Buck had set up a livable camp. He’d found an old cot and mattress for his tent in one of the abandoned buildings, and had a lantern and Coleman stove. The food, though, remained on the Iola, where he and Jennifer prepared and shared their meals. She had hoped that with Buck living ashore, she could exercise tighter control over their supplies. But it wasn’t working out that way. Buck indifferently continued to chow down like a famished wolf, and her nagging did no good. She couldn’t fathom why he didn’t seem to appreciate the seriousness of running out of supplies. What were they going to do? Their food stores were already lower than they should have been when they arrived on Palmyra, and with each passing day the situation was growing worse.
Aside from this irritation, however, Jennifer was not unhappy with Buck and did not consider their living apart a true separation. When they wanted to spend the night together, they did.
Soon after Jennifer dressed, the Leonards came by to announce they were leaving that morning. Bernard brought her more books, and Evelyn was carrying a small jar of cooking oil, a sack of flour, and some rice pudding.
Jennifer was touched—and surprised—by Evelyn’s generosity. Just a few days earlier, the older woman had flatly refused to barter, explaining that after a long cruise, they didn’t have enough food left on the Journeyer to give or trade away.
Evelyn asked to take Jennifer’s picture before they departed. She posed on the Iola’s bow—a sunnily smiling, dimpled birthday girl in flowery shorts and a bikini top—cradling Puffer in her arms. She looked happy.
The Leonards were soon on their way. As the Journeyer nosed out into the lagoon under power, Bernard waved broadly. “Goodbye, Jennifer,” he hollered. “Have a happy birthday and a wonderful year.”
“Thank you, Bernie. Have a good trip.”
He wasn’t really a bad guy, she thought. A little stuffy and self-important, but not the hopeless jerk Buck made him out to be.
July 16. Journeyer left today. Bernie and Evelyn brought by books, oil, and rice pudding, which I devoured entirely, though made some halfhearted effort to save ½ for R—then ¼, then lost out to my appetite for something sweet, and just ate it all up. Later, R came by and started to make my birthday cake. I went down to his camp, read and relaxed while Mac delivered my present—he had retrieved our anchor which we lost when we got hung up on the reef the day we arrived. R invited Mac and Muff to partake of cake and coffee at 6:00, which they accepted. When I returned, we cleaned and filleted fish. We had fried fish patties for dinner. After bathing, we moved a very pretty cake down to R’s camp and Mac and Muff arrived at 6 sharp with more presents—some roasted soy nuts and a sweet-smelling sachet. All sang “Happy Birthday” to me and I blew out the one big candle atop my cake after making a wish. Talked awhile, then Mac and Muff bid goodnite. After which, R and I smoked some hash and had an exquisite fuck—all and all, a very fine birthday.
Jennifer didn’t have to think twice about her birthday wish. It was often on her mind. Please let everything work out all right for Buck and me.
She didn’t tell anyone, of course, because she desperately wanted her wish to come true.
CHAPTER 10
MUFF DID NOT WANT to upset her elderly mother by mentioning her own problems and worries when she wrote home on July 13, 1974, three days before the Leonards departed. But in spite of her good intentions, her gnawing concern about life on Palmyra broke through in every paragraph.
Dearest Mother,
Three boats are here now, but one, the Journeyer, is leaving and will take this letter with them. That leaves us alone with a hippie couple who plan to stay here and live off the land. It’s just our luck that they decided to roost in Palmyra.
Mac has cleared the land around us and set up a little camp ashore that we use as an outdoor patio area. We found an old table, chairs, bench, and platforms to set the furniture on. This other couple, Roy and Jennifer, got one of the good chairs. I had pulled it closer to our area, then forgot it. The next day I saw him walking around our place and when I checked, the chair was gone. As Mac says, finders keepers, I guess.
Right near our camp, Mac has set up a workshop with a long workbench and we are really setting up house. We’ve done a little exploring. The other day, Mac found a building on the other side of the lagoon. He came back to get me and we took flashlights. It appeared to be a hospital and Mac thinks a communications center, too. Inside was spooky to me, but Mac went right in like he’d been there a hundred times.
Most of the island is junglelike and the birds carry on so you’d think you were in Africa, the deepest, darkest part. You need a machete to cut your way through and to clear away all the thick spiderwebs.
Roy and Jennifer have run out of sugar, cigarettes, and I don’t know what. They have bartered with other boats. Next they will ask us. I pray they won’t. Roy has a chain saw that he uses to cut down trees so they can get to the coconuts easier. It makes Mac furious.
To top it off they have three dogs. This island is no place for dogs. She has a house-type dog (very sweet, named Puffer) and he has a Lab and pit bull which is trained to hunt. They don’t have enough food for them. The two big dogs are already roaming out of hunger, looking for anything they can find to eat. What a mess. Why did we have to arrive at the same time?
Such is life six degrees from the equator.
Please write to Curt Shoemaker, the radio operator in Hawaii I told you about. He can pass word to us about how you are doing. (Hope your arthritis is better.)
Love,
Muff
Mac was exploring the interior of the island during the hottest part of the day, cutting his way through dense undergrowth with his machete, when he badly misjudged a powerful swipe at one branch. The blade easily severed the branch and flew into Mac’s left leg, slicing through to the bone just below the knee. Blood poured down into his sock and sneaker.
Mac swiftly tied his bandanna, wet from sweat, around the cut. He was grimly calm, but realized he had to get back to the Sea Wind. Fast.
He considered the trail he’d just blazed, but it meandered too much. A straight line through the jungle would be quicker. He began chopping in that direction, handling the machete with renewed respect.
A few minutes later he had to stop to tighten the tourniquet. The bleeding had not even slowed. Just how much blood could he lose before he felt faint? Already, a weariness from all the exertion in the hot sun had settled in his limbs, and he felt himself moving at a dreamlike, slow speed, as exhausted as a runner at the end of a marathon. But he didn’t dare stop to rest because he was losing more blood all the time. It would do no good to yell for help, anyway, because no one was close enough to hear him.
He soon faced a growth of thick wild grass nearly his height. Hacking through it in the stifling heat and humidity would require energy he didn’t have.
He turned away, searching for an easier way. Within minutes, he was back at the barricade of tall grass. He cursed himself for not carrying a compass. The sun was no help because high clouds had sailed in with the afternoon breeze and veiled the sky. He tried to reorient himself, unable to believe he was so confused. “You can’t get lost on a tiny island,” he had told Muff. Now he was lost. As his strength and self-confidence ebbed dangerously, he finally chanced upon the runway, where the assembled birds greeted him with a squawking cacophony that sounded like beautiful music to his ears.
It wasn’t far now.
Pulling the dinghy alongside the Sea Wind, he yelled for Muff. She popped up from below, took one look at his bloody leg, and let out an anguished cry.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he assured her, climbing aboard. “I cut myself with the damn machete. We need to clean it.”
Muff, who had taken advanced first aid, focused on the task at hand. She cleaned the deep wound with cold fresh water, then dripped searing peroxide into the cut. Mac barely flinched. “It’s got to have stitches,” she pronounced briskly. “I’ll get the sutures.”
“Bet
ter bring some antibiotics.”
The sutures had not been unpacked since Mac put them in the first-aid kit before their honeymoon cruise—thirteen years ago. Packed separately in foil, each length of thread was still usable, but the needle had become too dull. Instead of stitching, Muff sprinkled a powdered sulfa drug on the wound, and closed it as completely as possible with butterfly bandages.
“It’s a long way to a doctor or hospital,” Muff said. “Please be more careful, honey.”
Grunting noncommittally, he swallowed an antibiotic pill and went right to bed, obviously worn out from the ordeal. That night, Muff set the alarm clock, and woke him at two o’clock for a second dose.
Unable to go back to sleep, she went topside. On the familiar deck, she nearly stumbled in the darkness. There was no moon and the stars must have been hidden by overcast.
She awkwardly groped her way to the stern and sat down to think. Looking out toward what she knew was the jungle, she could see nothing. The darkness was literally blackness. It was as if she had stepped into a closet and shut the door behind her. She couldn’t remember ever being in such a dark place.
There wasn’t any kind of sustained pastel dusk at Palmyra. Nighttime fell as if someone had dropped a curtain. Mac said the sudden darkness was explained by their proximity to the equator. Muff found it eerie.
Mac spent most of the next day in bed, alternately sleeping and reading. This was the first time since they had arrived at Palmyra that Muff had seen him taking it easy during the day. It took an injury, and perhaps some wounded pride, to keep him down.
In the evening, Muff prepared a special dinner. She thawed out two steaks, put them on the hibachi, and baked potatoes topped with some of Jennifer’s coconut butter. She chilled a special bottle of champagne she’d been saving since San Diego, and they feasted.
The next day, Mac felt much better, though he would have to continue the antibiotics regimen for a week longer.
After this brief respite, Muff worried again, for she knew he would soon be back exploring the rugged island he saw as his domain.
When will he tire of this godforsaken place? She desperately wanted to help her man live out his dream, but she didn’t know how much longer she could stand it here.
CHAPTER 11
IGNORING THE GENTLE RAINFALL, Jennifer scraped more soil into the shovel and tossed it into a makeshift wheelbarrow.
Rain here was nothing like the gray, ugly torrents she’d experienced in New York, or California’s winter downpours. On Palmyra, showers were not at all depressing. They were warm and refreshing, something to look forward to as pure pleasure. They also meant renewed supplies of life-saving fresh water. Usually, as now, the sun still beamed during the showers.
Digging for scarce dirt had become a regular chore. Jennifer never would have guessed the difficulty of gathering garden soil on a coral atoll. It could only be found beneath trees and shrubs, but even there it was never more than a few inches deep. The natural flora thrived despite the lack of soil, undoubtedly because of the rich nutrients from the island’s abundant bird guano and decayed vegetation.
She wheeled her cargo toward the cement structure they were now calling the Refrigerator House. These days, the dilapidated refrigerator was powered by their own portable generator. In the time it took her to traverse those fifty yards or so, the rain stopped.
Buck, wearing only shorts and sunglasses, was on the roof of the building, spreading out the previous load of dirt. His sinewy muscles were slick from the warm rain, and Jennifer appraised him with a long look. She adored him.
Strange as it might seem, growing a roof garden made sense, as they had learned the hard way when they first moved a batch of vegetable and marijuana seedlings ashore. They’d left the tender little plants in paper cups filled with dirt on a broken-down picnic table. During the night, many of the shoots had been eaten, presumably by crabs and rats. After taking the remaining plants back to the boat, they searched for a spot that would be out of reach of the marauders. Eventually, they decided to plant atop the roof of the Refrigerator House.
Buck had built a rickety ladder and rigged a five-gallon bucket on a length of rope for hauling the soil they collected.
“We’ve got enough here now to plant a few rows,” he said.
Jennifer came back to reality. She knew what he had in mind. “The vegetables come first. We can’t eat dope.”
He chuckled good-naturedly. “Speak for yourself.”
Jennifer hoped that growing their own tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, carrots, and lettuce would eventually ease the long-term food situation. But it would not solve their immediate problem. The plants wouldn’t start producing for months, and as of now, they scarcely had one month’s worth of food left on the Iola.
“How much more dirt you figure we need?” she asked.
“Eighty, maybe ninety wheelbarrow loads.”
She groaned. Her back was already killing her, and she knew how hard dirt was to come by on this coral reef. “That’ll take at least a week if we work five or six hours a day.” She had no hope whatsoever that Buck would be so energetic.
She and Buck had already discussed what they would do if Dickie and Carlos didn’t show up with provisions next month, as scheduled. Before Jack Wheeler left the island, she had asked him if food was available at the nearest island shown on the chart, Washington Island, some 120 miles to the southeast. Wheeler said yes, that there were some Gilbertese natives living there, but that Washington was a “reef island,” meaning there was no channel, and in order to get ashore, a boat had to fight both the breaking surf and the dangerous coral reefs surrounding the island. The nearest island that could be reached where food could be purchased was Fanning, 175 miles to the southeast. Fanning, he explained, had a few hundred permanent residents, a general store, and, like Palmyra, a protected lagoon. But Wheeler had warned her that Fanning would be too difficult a voyage for a sailboat without a motor because they would be going against the wind. Instead, he suggested American Samoa, a much easier sail, he said, because of favorable winds and currents the whole way. “Samoa,” Jennifer had said incredulously. “That’s way south, isn’t it?” Wheeler confirmed it was more than a thousand miles south of Palmyra, but he nevertheless recommended it over Fanning. Jennifer couldn’t imagine a two-thousand-mile round trip to go grocery shopping.
They would try for Fanning, even though they wouldn’t be able to buy much with their very limited funds. But Mac had expressed an interest in buying their portable generator, the same model he’d meant to get before leaving home. She knew he would give them a fair price. Also, Jennifer hoped she and Buck could find some kind of temporary work on Fanning and earn money to buy additional supplies. She planned to stock up on the staples—flour, sugar, rice, beans. Also, they wanted to buy an outboard motor they could use on both the Iola and their dinghy, so they could troll for fish in the lagoon. Those supplies would keep them going until the following spring, when the vegetable garden would be producing. That was her master plan, anyway, while Buck was more concerned about getting the marijuana crop going. He was planning for their smuggling operation with the Taylor brothers to make them rich by springtime.
While Buck was thinking big, Jennifer’s attention was focused on basic day-to-day survival, for her the most unappealing aspect of life on Palmyra. She spent the majority of her time gathering and preparing food, like a woman in a third-world village. Making a batch of coconut butter took hours, beginning with collecting ripe coconuts—most of those on the ground had rotted—then grinding, blending, and cooking them. She and Buck had found a single banana tree on an islet across the lagoon, and they would row all the way over for just two or three bananas. Washing clothes and drying them in the humid air took half a day. Feeding the dogs—Jennifer prepared mullet and coconuts for them to supplement the shrinking supply of dog food—cleaning the boat, working on the garden…the chores seemed never-ending. “Paradise sure is exhausting,” she groaned to Buck. “We’re pr
actically alone on a tropical island in the middle of nowhere, and I’m busier than a streetwalker when the fleet’s in.”
“Let’s pretend I’m a horny sailor, huh?”
July 22. Carried loads of dirt in A.M.—after five trips I was ready to pass out. Another boat came in, the Shearwater from Portland, Oregon. Two guys—Don Stevens and Bill Larson—on board. Have toured South Pacific, heading back home by way of Hawaii. R rowed out and helped moor them where Journeyer had been. More fish for dinner.
July 23. Rainy day. Put up batch of sourdough starter. Also planted some m seeds. R came over and both of us stayed on boat and read. Mac brought over a good group of books—1984, a Harold Robbins, some Zane Grey, and another Agatha Christie. We gave them some books we’d already read.
Another old favorite for dinner—papio and coconut cake, some baked in shell, some fried. In the evening, the two guys on Shearwater invited us to their boat. We were treated to rum and Cokes and cocktail peanuts. Made a deal to trade magazines and books next day. They gave R two packs of South Sea cigarettes. Don showed me his ship’s log, full of pictures of Tonga, Fiji, etc. A very enjoyable evening.
Everyone on the island was invited to a potluck dinner at Buck’s camp on the evening of July 25.
Jennifer had cooked most of the afternoon, preparing garlic bread, an apricot nut loaf, and a coconut pudding pie, using flour and sugar donated by the Shearwater. Mac and Muff brought steamed potatoes and carrots, the last of the produce they’d bought in Hawaii.
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