The Classic Crusade of Corbin Cobbs

by Michael Ciardi

My journey recommenced on an isolated beach somewhere far displaced from modern civilization. A balmy cushion of waves jetted into a craggy shoreline for as far as I cared to observe. With a hedge of jungle vegetation on one side of me and the lime-colored sea on the opposite, I kept aligned to a sandy pathway with the expectation of finding my destination before growing tired. The air’s humidness and coconut palms hinted to a tropical locale, but I had no way of pinpointing my precise whereabouts until encountering this island’s inhabitants, if indeed there were any to be found.

  After a few miles of trudging along the beachfront, I discovered my first obvious clue that I wasn’t here alone. A set of human tracks in the sand seemed remarkably similar to my own in size and shape. Since the prints were not bare, I assumed that the maker of these tracks had acquired some degree of civilized footwear. The proximity of these footprints to the breakers on the sand indicated their freshness, perhaps deposited no more than ten minutes from my arrival.

  My task of detecting this individual became no more troublesome than following the tracks across the sand and into a region clustered with small rocks and boulders. I eventually came upon a cave etched into the side of a mountainous region. A lone figure, seemingly oblivious to my approach, squatted on the rocks in plain view of anyone who cared to watch him. He appeared preoccupied with his present task, which consisted of eating turtle eggs directly from their shells.

  His garments, although tattered and bleached by the sun and saltwater, were standard issue for a 17th century sailor. Because of the torn condition of his indigo vest and ivory leg stockings, I presumed he spent some time here stranded away from the comforts of European attire. Since I didn’t wish to startle him during his feast, I waved my hands repeatedly with the hope that he’d interpret my gesture as an amicable introduction. As I proceeded up an incline from the beach, I estimated his age as being at least ten years younger than me, but the elements of this environment had weathered his skin to almost a texture of baked rawhide.

  This marooned man’s hair flowed in unkempt coils around his face, devouring portions of his cheeks and clumping densely beneath his chin. I then noticed a flintlock-hunting rifle leaning against a palm tree beside him, and a few casks of gunpowder protruded from the cave’s yawning aperture. He seemed prepared for any hostile encounter, yet somehow destabilized by events I didn’t yet comprehend. Because of this evidence, I elected to maintain enough distance between us to dodge a musket ball if he perceived me as a threat to his welfare. Instead of grappling with his firearm, however, he continued to devour the turtle eggs in a ravenous bid to curtail his hunger.

  After the man finished his meal, he leveled his eyes upon me with the same astonishment that I projected onto him. My hand signals had at least momentarily persuaded him to believe that I explored this terrain in the good spirit of curiosity, which I’m sure he appreciated at one time or another.

  “Welcome,” he shouted to me as if my company was long past due. “I pray you aren’t another hallucination sporting with my eyes.”

  “Since I can see you as clearly as you see me,” I declared, “I suspect I’m as real as you are.”

  “I sense that you’re not a cannibal, but are you a mutineer?”

  “No, sir. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know where I am.”

  “That’s both easy and difficult to determine,” the islander responded. “If you asked me to chart a map to show you exactly where we are, I couldn’t oblige you. On the other side of things, I have anointed this land with a moniker that should suit your interest as well as it has done for me.”

  “By what name do you call this place?”

  “By the only one that it should be known. It is either good or bad fortune that has shipwrecked you here on the Island of Despair.”

  If this information proved accurate, I now found myself on a remote island off the coast of Trinidad. And if I accepted this as an irrefutable fact, then I also had to recognize that the castaway known as Robinson Crusoe now stood before me. Based on the ample portion of gunpowder Crusoe had stockpiled in his cave, I assumed he was still in the early stages of his twenty-eight-year occupancy on this deserted land mass. This sole survivor may have not yet suspected how long he’d be forced to endure isolation, and I refused to inform him.

  “On what ship have you sailed here from, sir?” Crusoe asked. I anticipated this inquiry because he might’ve presumed the condition of another vessel (if there was one) was superior to the wreck that stranded him.

  “I have no ship,” I confessed. “At least for now, we are both stranded here.”

  My response appeased Crusoe momentarily, but he undoubtedly felt skeptical about my spontaneous emergence on the island. “You don’t look the part of a savage,” he noted, “and you haven’t yet hinted at the prospect of making yourself welcome to my supplies.”

  “I won’t be here long,” I assured him.

  “Then you must know things that I don’t,” he remarked. He then adjusted his torn clothing in a feeble attempt to cover up his gaunt frame. “You’ll have to pardon my frail appearance,” he continued. “I’ve recently convalesced from a frightful illness, one perpetuated by this tropic climate.”

  “I didn’t mean to intrude at an awkward time,” I said.

  “There’s never really an off time for sociable company on such an island,” said Crusoe. “The presence of a dog or cat doesn’t replace what we suddenly share.” It then occurred to me why Crusoe had referred to this region as a place of despair. Without an ability to interact with anyone, he was forced to communicate with his interior thoughts. Inevitably, I wondered how much we had in common. Whether a man was inaccessible by circumstance or choice rated as an interchangeable quandary. Maybe it was already too late for Crusoe to rectify the rigid course of my journey.

  From my perspective, an introduction was unnecessary, but I forgot my advantage once again. I knew the history of Crusoe, but he didn’t even know what name to call me by. Since it was Thursday, and I wasn’t particularly fond of the prospect of being named after a weekday, I told him my name. Of course there was no expectation on my behalf that my identity mattered to Crusoe in the slightest way. He simply forwarded a peculiar stare at me as he tossed the cracked remnants of turtle shells to the sandy ground.

  “My man Cobbs,” he remarked boisterously. “Has a rather nice sound to it, don’t you agree?”

  “If that’s what you prefer to call me, so be it,” I replied. “I’m just trying to figure out why I’m here with you right now.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Not really.”

  “I can’t fault you for being confounded by this predicament,” Crusoe returned. “It wasn’t until quite recently that I discovered that the perils on this island weren’t as detrimental as I first believed. After all, despite the tribulations that every man endures, his deliverance is never too far away.”

  Perhaps if our discourse unwound at another moment in this day, Crusoe’s wisdom would’ve registered as at least partly motivating. But in light of what awaited him beyond this encounter, I didn’t sense any hope for my own future. Contrarily, I felt destined to absorb the mind-shattering blows of loneliness. Yet, I still reserved some inquisitiveness into Crusoe’s plight, for he was a man who certainly dealt with more hardship than I. Most men who studied his misadventure envied him for his resiliency. I was no different in this respect.

  “What do you know that I need to understand, Robinson Crusoe?” I asked him directly. My question left no chance for misinterpretation on his part. The castaway accepted my inquiry with the same level of seriousness in which I asked it.

  “Not too long ago,” Crusoe stated, “my opinions were as muddled as your own. But then, while in the midst of an illness that spawned a great fever, I witnessed an angel descending from a dark cloud that was set aflame.”

  I had some previous knowledge of Crusoe’s epiphany, but I couldn’t claim to have shared his spontaneous belief in celestial spi
rits, and subsequently his freshly kindled passion for the New Testament.

  “It will take more than the observance of a man suspended on a fiery cloud to convince me that all will turn out in my favor,” I said. “The woman I love is now dead, and there’s no one more at fault for this travesty than me.”

  “We both know that whatever has occurred cannot be altered, but have you ventured this far into your journey to simply surrender now?”

  “It might be easier for me to just die, too,” I told Crusoe. “What will it really matter once I am gone?”

  “If that’s the way you truly feel, my man Cobbs, then there is no remedy in the secular or spiritual realm that will ever save you. But before you resign yourself to that sort of grimness, ask yourself why you’ve come to see me here.”

  “I don’t know that answer.”

  “Oh, poor miserable Corbin Cobbs,” Crusoe groaned. “Do you really believe that you’re the only man who feels alone in this world? A life without tests permits a man to ignore his resourceful nature. How will you ever learn what your full potential may be unless you’re made to endure circumstances that you once imagined as unthinkable?”

  No one with a balanced perspective on life would’ve debated Crusoe’s logic, and although he was only in the first of twenty-eight years on the stretch of tropic earth, it seemed obvious to me that his tenacity for life was staunchly hitched to something far bigger than his own dreams. I shared a bit of his enthusiasm, but none of his faith.

  “Before setting sail on my first voyage,” Crusoe added, “I spoke to my father about my untamed passion for the sea and quest for adventure. Predictably, he wanted me to traverse conventional pathways, avoiding the element of the unknown as if I’d somehow be better off by resisting the lures I most cherished. Despite the unfamiliar currents that awaited me on the ocean, I never considered my choice to sail as foolhardy. Besides, what I first recognized as a place of damnation is really one of salvation.”

  I glanced beside a rock where Crusoe now knelt, almost in a gesture of prayer. A tattered but intact copy of the Bible was within an arm’s length of his grasp. He reached for this book as I fondly remembered holding my journal. “You’ve found the reference that will save you,” I declared, motioning toward his Bible. “But what will save me?”

  The castaway didn’t answer me, and I assumed his strategy was to permit my own sullen words to recycle in my head until finding useful construction. When the echo couldn’t be disregarded any longer, I bid farewell to Robinson Crusoe. In isolation, a man had no choice but to confront the one thing that he neglected to examine routinely: his own conscience. For most of my life I had scrambled in search of happiness. For each person, the answer was different, but everyone needed to find inner peace in order to achieve fulfillment.

  Now, I trod alone on the beach, watching a band of waves lap incessantly in the surf. The footprints I left behind in my travels wouldn’t remain here very long; this always reminded me of the pithiness of life. What was next for me? Was I resigned to sacrifice the remainder of my days by submerging into the tides of self-pity and woe? The answer to these questions resided in the realm of reality, and sometimes this was the loneliest of all isles.

  Chapter 72

  6:02 P.M.