The road out of town runs for twenty-one kilometres before it stops pretending to be a road at all. It narrows, then softens, then gives way to gravel and washboard and the long, patient silence of trees. At the end, where a creek cuts between two mountains so tall they seem to be conferring with each other over the valley, a man built a fire every night for the better part of a year. He was not lost. He knew exactly where he was. That was the whole point.
He called it his hideout. Only three people alive knew the coordinates: his three best friends. He trusted them the way you trust someone who has already seen you at your worst. Everyone else in the community — the hundreds of people who nodded to him in the aisles of the grocery store he managed, who had known him for years, they only knew that he was… somewhere. And every single one of them wanted to ask him the same four words:
How is your wife doing?
Photo by Preillumination SeTh.
That is, on its face, an act of love. A community closing ranks around one of its own, checking in, refusing to let a man carry grief alone. And it was that. But grief has a strange arithmetic, and love multiplied by three thousand people, asked two hundred times a day, five days a week, stops behaving like love and starts feeling like something closer to drowning.
It’s time to go. It. Is. Time. To. Go! Come hell or high water, you are getting off this island today. No matter what.
Photo by Graham Holtshausen
You’ve realized what needs to change in your life, and you’ve made the commitment. You may perish on your way out through the coral-laced breakers that pulped your ship. You may survive. But you know that camping out at the crossroad, which being on this island represents, only produces doubt and doubt kills the warrior. There will be a passing ship, you’re sure, because the island is in a shipping lane.
All available combustible wood and materials were piled into the basecamp fire pit and set ablaze. Additional tree branches were cut, and a raft was created to support you and the tool kit. There was no turning back and you knew it. This is what MDI prepared you for, and now the rubber was meeting the road — or more correctly, my toes, leaking through ripped boots, are meeting the sand.
Photo by Tsuyoshi Kozu
Wait. Holy shit… there’s a ship! In the tool kit, you remember, you’d added a small mirror. This had come in handy many times when you needed to see things that were underneath or behind something. It’s a trick of the locksmith’s trade but now, given the circumstances, you can use it for another purpose entirely: signals.
Use the sun to signal the ship. The fire is burning like a bondire in the desert at Burning Man, and you’re desperately moving the mirror up and down, firing off unmistakable morse-code-like blasts of light.
Hurray! You see a flash, then another, and yet more. Someone on the ship is signaling back. Ever so slowly, the boat begins to come about, wake frothing alongside.
Photo by Tucker M. Yates.
As it comes closer, and eventually anchors outside the lagoon, you see the lettering on the bow: the U.S.S. MDI. The sailors drop a ladder from the deck to the waterline, but they can’t help you off the beach, help you push through the incoming waves, and help you paddle to the ladder. That you must do yourself.
It’s fuck it! time again. The raft isn’t as good as you thought it was but, with tool kit in tow, off you go down the beach and into the water, wading as far as you can until the moment comes to sink or swim. Fuck the raft. Swim you do, with as much effort as you can muster because you know there is no turning back. This is real commitment and survival.
The ship is in sight. The ladder is in sight. The men are in sight. The ladder is within reach. Keep going. The men on deck are yelling for you not to quit. They want you on deck. The ladder is finally in your grasp, you climb, make it on deck, and you’ve made it off the island. Well done lad!
Welcome aboard!
About the Author
Matt Coddington is an award-winning commercial locksmith. He currently works and writes in San Diego. He is a former paperboy; a former avid collector of baseball cards, and a former musician and Drum Corps International world champion. He is sixty-three, single, and has no children. His next chapter—whatever it may be—is set to commence soon.
