s tools lay strewn about the wreckage of the fuselage, and she was able to locate only her hammer, a crowbar, a few wrenches, and a single screwdriver. She made certain to collect all clothes that were carried on board.
She spent many weeks bringing order to this enforced habitat, each day securing some new aspect of her livelihood from nature’s informal entropy; and it was only after she’d provided for her basic needs that she took some quiet time to give thanks for her subsistence and acknowledge the awesome sovereignty of her environment.
Thankfully the struggle for survival was long past. Over time her life as a solitary had become a series of peaceful devotions, routines she performed with solicitude and genuine grace. Now, along this ancient pathway she walked each day after bathing, through the palm grove above the shoreline. Near the far end of her sweet potato patch she had to ford a stream in a mist that never really made her wet. Then, passing the banana grove uphill from her tree house, vistas of the rugged coastline gave way to sauna-like alcoves, carved out by pounding waves and centuries of erosion, now protected by fern-covered canyon walls. On a hillside covered with lantana, fresh water trickled off a broad-leafed spout coming out of a tree trunk, horny and spiny as the skin of a troll.
At trail’s end was the beneficent cove where Amie now made her home—a place curiously familiar and comforting. Green, moss-covered stones were cast against black lava rock, like dusky segments of an abstract memory. A place of safety: this she knew—somehow.
“There’s an idiot on the beach!” cried the parrot.
“So you’ve returned,” Amie acknowledged, searching the fronds of a tall palm nearby.
“Where is the navigator?” the parrot inquired.
“As far as I know, I’m the only person on the island,” she said.
“He talks to himself,” the bird related.
“Does he now?”
“And he’s fascinated with every word he says...”
“Some of us love hearing the sound of our own voice,” she allowed.
Again the remarkable parrot had managed to present a riddle that seemed impossible for her to solve.
CHAPTER 9
Marooned
FACE DOWN on the beach Julian found himself examining the remains of an antediluvian eruption. Bleached white by the sun and salt water, granular pieces of pumice, tiny multicolored bits of silicon, and broken fragments of shell commingled with minuscule segments of washed-up coral. Shaped minute after minute by wind and water, the sand was, at the same time, light and dark, wet and dry. Alive with timid sand crabs and creeping vegetation anchored in golden drift, it felt at once hot and cold. It was both solid and soft. It was earth at the edge of the water.
Still soaked to the skin from the storm, Julian lay weak and exhausted but glad to be alive. Just before dawn the storm was at its height, and the white-capped waves were cresting at ten to fifteen feet and pounding furiously over the reef. Had he tried to swim to shore just a few hours earlier, he would certainly have drowned.
“Buenaventura! Are you here?” he called.
The echo of his voice returned to him from a world full of emptiness, but Julian was convinced that his avis friend had flown to safety. Upon a distant and misty cliff he saw birds of many species roosting in tremendous numbers. Perhaps there Buenaventura had found refuge.
Fallen tree trunks and piles of driftwood cluttered the shoreline. Roots and creepers grew gnarled and sinewy. With needle-nosed beaks, red-footed booby birds fished the shoreline for crustaceans, while egrets and albatrosses glided upon subtle air currents and hunted for tiny black lizards that camouflaged themselves in the forest brush.
It was no longer raining, yet the clouds hung low in the canyons. Fog hid the mountain peaks and crept down the slopes to cast the trees in silhouette. Julian looked past his beached boat and out to sea, trying to delineate the horizon. A moment later (or was it an hour?), he thought he heard the sound of a familiar, though still invisible, twin engine aircraft. This time, however, the plane was not merely circling; it was in distress. Panning the breadth of the sky he saw nothing at first, though his ears told him all he needed to know. Still concealed by the remaining clouds, the plane fumbled like a blind man in a strange room, and the fine hair on the back of Julian’s neck bristled from a sudden change of energy that seemed to originate somewhere beyond time. Just then the Electra came cutting through the clouds. Rocking and wobbling as it passed perilously overhead, Julian thought, for a split second, that he could see the pilot’s face through the glass of the cockpit. It was a vaguely familiar face, a face he’d once seen in a picture, or in a dream. Or perhaps in a r
eflection...
Running frantically up the beach to determine where the plane might touch down, he tripped over his elongated, sopping pant legs and went sprawling onto the sand. Passing his tongue over his cracked lips he tasted a drop of his blood. He spat out sand and grit and discovered he’d chipped a tooth. As he lay prone on the beach he heard an impact uphill, though there was no explosion, nor evidence that the downed plane was on fire. Veiled not only in fog, this exotic locale seemed to manifest some impossible schizophrenia.
Up the mountainside he struggled, determined to reach the crash site before it was too late. The humid rain forest, with its tangled overgrowth, resisted intrusion. But Julian would not be denied. He knew the survival of those on board the plane might depend upon his timely arrival, and possibly his own rescue was contingent with theirs.
Hardly equal to such a strenuous initial test, he was nearly overcome with exhaustion. He knelt down in the mud and covered his face with slender, trembling hands. Appealing to some higher power, he found himself supplicating renewed strength and clarification.
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