Daily Cascade

Stranded?

Prompt:
On this day in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s fictional work The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is published. The book, about a shipwrecked sailor who spends 28 years on a deserted island, is based on the experiences of shipwreck victims and of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on a small island off the coast of South America in the early 1700s.

In your entry today, write about being stranded on a deserted island. What would you do to keep yourself sane?

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I'd be so weirded out if I were ever stranded on a deserted island, as if I am not so weird, as it is now. I guess, at first, I'd be mulling over the facts about how this happened to me, where I went wrong, and why this!

Once, the mulling and grieving would be over, survival instinct would probably take hold and adrenaline would keep me moving. My needs would be: water, food, shelter, and safety.

Once I handled those basic needs, (as if I could!), I would set up a routine. This is because routines, loosely speaking, seem to help me greatly in my present life.

Surely, I'd wake with the sun, due to the lack of the eye-mask I now use in the mornings. Then, I'd forage for food. Fishing or traps or such I won't even mention. I just can't kill animals; although I have no qualms about eating them, if they come from the butcher or the supermarket. This would force me to turn into a vegetarian, which would greatly please my older son who is a vegan--unlike anyone else in the family--if he knew somehow I wasn't eating animal products. But I digress.

Since I always have a need to know the time, I might try to keep a loose sense of it, possibly by collecting pebbles and putting a pebble for each day in a corner of the shelter I might have built or the cave I might be using.

As to company, I'd probably be okay, with that one. As it is, I am used to talking to myself and to wild life. You should listen in to hear how I address the baby salamanders that perch on the windowsill of my now-kitchen, not to mention the birds and squirrels and rabbits out there on the lawn. I somehow have the feeling that once a wild animal catches on to my talking to it, it responds in its own ways. No, I'm not making this up. I really believe it. Try it yourself and you'll see!

Then, I might even make up stories and poems and write them on the sand. And, just maybe, I would also hope someone nice and friendly and much more capable than me would become stranded on my island, too.