Two men rescued at sea last week in the Torres Strait by an Australian helicopter crew claimed to have drifted helplessly for 25 days in a large plastic cooler. Ko Ko Oo, 22, and Haung Htaik, 24, told rescuers that they were Burmese fishermen who had climbed into the five-by-four-foot box after their rickety boat broke up in rough waters some 200 nautical miles north of Australia; the boat's eighteen other fishermen and crew were thrown overboard and presumably drowned.
The men told reporters that they drank rainwater and ate nothing for the first ten days of their ordeal. "Then two big seabirds came and vomited some small fish -- about six or seven little fish," Oo said. Bit by bit, these became the men's meals. Seldom has anyone ever been so grateful for anything upchucked.
A man rescued from the Indian Ocean two weeks after the 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of South Asia reported that he had survived by clinging to pieces of wood, snatching coconuts as they floated past and eating them after prying them open with his teeth. According to the Guardian, Indonesian construction worker Ari Afrizal said that as he watched corpses and debris swirling in the water, he "prayed and prayed. I told God I didn't want to die... I worried about my elderly parents and asked for a chance to take care of them." In 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about a boatload of Dominicans who lost their way while trying to reach Puerto Rico and survived by drinking the breast milk of a new mother on board: Soon after setting sail on the handmade boat, the passengers realized its compass was broken. Six days later, "'there was nothing more than prayer and my sister's breast,' said Elena Mercedes, 24." We are duly told that the waters in which all three incidents took place were shark-infested.
Why do we so love survival-at-sea stories? It's partly because they hark back to adventure tales of old -- to those days when human beings were frequently and brutally thrust into the jaws of nature without layer upon layer of technology and infrastructure to protect them. But we also love such stories because they're about situations in which typical day-to-day mental processes are abruptly displaced by arguably stronger stuff: extremist thinking, survival strategies, prayer and panic and instinct. We spend the bulk of our complex yet cosseted lives pondering. Analyzing. Processing. And even though some of us ponder/analyze/process ourselves into chronic anxiety, for better or worse this is a luxury that comes with living in a free and safe society. When you're suddenly adrift in an icebox or atop flotsam or lost and starving, that luxury vanishes as if it never existed. Sheer necessity encompasses all as body and mind face hard cold facts entirely on their own. Fears of anything besides death fade. Humiliation loses all meaning. And questions about how on earth one can resist another Ecstasy pill or another cigarette or another shopping spree simply cease to be questions. Priorities shift because they must. Reading survival-at-sea stories, we project ourselves into them, and wonder: What if I had to give up this ... and this ... and this? What if I absolutely had to?
