Stranded on Idiot Island

The last, dreamless night on the island was like a bad dream: Waking every hour from exhausted sleep to a frosty February dark, cannibalizing our shelter for branches to burn in a fire that smoldered like lazy charcoal when what we really wanted — needed, really — was something roaring, something Smokey the Bear would have wagged his preachy finger at before we pushed him in. Fur burns, doesn't it?

Kicking off my palm-frond blanket, I tried to awaken my opponent, Alan, to help move the canoe, employed as jerry-rigged lean-to. The night had yawned open from an overcast afternoon, the winds had kicked up, and it was getting very, very cold.

But Alan wouldn't budge. Maybe he was frozen.

Back on the warm, sunny first day on Shell Key, we'd propped the canoe on paddles and tiki torches, then laid branches over it to form a perfectly acceptable shelter — perfect except for the icy rainwater dripping in, and the fire ants feeding on our flesh.

Using the shelter this second night was futile because the wind had shifted from the west to southeast.

I swung one end of the boat around.

Alan didn't stir. Maybe he really was frozen.

Finally, he got up. We slid the boat by the fire, leaning one end on a paddle, the other on a traffic cone we'd found and named "Wilson" in honor of the volleyball Tom Hanks befriended in Cast Away.

I lay down. Immediately, my eyes began to burn. I couldn't breathe. I felt like I'd been hit with nerve gas.

"I think," Alan sleepily deadpanned, "we created a backdraft."

We were on Shell Key, a.k.a. Idiot Island, a.k.a. Poo Island, for just 48 hours.

We were there to survive, like Hanks in Cast Away and the dorks on Survivor. Instead of the rice Survivor contestants receive, we had a box of Froot Loops. Our only other supplies were four gallons of drinking water and Alan's two luxury items, a dive knife and a cast net. He also brought his cell phone in the event of an emergency. In case he couldn't start a fire, he brought along an emergency pack of matches. And, um, another pack of matches. While this could be construed as cheating, or pyromania, rest assured the matches got soaked early on.

Good thing Alan brought along a Bic lighter too.

My luxury item was toilet paper.

Not exactly the makings of a Club Med vacation. We had no tent, no sleeping bags, no clean clothes, no decent food, no flashlight.

Day One: The Sound of One God Mocking Stopping in Tierra Verde en route to Fort De Soto, we bought rubbery convenience store hotdogs and other junk food. I stashed a bag of peanuts, and Alan had some Nutter Butters on his person. But my wife, who was to drop us off at the Fort De Soto boat ramp, caught on. For some reason, she's very resistant to any kind of cheating.

Wives must want their men to suffer, a little. However, man's will to survive, or at least our urges to snack, ruled the day, and she was unable to dissuade us from cheating.

As I whined about raccoons and the coming potential to be wet, cold, tired, dead, Alan curtly told me, "Butch up."

A phrase my wife promptly adopted.

Once at the boat ramp, she allowed us just five minutes to unload the canoe, a 17-foot aluminum beast, and load up our meager supplies. It took about 15. That's the thing about our version Survivor; what few rules there were, we quickly broke.

My wife waved goodbye and our baby daughter flapped her arms excitedly as they watched Alan and me paddle into oblivion.

After a short, easy stroke through the sparkling waters of Tierra Verde, we reached the island. Birds flew overhead, or waded around the flats poking at this or that. This had the makings of a working vacation.

Following our survival instincts, we promptly ate our smuggled snacks. Walking around looking for a campsite, we discovered that what from a distance looks like a long stretch of Australian pines, upon closer view, is actually a bombed-out party crater. Empty bottles and broken glass were scattered among the remnants of past campfires, spaced about 20 feet apart as we walked through the swath of destruction. Every pile contained the remnants of bamboo tiki torches, which as we would soon learn burn well even without fuel. Bamboo burns better than Australian pine, the island's main nuisance other than us. The trees around campsites had exposed sockets where branches used to be.

Eruptions of marsh grass and sea oats resembled dry sparklers. We saw all kinds of birds, including roseate spoonbills, ibis, herons. And though I was relieved to see no raccoons, Alan noted their tracks in the sand.

Instead of getting to explore the whole island, I got to hear Alan's rules of survival.

"David, Rule No. 1: Build shelter. No. 2: Build a fire. No. 3: Find food." There may have been more, but I couldn't hear because my fingers were buried in my ears to the drums.

On the eastern edge of the key, we dragged the aluminum beast up under a sort of harbor of pines. The open portion faced Tierra Verde, but the ugly view of the bridge construction was blocked by a mangrove island paralleling ours. In fact, if you ignored the sound of trucks backing up, Coast Guard helicopters and sightseeing planes flying over, pleasure and fishing craft gurgling by, you could imagine yourself on a tropical island peopled by little piles of poop living under T.P.

Wasn't long before I had to take a poop of my own, the first of several I would let go on the island. They don't really go into this fact of wild life in film and TV. For instance, you never hear this on Gilligan's Island:

"Skipper, I'll haul those coconuts after I drop the kids off at the lagoon, so to speak."

"Whatever, little buddy."

At any rate, outdoor pooping was no big deal since I had toilet paper.

Mr. "Butch Up," on the other hand, gobbled Imodium AD tablets before he left. In addition to the myriad other junk he brought, he smuggled some more Imodium with him.

"I hate shitting outside," he said. He didn't drop so much as a nugget during our stay.

For shelter, we unknotted the rope from the canoe's bow and reknotted it to a tree, then tied the other end to a cross-brace on the canoe, making a low-slung lean-to. Imagine a boat just over halfway to capsizing, only on land. If it should rain, we would be in trouble. We took some tiki torches and wedged them under as braces, then laid pine branches for walls.

"Alan, you should start fishing," I told him, snapping a stick over my knee. "I can do this." He left to hunt, and I kept breaking branches. My hands quickly grew red and raw, but there's something satisfying about straining with a thick branch over the knee, neck veins popping out till the branch would CRACK. I wedged thicker branches in a Y-shaped tree, leaning on them so the tree did most of the work.

The arrangement on the island was sort of like a primitive marriage, with me gatherer, him hunter, and no sex.

Alan went down to the shore and caught four baitfish, which he stowed in a barnacle-covered bucket he had found in the water.

Later, when we were walking along the Tierra Verde side, I grabbed a grapefruit floating in the water. The skin was intact, the fruit a little mushy and pickled, but the juice tasted nice and sour.

Jeff Pabst showed up at about 4 p.m. He smirkingly admired our shelter and started snapping pictures, then went and started setting up his camp.

Oh, did he have it good. Club Med good. Paradise Island good. His spot was a short walk through the woods away, but even from our site we could see he had a tent, sleeping bag, beer. He even had ropes to tie his bag of food in a tree. Somewhere in there he added, "I'm not supposed to give you guys any food unless you earn it."

Needless to say, we didn't give him any of our grapefruit.

Alan was trying to light a fire by rubbing a stick poked into another stick lying in a mossy bed. It wasn't as obscene as it sounds unless you think exercises in futility are obscene, in which case it was. He worked at it for an hour. Jeff Pabst, done setting up his cushy camp, came over and told us he was paddling back to the Fort to move his car.

"I might be gone awhile," he told us, and he was off on his surf ski, which Alan referred to as a kayak. Alan was already getting tense with our tormentor, so once he was gone, Alan wasted no time lighting a big fat match and sticking it to the moss.

When Pabst returned, Alan and I were kicking back by the proverbial roaring fire.

"You guys sure you didn't use matches?" Pabst said, his tone dripping with skepticism.

First Night

Pabst walked up after dark, eating his veggie burger dinner and drinking an imported beer. Alan and I stuck with Froot Loops. They're quite good, even without milk.

Pabst was wearing an annoying headlamp he kept shining in my eyes.

"You guys ready for the first challenge?"

"Hell yeah," I said, flexing, talking trash. Alan was a little mellower about the competition, no doubt certain he was about to lose.

Then Pabst pulled out two paddleballs: The cheap, solo paddle game with rubber ball affixed by a length of rubber band. These were totally ghetto, the chord stapled to a glorified balsa wood ice cream spoon.

Our prize: a can of pork and beans.

"We don't have a can opener!" I realized during practice.

"That's sorta the idea," Pabst said.

In practice, I couldn't connect more than four times. Alan was worse, barely able to hit even once. When it counted, though, he reached deep down inside himself, banging out seven consecutive hits — an island record.

We cut our prize open with Alan's dive knife. Pabst demurred, but he understood the whole survival-of-the-fittest, we've-got-the-knife-vibe we threw off. We'd made a pact to share whatever food we won, and after Alan ate, using the paddle handle for a spoon, I warmed the can on the fire and scooped out the beany dregs. It would have to do.

That night, Alan and I slept head to head under the canoe, our legs and asses hanging off the rug we had found. The forest floor, under almost constant shade, was moist even when it wasn't raining, which it now was. A steady stream began coming down. Dripping water eventually soaked the carpet.

At least it wasn't cold, maybe in the high 60s. I woke up from a dream in which I sat in the captain's seat of a motor boat, trying to start it even as it filled with water.

"It's no use; it's flooded," I said out loud.

I got up to piss and walked down to the water's edge. Just as I had the pump flowing, I heard rustling in front of me. It was too dark to see, but I knew, maybe because I had my third eye open: raccoon.

"AAAAAAAGHHAAA!" I calmly said. I made a fast break; I ran but did not travel, dribbling in my cargo shorts, my arms windmilling as I ran up the path. Later, as I fell asleep, I dreamed a raccoon had pushed through the branches and sort of nuzzled my crotch in an insistent fashion. I flinched awake and finally went to sleep, only to awaken again and again and again to the sound of Alan's snoring booming under the canoe.

Day Two: A Nice Place to Visit "If it makes you feel any better," Pabst said after hearing about our miserable night, "I didn't sleep very well either."

"Why not?" Alan said, the refugee-camp glow still fresh on his tired, puffy face.

"I don't know," Pabst said. "I just couldn't get comfortable."

"That cockslam," Alan later called Pabst, who went back to break camp. Pabst clearly savored his role of irksome role in the game, and Alan clearly resented our intermediary just like a real Survivor contestant would prefer to see Jeff Probst hung by his goofy Banana Republic duds.

Way to play the game, fellas!

In fact, you could say Alan began to display reverse-Pavlovian responses, saying things like "cockslam" every time Pabst left. It's Alan's all-purpose insult. He called me that at least 20 times over the 48-hour period we were there, which sounds bad but breaks down to only every two hours or so.

On the beach, Alan picked up a crab and put it in his pocket. Pabst went back to break down his vacation getaway, while Alan and I continued along the beach, where we found a crab trap. We plowed sand and pine needles as we dragged it a mile back to camp.

"Isn't it against the law to mess with those things?" Pabst said as we dragged it by his campsite.

I could've yanked out his hoop earring. Surviving isn't about obeying the law. It's about battling the elements, surviving. There he was, packing up his cushy tent and sleeping bag, and heading back to his cushy desk job, and there we were — Men! Brutes! Savages! On the verge of eating dirt by nightfall.

After Pabst left for his day job, Alan and I fished on the beach. Alan had no luck using fishing line and a hook — oh, yeah, he brought some line and a hook, too, the cheater. He used the net to catch a pinfish for bait; thieving, no-good raccoons stole the four he'd caught the previous day.

I, meanwhile, was holding my own with the casting net.

"Why do you keep calling it a "casting' net?" Alan asked.

"Why, what's it called?"

"It's a cast net."

Whatever, Skipper. I was about as adept at using it as I was with its name. I caught nothing but my arm in that thing.

Defeated, we went back and ate Froot Loops, still the only dry thing in our camp — and still delicious without mil — oh, what's the use? We were hungry, and Froot Loops seemed an even more bizarre joke than they at first had.

Meanwhile, the fire was as low as our morale, so we went to seek out a dead Australian pine we'd seen.

Big husks of bark dangled like dead skin. We took turns trying to dislodge the bark using a stick. Suddenly, Alan was running, prancing over little pinecones in his bare feet while a horde of wasps chased him. It was funny watching Alan run, except that he ran toward me, so I had to run too.

As soon as we came out of the pines, I spotted a pile of spanking nice wood stashed behind a small dune: a log from a pine tree, 2-by-4s, part of a pallet.

After restoking the fire, I got on Alan about catching crabs.

"Did we drag the trap all the way back here just to leave it sit —"

"We're gonna use it," Alan interrupted. We were about a day away from speaking in grunts. "We're gonna bait it with the leavings from the fish."

"What fish?"

"The one we're gonna catch right now."

I watched Alan work the cast net. He knew what he was doing as he pinched part of it in his teeth, fanning the net out with his free hand.

After about five tosses, he gave the net a yank and shouted, "Got it!" in victorious disbelief before he had the net out of the water.

"Man, the second it came down, I knew I had it," he bragged, and mimed pulling the net.

My stomach was growling, but I felt sorry for the fish. I'm not vegetarian and I'm no meat-eating apologist. Like most diners, I don't usually see the fish alive before I eat it — it just comes with some slaw and fries. The mullet made fewer and fewer Os with its mouth. Its fins tore the netting as it struggled. We picked up firewood the whole way back, in anticipation of the fire we'd need for cooking and staying warm that night; it was starting to get cold.

Alan cleaned the fish, and I cooked it, rigging some rebar from the crab trap as a stove. The fish promptly fell in the fire.

I panicked, actually saying I wished I had a spatula. Alan reached right into the fire and grabbed it. Yes, like a real man.

We ate the thing with our bare hands. It was so fresh I would have slapped it across the face had Alan not cut off its head and baited the crab trap with it.

A mad endorphin rush hit us both after we finished, and we both got very sleepy. Maybe that's how primitives did things: hunt, eat, lie around basking in the after-dinner glow.

Alan said, "Why is there a tiki torch in that tree?"

In a pine just feet from our shelter, maybe 20 feet up, was one of the two tiki torches Pabst had brought with him to lend the island a Survivor feel. I looked around and found the other torch in a tree with better climbing branches. I went up after it.

Alan continued to space out by the fire. "I've got a headache," he said before slipping into a coma sitting up. After we left the island, he told me his catatonia was caused by a mysterious spider bite on his butt, the real mystery, of course, being how he discovered the bite.

I went to collect some more firewood. In the cremains of an old campfire, I found a knife, its faded wood handle protruding from the soot.

I took it back to show Alan. "Check it out," I said, and threw the knife into the dirt between us, where it fell over. A minute later, a barefoot Alan got up and kicked the knife.

Blood squirted out of his ankle with each step.

"That's it, Alan." I said. "Let's go back." It wasn't just that I saw an excuse to quit. I also recalled my editor telling me, "Please don't get hurt," which Alan clearly had. Also, I worried raccoons might swarm at the smell of blood.

"No!" Alan said, as if a million bucks were really on the line instead of our health. He poured fresh water on the cut and tore his T-shirt to dress the wound. It stopped bleeding, but only after he'd tracked blood all over my clean camp.

Figuring the tiki torches in the tree had been some kind of clue, I wandered around Pabst's abandoned campsite and turned up the fuel and canisters stashed under some grass.

Our little fire would burn like the Dresden Firestorm that night, every time we doused it with fuel.

Second Night After sunset and a dinner of Froot Loops — the crab trap had turned up jack crap — the wind began to pick up. The sun, which had never really come out, continued to disappoint us.

Soon we were down to the last few logs we'd taken from other fire remains. They were damp — from the rain, we hoped, not campers' personal fire extinguishers. Water sizzled out the logs' ends.

By 8 or 9 p.m., we were out of wood. We scraped the forest around the site for twigs, pine needles, anything that might burn. Mostly, I poured on citronella.

Alan slept on the paddles to get off the cold, wet ground, and I covered my bare legs with palm fronds. At one point in the interminable night, I woke up to find two frond blades ablaze.

I stamped it out with a wet-socked foot. It's a wonder we didn't kill ourselves out there — on purpose, just to be out of our misery. Alan even managed to throw his dive knife at a tree, glancing off and hitting him, yes, in his other ankle.

We shivered and froze all night. We moved the canoe, created a backdraft, moved the canoe again, took turns waking up and trying to keep the fire going. If there was any firewood left out there in the dark forest, it was safely guarded by raccoons, so I wasn't touching it.

Day Three — Captains Disgracious Alan hit the natural snooze alarm by putting more and more clothing over his face to block out the morning light. I don't think that's what's meant by sun block, but it enabled him to sleep past the sunrise. A heavy fog had rolled in; we couldn't even see the other island a few hundred yards away.

I blew on the fire's remains, trying to get some damp grass and paper burning. I'd had no water or Froot Loops, and I almost passed out. Through the spots I was seeing, I saw Pabst walking up, laughing.

Alan got up. His feet had grown stiff, and he had a nasty blister on his left heel.

Pabst said, "Ready for the final competitions?"

"Foot race!" I said. Unfortunately, Pabst had his own games in mind. Before we could compete, Pabst led us, Alan limping slowly along, to another stand of pines.

"What does that look like?" he said, pointing to something under a pile of needles.

"Does it look like a sleeping bag?" he coached as I walked over and uncovered — a sleeping bag.

I laughed, but this was too much. I blamed Alan and his weird fugue the day before for not helping me look for more junk. Mainly, I was mad that I hadn't kept looking around.

Still, I was ready to make like a rat at the pellet dispenser for more prizes.

Pabst led us to croquet mallets and balls. "Actually, I'm glad you didn't find these because you probably would have burned them," Pabst said.

From a mound of sand, we had to hit a ball into a fire pit about 30 yards away. Whoever did it in the fewest number of tries would win a can of Slim-Fast.

Alan went first. The shot went straight but fell 8 feet short. I whacked my ball to the right of Alan's, a few feet closer to the prize.

Alan got cocky. "Doesn't matter, it's the fewest number of tries," he said. He lined up his shot, pulled back, swung.

Wide left.

My shot went straight in. I drank what I could stomach of the goo, then gave half to Alan. I was hungry, sure, but being hungry is better than drinking Slim-Fast.

The next competition was an egg toss on the beach. With each throw, we were to take a step back. Alan dropped it no fewer than five times. I dropped it once. Still Humpty wouldn't break. Just as I started thinking it was hardboiled, I winged the egg fast and furious. It fell short within reach of Alan, yolk splurting on his sneakers. He tried to claim victory, but admits to having catching "issues."

My prize: an Egg McMuffin bought 40 miles away in Tampa. Breakfast was cold, greasy and unhealthy — a tasty portent of our impending return to civilization. I almost ignored our pact but saved a third for Alan.

Finally, we took the vote to see who would leave the island. Pabst tried telling us who to vote for — shades of the real show. "It'd be funny if you each vote yourselves off," he said.

In truly low, Western white male fashion, mere hours before we were to leave Poo Island, I voted off the one guy who had caught a fish. I did so because I wanted to win, but also because he spaced out on the hunt for the stuff Pabst had left behind.

It made sense at the time. It's not like you have to know what you're doing to vote in Florida.

Alan held up the paddle and I saw that he'd scrawled: "Alan — he's a jerk."

Hell yeah, boyyyyyy! I won. Tom Petty was right: Even the losers get lucky sometimes. It meant absolutely nothing, of course, since we still had to paddle back together. And there was no prize money. But still. I won.

In a little while, Pabst was gone, and at around 11 Alan and I paddled in a fog so thick we were disoriented in minutes. After about 30 of them, we came upon a guy in a kayak.

We told him what we'd been doing the last couple of days. It sounded ridiculous: "Yeah, we had only Froot Loops to eat, and no tent."

"That's — pretty cool."

We were about to paddle off when he said, "Hey, can I ask you guys a stupid question?"

Sure.

"Do you know where the boat ramp is?"

"We're looking for it too," we said. It was a real icebreaker, like if we discovered we were all at the White House to shoot at it.

The islands off Fort De Soto all look alike, with swift currents going through Bunces Pass. In fog, it was easy to get, and stay, lost. The kayaker had been going in circles for two hours.

Alan and I argued over what direction to head. Too many captains on this vessel — I should have voted him off the island when I had the chance. Oh, wait. I had.

Then the kayaker said, "I see the bridge!" as if he'd seen the light.

In a way, he had. The fog was fizzling out. The kayaker kayaked off, and we lazily fought the current, the shallow bottom and each other, just to see my family on the boat ramp, my wife waving and my baby girl flapping her arms as though we'd never left, as though it had all been a dream.

Contact Weekly Planet Survivor David Jasper at 813-248-8888, ext. 111, or at jasper@weeklyplanet.com.

This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2001.