Castle of Water

5

Alone and shivering on their respective beaches, Barry and Sophie both considered themselves extremely unlucky—which, in a purely statistical sense, they were. But from a historical perspective, they were hardly alone. Becoming an island castaway in this mapped and modern twenty-first century may sound exceptional, but it was not without precedent. And while it would have likely proved little comfort, there’s no shortage of individuals who could attest to that fact.

Take, for example, an Irish American most have heard of named John F. Kennedy. As a twenty-six-year-old skipper in World War II, he found himself floating in the middle of the Pacific after a Japanese destroyer rather inconsiderately sank his patrol boat. The future president and a few members of his loyal crew braved sharks and saltwater crocodiles to swim to nearby Plum Pudding Island, living off coconuts and rainwater while waiting for rescue.

And then there is Ada Blackjack, the twenty-three-year-old Inuit woman who served as both cook and seamstress on a Canadian expedition to Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, in 1921. When the rest of her party either died of scurvy or perished trying to escape in the sea, she hunkered down and survived for a solid two years on that desolate rock, hunting small game and melting ice to drink.

If it’s literary renown you’re after, you’ll find no better example than Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor marooned on the Pacific island of Más a Tierra in the early eighteenth century. He subsisted there for nearly five years on the goats and rats that plagued his uninhabited isle, whiling away the hours reading his Bible and smoking tobacco. Following his rescue, he would publish a record of his adventures—a biography that many believe inspired the novel Robinson Crusoe, written just a few years later. Indeed, in 1966, Más a Tierra was officially renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in honor of that noble act of plagiarism.

For longevity, you can’t beat Juana Maria, the lone woman of San Nicolas Island, who was for eighteen years a castaway lost to the world; for drama, Marguerite de la Rocque, who gave birth to a bastard child during her two years on the Isle of Demons. And for pure heroism, there’s always Ernest Shackleton, who rescued his men from Elephant Island after a grueling and treacherous eighteen-month ordeal. There’s even some evidence that Amelia Earhart spent her penultimate days as a castaway on a lonesome Pacific atoll, although the verdict is still out on that one. Philip Ashton, Fernão Lopes, Charles Barnard, Poon Lim, Gonzalo de Vigo, Chunosuke Matsuyama—they’re all right there for the skeptical and the curious alike, men and women who found themselves abandoned by civilization and left to their own devices on desolate hunks of sea-gird stone. The history books abound with such desperate plights, going back to the sailors of classical antiquity, all the way up to the Japanese tsunami victims and lost Mexican fishermen of, yes, our mapped and modern twenty-first century.

A twenty-first century that for Barry and Sophie was only just beginning. Their joint Cessna 208 went down on the first day of April 2001, a rather severe poisson d’avril, to say the least. That they ended up on the same plane was merely coincidence, if one believes in such things. As passengers aboard a small semicharter flight from the relatively remote island of Tahiti, bound for an even more remote island in the Marquesas, it was pure chance that brought them together. They were both looking to visit a place at the ends of the earth that they had heard good things about, and nothing more.

For Sophie, it was to be the most romantic leg of an already exceedingly romantic vacation. She and Étienne had delayed their honeymoon because of time and financial constraints—starting an architecture firm in Paris had proved taxing on both, and the AutoCAD licenses alone had put them several grand in the hole. But the date was set for a late March departure, some three months after their wedding, and when it arrived, they were understandably elated. The first week was spent on the main island of Tahiti, at a beachside resort rife with coconut palms and equally coconutty drinks. Mornings were devoted to making love in bed beneath the gauzy veil of their mosquito netting, and afternoons to walking along the beach, discussing architecture and making plans for the future. Étienne wanted to live in Paris indefinitely, but Sophie at least entertained the notion of returning to the south one day, maybe even to the Hautes-Pyrénées, where she had spent her summers as a girl. Either way, they had several happy years to figure it out. In the meantime, they had a promising little firm in the tenth arrondissement, several new contracts for respected cultural institutions, and another full week of tropical leisure ahead of them, to be spent on an even more idyllic island in the Marquesas that Sophie had read about in a brochure.

“Regarde,” she had whispered to a half-asleep Étienne while in bed together in their flat in Paris. “Jacques Brel lived there during the last years of his life. C’est un paradis.”

“Oui, ma chérie,” he had drowsily assented. “Allons-y.”

Barry’s voyage was also a celebration of sorts, albeit one of separation rather than joining. A separation from many things, as a matter of fact. For while Sophie had been doggedly pursuing her passion in Paris, Barry had been halfheartedly bobbing along as a middling bond salesman in New York. Actually, halfhearted may be generous. Barry hated it, loathed it, despised it with a passion. Yet somehow he had become resigned to that existence, a far cry from his childhood in Cleveland and an even farther shout from his grandparents’ farm in southern Illinois. But it just seemed the sort of thing one did after Princeton, even with a degree in art history, and he had been initiated unenthusiastically into the world of Excel spreadsheets and client meetings and unpleasant bar nights, while quietly dreaming of far different things.

Things like Gauguin paintings, for example. And when the tensile cord of his being finally snapped and his conscience could take no more, Barry remembered that selfsame Polynesian island whose name Sophie had uttered in bed (“Hiva Oa, Hiva Oa” . . . just saying it made his spine tingle). In a burst of resolve, he had decided to go, and with good reason: The singer Jacques Brel wasn’t the only francophone who had spent the last years of his life there—the little speck in the Marquesas had served as the painter Paul Gauguin’s final resting place as well. When Barry quit his job at Lehman Brothers, his boss had called him an idiot. When he told his girlfriend, she had informed him that his odds of making it as an artist were one in a million, as she packed her things and walked out the door. But when he whispered his new path to himself, the gods said, Well done.

Naturally, there was some trepidation. Quitting a fairly lucrative career in his midthirties to become a painter wasn’t the most fiscally prudent decision he had ever made, and giving away most of his savings to the United Way (honestly the only charity he could think of) was probably an even worse one. But if he lived frugally, he knew what remained in his bank account would sustain him for a few lean years, and the art supply store across the street from his new apartment downtown sold canvases on the cheap. Nervous but pleased with himself, and giddy with possibility, Barry felt a celebration was in order, something to commemorate a bold new adventure and provide ample inspiration for the creative period ahead.

The island of Hiva Oa was not easy to get to. But from Tahiti’s smaller airport in Papeete, there was a single-engine prop plane that made the eight-hundred-mile flight to the Marquesas twice a week. Sketchbook, oil paints, and pastels in hand, Barry had stood waiting at the airstrip, half a world away from home, beside a young French couple who had booked the same flight as he. The husband introduced himself as Étienne and seemed serious but personable. As for his new wife, she was very pretty but strikingly aloof. Sophie, she had said her name was, and beyond that, she did not divulge much more. They were dressed quite appropriately in their Deauville finest: cutoff shorts, espadrilles, and matching Saint James T-shirts. Barry, on the other hand, was still wearing the same clothes he had donned for his last day at the office and felt distinctly out of place in the South Pacific. Oh, well. He would have plenty of time to invest in cargo shorts and tan-giving tees when he arrived in the Marquesas. And he was looking forward to it.

The sun spilled down and the palms did their thing, and after a half hour of waiting, a rattletrap Cessna droned up, its rust-flecked wings shimmering in the heat that rose off the tarmac. From its cockpit, a groggy-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses beckoned them aboard.

“That’s our plane?” Sophie asked worriedly, and in French.

“Oui, c’est ça,” answered Étienne. “But don’t worry, it will get us there.”

Over the course of his life, Étienne had been correct on many counts, from his suspicion that the attractive brunette in his architecture class in Montpellier might like to join him for coffee to his conviction that it was better to set out and start a small firm of his own. But in this instance, regarding the reliability of the single-engine Cessna 208 and the integrity of its custodian, Étienne could not have been more wrong.

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