Phoenix Rising

He poured his guts out on the white sands of a remote Philippine island. It was deserted except for various plant and animal species of animals whose identities and potential for harming them remained unknown.

After numerous repeated attempts to light a simple fire using frictional technology, he carapaced into a spell of minor depression induced by simple fatigue.

He felt a pronounced failure, no doubt adding to the depressive mental weight he now suffered. Given simpler circumstances he would have produced the ubiquitous contraption endowed with a phosphorus tip at the end of a thin stick of pine called a match.

His busted cell phone was worthless here for many reasons. His eye caught its black shiny form on the makeshift campground. With despicable frame of mind he lunged at it, grabbed it as it were a cornered rat and proceed to gut it using his Swiss Army knife.

He thought to use its glass surface as a lens for Sun’s magnification, only to find that the back part of the thing was encased in a stiff gummy material, called the LCD unit, or liquid crystal display. The grey, opaque material was hopelessly adhered to it his “magnifying lens.”

He remembered his electronic nerd-of-a-buddy calling it a digitizer. Willie could disassemble a cell phone in seconds and reassemble it after replacing its digitizer. No good for him here. “I could never separate the stuff away from the glass. Besides, I need a curved piece, as in eyeglasses.” For want of a fire, he regretted the day he had gotten Lasik on his eyes. Monica didn’t use eyeglasses either.

He tossed the cell phone aside.

“MacGyver couldn’t do anything with it either, except as a fishing weight.” The battery in it was dead; otherwise he could have used the gold filaments comprising the device’s internal antenna wires to short-circuit a spark.

He knew this because he had once crossed a negative post with a positive one in his dad’s car battery and gotten a tongue-lashing. His dad claimed the spark could have caused an explosion. He was pissed at his dad but wished he were here now. Dad would know what to do.

A crazy thought entered his mind about hazardous waste materials. “I should recycle the phone; it could contaminate the island.” He felt a wave of apprehension at the likelihood of the EPA discovering a Hazmat on the island and indicting him with millions of dollars in penalties just like had happened to Exxon at Valdez, Alaska.

“Plants like the many tropical shrubs and coconut palms here, could uptake the broken-down chemicals into after a few decades. The uptake would then poison the animals feeding on them. Kind of like a radioactive substance entering the food chain.”

He recalled Chernobyl and the reindeer’s contaminated mammalian glands rendering their milk radioactive. “What if a sea turtle lays its eggs near the cell phone and the hatchlings get affected?” He could hear Rachael Carson’s ghost admonishing him.

“Fuck it.” He shouted at Rachael, the EPA and the island. And left the phone bleaching on the beach. Such was his state of mind that he didn’t even offer it a simple burial.

It was 98 degrees and probably 90 percent humidity. At least so, he felt. “Anyways, it’s not as if I have a psychrometer up my ass to measure it.

He was in a foul mood that continued to increase in foulness. Six days had transpired since the shipwreck. His yacht, Princess lay a stone’s throw from their campsite. Her hull was bashed in by reefs that had waited eons for that fateful night of calamity. Matt and Monica, “the Two M’s, as they were called by their friends, or M & M, had endured an hour of life threatening dangers. The principal one being death by drowning or concussion due to a blow to the head by the ship’s contents, including a falling mast or swinging spar.

After swimming to safety they became castaways as witnessed and verified by the island’s howling monkeys. The Princess followed, eerily approaching ever closer to their moonlit moment of deposit. With each ebb of tide and crash of wave; she undulated to shore port side first. Somehow she had freed herself from the breech and seemed to want company with her captain and mistress.

Having his Princess injured but safe and Monica as a fleshly comforter, he allowed his eyes to close, exhausted. Monica had fallen to fatigue many hours after the tragedy, feeling safer on the beach and in close proximity to her adventuresome lover.

He and Monica had dug a pit 6 feet deep over 5 of those days leaving them both exhausted thirsty and hungry. Brackish water gradually filled the bottom to a depth of 5 or 6 inches. Their biggest challenge now was to build a fire and boil their water. After celebrating with high fives they set to the task of fire building.

Matt was settled on resuming his attempts at starting a fire by returning to the bamboo. Bamboo covered the island, green and growing lushly. Dried bamboo covered large areas of the beach. Great effort was not needed in procuring it. Matt selected two of the most desiccated pieces he could find and fashioned them into approximately 2 feet in length using his machete. Each was about 1 1/2 inches in width and naturally, slightly curved. On one he drilled a 1/4 inch hole to provide the sparked tinder a nest for a good air to fuel combustion ratio.

With Monica squatted at his feet and securing the stationary length of bamboo, the one with the hole, Matt set to work using the second length as a cross frictional piece. This one he applied steady downward pressure as he speedily pushed forward then backward. The relative humidity in this tropical location was their greatest combating factor. No doubt this criterion was responsible for their many failed attempts.

Monica would encourage him verbally, “C’mon Matt, you’re almost there. Keep goin’. It was an almost sexual exercise with her feminine gasps of emotional release. “It’s comin’ Matt, keep pushing!”

Matt responded accordingly. At each failure, Monica would place her hand gently on his neck or shoulder and lovingly stroke or clench his tendon and massage him as a form of reassurance.

Each day made them weaker due to dehydration. Eating coconuts was not going to sustain them. They knew that eating too many would result in diarrhea and or constipation. They needed fire to boil water.

After the 8th day Matt conceded, “I can’t do this anymore, Monica. She was understanding and offered him encouragement. “Matt, there’s no way we’re going to survive here without water. We can’t do it with only coconut juice. You can’t give up.

The following morning, Matt lay in their lean to shelter. He realized the truth in Monica’s comment the day earlier. He decided that if they were to get off this island, he would have to man-up and fight. “I don’t give a shit. If I have to rub all the fucking bamboo on this island to start a fire, I’ll do it!′

His shouting awoke Monica. She smiled weakly as she lay next to him.

In the morning, Matt sat stoically, staring at the ocean. He figured he would lay the bamboo out on the beach under the mid-day sun for a couple of hours. His reasoning was that in this way the bamboo would dry out and make it more conducive to fire starting.

At a point where the sun was about 10 degrees past its azimuth, he walked back out to the drying sticks grabbed them and sat down to begin his task. “Hey Monica, come out and help.”

She had been sleeping from sheer fatigue and nourishment. They applied themselves to the frictional fire starting ritual again. They worked under a burning sun. The humidity out on the beach was low and the white sands provided a good source of heat conductivity from the suns reflective rays.

They suffered 5 or 6 failures with near successes and were about to concede, when Monica noticed a pin prick of red orange color. “Matt, I see it. You have a spark. Yes, it was a spark nestled in a shredded nest of fine bamboo down.

Matt picked it up carefully and held it, cupped in both his hands as he pointed them heavenward. He gently blew into them at first and as smoke began to exude from the ball of shaved tinder; he blew gradually and more forcefully with each successive application. Then, spontaneous combustion flared into a full-fledged ball of flame that burst larger as it consumed greater gulps of air.

Matt placed the precious alchemy on the sand as Monica fed it small pieces of driftwood and bamboo.

They sat around a fire that night feeling more secure against potential animal attacks or wandering vipers. The warmth comforted them and raised their spirits. They had boiled and drank plenteous quantities of water, cooled it and satisfied their thirst.

On the second day after starting their first fire, they found a live rat at the bottom of their well. It filled them with disgust but captured and killed it. They skinned and gutted it and cooked its small carcass over the night’s fire. The protein strengthened their bodies in ways coconut meat could not.

As Matt sat around the fire and Monica slept he pondered. The rat’s proteinaceous sustenance seemed to have provided his brain with thinking energy he had lost days ago.

“Here we are Monica and I thousands of miles from home. After the hardships we’ve been through, I never thought I could ever endure the impossibility of starting a fire without a bow or drill. Staring at this fire now is a truly mystical moment.”

Monica added, “Think about it Matt, the atoms of long ago plants that live on this island lie in the sand. Atoms of bamboo have burst into flame, quite a phenomenon by what appears to be so primitive a method for starting a fire. Imagine never having started a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together. It must have been a magical thing for primordial man ages ago, rubbing two sticks together and poof - fire.”

She continued her contemplative words while Matt’s head rested on her lap. “The ashes from the bamboo will dissipate into the atmosphere; countless particles of them will filter into the sand and leach to unaccountable depths. These ashes will nourish plants. Through many processes of chemical transformations resulting from this fire, our lives on this island will be more comfortable.

“You know Monica, I’ve been thinking. We may be on this island for quite some time. It won’t be easy. We’ve got to keep this fire going, like the eternal flame that was lit at Jack Kennedy’s tomb, never quenched. We’ll have to find a cave, make sure our bamboo stays dry. It’s gonna rain sometime soon and often during the rainy season.”

“Yep. You’re right Matt. And your son, or could be your daughter is going to need fire.”

“Wha . . . whaddaya mean?” Asked Matt incredulously. “Is that why you’ve been barfing?”

Monica’s silence was Matt’s cue. He could feel her smiling.

“This whole time I thought you were nauseated from the heat and eating too many coconuts.”

“Yes, Matt, I’ve had morning sickness on an island thousands of miles from home. I suppose our child’s birth certificate will read citizen of the Philippines.”

Matt was beaming. The news rejuvenated his imagination and optimism. Monica and I will survive because of this fire. The Greek’s Prometheus carried his flame to mankind. God has given us fire and a new beginning.

Matt thought about the emblem on one of America’s popular cars, the Firebird. He thought of the flight of the Phoenix, a classic movie starring Jimmy Stewart. He thought about the mythical bird, the Phoenix that rose from its own ashes every 500 years in a transformational rebirth.

Their success in starting this fire would lead to a greater achievements toward survival.

His eyes roved toward the Princess. He could hear the lapping of the gentle ocean waves against her half submerged hull.

“Monica, I think I can repair Princess. We’ve got some exploration to do. There’s shell fish in the ocean. We’ll continue to get our strength up and besides hunting for game, we can search for be plant or trees that produce resin. With fire, we’ll be able to boil plant materials to produce substances that will repel water as it seals a patch made of dried, thin, cellulose.”

“Yes, and we can also boil the hooves and hides of animals to make gelatinous materials,” Monica added.

“Remember the novel, Swiss Family Robinson, Monica?”

“Yes, my dad read it to me as a child.”

“Me too, never thought I would be on the threshold of living like that.”

“We’ve got no other alternatives, Matt. I’m glad we didn’t shipwreck in the cold latitudes.”

Matt’s eyelids were getting heavy. He muttered as he wavered near the soft fall into sleep. “Monica, what do you think about naming our kid, Phoenix?”

Monica also near being overcome by sleep answered, “I like it. It fits perfectly whether boy or girl.”

The little party of 3 castaways would truly rise from the ashes.