Jeff Meller
9 Oct 13
503 words
He's trapped.
Five days have passed since the corporate
jet crashed and Chuck Nolan, the sole survivor, washed ashore.
At first he was in shock, then exhilarated - a brush with
death makes one feel fully alive. Then he felt grateful, mingled
with melancholy - for friends who were dead, for wives and husbands who do not
yet know they are widows and widowers, for children who will celebrate
Christmas without one parent.
He reconnoitered the island. As far as he can
see in every direction he is alone: infinite sea, boundless beach, limitless sky,
impenetrable jungle.
Primeval: sounds only from nature - wind in
trees, chirrup of insects, waves on sand; light only from sun and moon.
After a week he is sunburned, bearded,
grimy, his hair matted with sweat. His pants barely bend at the knees, stiff
with sea salt.
For five days he has had nothing to eat but
coconut, nothing to drink but coconut milk.
Each day he wakes thinking: “They must be
looking for me. Today I will be rescued.” But the sky remains empty, the
horizon unbroken.
This morning he says to Wilson, a
basketball which serves as his security
blanket, “I should try to make a fire to alert searching planes or
passing ships.” Wilson does not disagree.
“But how to make a fire?” he wonders. Flint
and steel. A bow and spindle. A mirror. He has none of these.
Then he recalls - vaguely - a fire can be
started by rubbing two sticks together. Make a groove
in one piece of wood and rapidly rub the pointed tip of another piece of wood back
and forth. The friction between the two is supposed to create heat.
He
shaves a point on different kinds sticks he finds along the beach. Then he makes
a groove in other pieces of wood. He tries different rubbing techniques. He breaks
many pieces of wood. Nary a hint of heat or smoke.
He
has been trying for hours, all day it seems. With each failed attempt frustration
increases his anger and despair.
Toward dusk, when he thinks he sees an
actual wisp of smoke, his eyes widened in disbelief. He nurses the wisp gently with
his breathe, adding coconut coir as tinder. Sweat drips from the end of his
nose. Burning coir is the best aroma he ever has smelled. When the smoke sizzles
into a small burst of flame, he cheers “Fire.”
He adds more tinder, then palm fronds, then
logs. The small flames grow into a bonfire, a celebration of his triumph. Waving
a burning frond aloft he exults, “It’s a signal fire.”
And he calls to the burning sparks rising on
the heat of the flames into the now dusky sky: “Fireflies go!” They are not
trapped like Chuck: “You’re free. You’re free.”
“Look what I have created,” he cries, “I have
made fire,” as the indifferent surf foams gently at the shore, as it has over
eons when other men have claimed to create fire.
-- 30 --
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