One day a man decided to retire. He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life, that is, until the ship sank. He soon found himself on an island with no other people, no supplies, nothing, only bananas and coconuts. At first, he told himself he would survive for a few days until help arrived. Then the days became weeks. The weeks became months. Eventually, he stopped counting altogether.
After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to the shore. In disbelief, he asks, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?” For a moment, he wonders if the heat and loneliness have finally driven him mad and whether the beautiful woman before him is actually a mirage.
She replies, “I rowed over from the other side of the island where I landed when my cruise ship sank.” Her voice is calm, almost as though arriving on a deserted island after a shipwreck is an ordinary afternoon inconvenience.
“Amazing,” he notes. He sits up slowly, staring at her and then at the boat, trying to make sense of what he is seeing.
“You were really lucky to have a row boat wash up with you.” After four months of coconuts, solitude, and talking to himself, the sight of another human being is already astonishing enough. But the boat seems almost impossible.
“Oh, this thing?” explains the woman. “I made the boat out of some raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. She gestures toward the boat as casually as someone showing off a newly purchased car.
I wove the bottom from palm tree branches, and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree.” The man looks at the boat again. It suddenly seems less like a rowboat and more like the work of an engineer, carpenter, blacksmith, and shipbuilder rolled into one.
“But, where did you get the tools?” He cannot help himself. Every answer seems to create three new questions, and every question makes this mysterious woman more impressive.
“Oh, that was no problem,” replied the woman. “On the south side of the island, a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock is exposed. I found that if I fired it to the right temperature in my kiln, it melted into ductile iron I used that to make tools and used the tools to make the hardware.” She says it with such complete confidence that the man simply stares at her, wondering exactly how many hidden talents one person can possibly have.
The guy is stunned. He had spent four months struggling to open coconuts with rocks, while this woman apparently established a primitive metalworking industry.
“Let’s row over to my place,” she says. Her casual invitation somehow makes everything even more surreal. So, after a short time of rowing, she soon docks the boat at a small wharf. As the man looks to shore, he nearly falls off the boat.
Before him is a long stone walk leading to an cabin and tree house. The path is neatly constructed, the surrounding vegetation carefully cleared, and smoke curls lazily from what appears to be a chimney. There is even a little wooden sign hanging near the entrance. While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man can only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, “It’s not much, but I call it home.
Sit down, please.” The man looks around in complete disbelief. There is furniture. There are shelves. There are handmade decorations. Somehow, after surviving a shipwreck, she has managed to create something resembling a luxury island retreat.
“Would you like a drink?” she asks.
“No! No thank you,” the man blurts out, still dazed. “I can’t take another drop of coconut juice.” For four months, coconut juice had been his breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack, and occasional emotional support system.
“It’s not coconut juice,” winks the woman. There is something about that wink that makes him suddenly suspicious.
“I have a still. How would you like a Tropical Spritz?” She says it as casually as if she were offering him a soft drink from the refrigerator.
Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they exchange their individual survival stories, the woman announces, “I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.
Would you like to take a shower and shave? There’s a razor in the bathroom cabinet upstairs.” The man pauses. A shower? A razor? At this point, he is beginning to wonder whether he has actually died in the shipwreck and accidentally ended up in paradise.
No longer questioning anything, the man goes upstairs into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet is a razor made from a piece of tortoise bone. He picks it up carefully, half expecting it to transform into something even more unbelievable.
Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside a swivel mechanism. “This woman is amazing,” he muses. “What’s next?” He shakes his head, puts the razor down for a moment, then picks it up again just to make sure he isn’t imagining it. After everything else he’s seen, however, he decides that on this island, apparently nothing is impossible. When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but some small flowers on tiny vines, each strategically positioned, she smelled faintly of gardenias.
She then beckons for him to sit down next to her. The man’s heart begins pounding. After four months of isolation, the sudden appearance of another person would have been overwhelming enough. Now the atmosphere seems to be changing entirely. “Tell me,” she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, “We’ve both been out here for many months. You must have been lonely.
There’s something I’m certain you feel like doing right now, something you’ve been longing for, right?” She stares into his eyes. The man freezes. His mind races through every possibility. After everything that has happened—the shipwreck, the island, the incredible boat, the house, the homemade tools, the still, the shower, the razor—surely this is the moment when his incredible luck finally reaches its ultimate conclusion. He can barely contain his excitement. He can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You mean.” he swallows excitedly as tears start to form in his eyes, “You have the Roughriders on TV?
