Ayudaaaaaa! Ayudaaaaaa! Ayudenmeeeee!” (“Help! Help! Help meeeeee!”) Alvarenga screamed. The famished fisherman was crawling through a carpet of sodden palm fronds, sharp coconut shells and tasty flowers. He descended from the rise and inched toward what looked like a wooden shack, a gaggle of chickens and a lone pig. Who wore the red shirt on the clothesline? Was he armed and dangerous? Do cannibals have roosters? Alvarenga’s mind fired in all directions. The tidal rhythm of life at sea had so accustomed his brain to the sloshing and sliding of the Pacific that he was dizzy standing on solid ground. He felt insecure on this crust of land.
The once-confident open-sea fisherman was unable to stand for more than a few seconds. “I was totally destroyed and as skinny as a board,” he said. “The only thing left was my intestines and gut plus skin and bones. My arms had no meat. My thighs were skinny and ugly.”
Under normal conditions, the stout Alvarenga might have sprinted down the hillside. It would have taken seconds. Now it took minutes for him to lurch from tree to tree, grabbing each trunk like a man who’d had too much to drink. His feet moved autonomously from his brain; despite clear orders they splayed in seemingly random rebellion. His upper body was slightly stronger, though there was no remnant of the explosive muscle power that had allowed him to win powerlifting contests among the tough fishermen on the docks of Mexico.
Alvarenga’s heart was so weak it was unable to properly circulate blood up from his feet. He felt like he might faint. He sat on the sand at the edge of a blue lagoon so large it looked like a lake. Where was he? He had begged God to be washed ashore but now with his prayers answered, he received none of the imagined comforts. A deep anxiety chipped away at his confidence. Any animal larger than a dog was now classified as a predator. Especially humans.
During fifteen complete lunar cycles, Alvarenga had coached a fragile truce as despair and hope dueled for control of his mind. Standing on solid ground astride what looked and sounded like the outskirts of a small village, he had no way of anticipating the mental demons now poised to attack. His salvation from the sea, a miraculous escape, was now so imprinted on his brain that he never again would be free to imagine life without this trauma. He was literally and clinically “traumatized for life” and fully unprepared for contact with other humans.
Directly across the water, on the far side of a narrow canal, the red shirt was hanging on the clothesline. Alvarenga approached. Could he navigate the shallow waters? He stood up and, wobbling slightly, attempted to ford the fifty-foot channel separating the two islands. He howled in Spanish, “Does anyone hear me? Anyone!”
Across the canal, finishing up breakfast at her rustic beach hut, Emi Libokmeto heard the screams. “I got up and had a look. As I’m looking across to the other island, I see this white man there,” said Emi, who works husking and drying coconuts on the island. “He is only in his briefs and he is yelling. He looks weak and hungry. My first thought was this person swam here, he must have fallen off a ship.”
Alvarenga saw Emi and went into shock. “It terrified me. I was so scared. People don’t exist, I told myself. How do people exist? How can there be people here if they don’t exist? I tried hard to clear my head. Yes, yes, I am in the world. This is not a hallucination.” Alvarenga’s mind was going haywire. The same instincts that guided his solo survival at sea were short-circuited by his first encounter in nearly a year with a member of his own species.
Emi couldn’t believe her eyes. The white man covered in wild hair was coming toward her. “My husband, Russel [Laikidrik], was very scared, he insisted we go back in our house and hide,” said Emi. “But I wasn’t scared. Just from looking at him I felt sorry for him so I urged my husband for us to go help.”
From opposite sides of the canal the two parties approached. Alvarenga gingerly tested out the current, concerned he might be swept back to sea. Emi and Russel advanced with caution. “As we got closer we noticed the knife in his hand so we stopped,” said Emi. “Russel was very worried and wanted us to turn back, but there was something about him. Something kept telling me this man needed our help and so I said to Russel that he needs our assistance. Plus, I was thinking to myself that he looks weak and there are two of us so if he tried anything we could control him.”
Emi pointed at Alvarenga’s hand, at the long knife, and yelled in English, “Put down! Put down!” and mimed doing so. Alvarenga balked. He needed the knife to dice coconuts and carve meat from the animals he was stalking and planning to hunt. His worn and trusty blade had saved his life dozens of times over the past year. Why would he abandon a key element of his salvation? It was his only tool. The woman yelled again, with conviction. Her companion was a powerfully built man. Alvarenga recognized that the man could wrestle him down with ease and the small woman looked unlikely to back away. Russel, accustomed to the rugged manual work in the tropics collecting and chopping coconuts, repeated the motion indicating Alvarenga ought to drop the knife. Alvarenga understood their instructions and although he cherished his knife, he was too exhausted to argue or explain. He flipped his knife into the canal. It sank into the light-blue water and came to rest three feet deep. Without a weapon, barely able to stand and too exhausted to formulate a plan, Alvarenga dropped to his knees. He began to pray.
Emi was instantly moved to help the stranger. “For me this was a sign that he was also a person of faith and he had been through something traumatic and it moved me with an overwhelming feeling that we must help.”
Fortunately for Alvarenga, the tide was slowly receding and the water in the canal was only waist high. Emi and Russel continued to wade toward him. Alvarenga was kneeling in the sand, swaying and obviously weak. He pointed frantically toward the far side of a nearby island and yelled in Spanish, “My boat, my boat. My boat is over there.” But the couple didn’t understand. As Russel and Emi approached, the wild man stopped making eye contact. Or maybe his eyes didn’t focus anymore. He looked lost and as they got close he lowered his head as if he were trying to hide.
Russel stepped forward and reached down to stabilize the frightened man and discovered he was shivering uncontrollably. Russel peeled off his own shirt and pulled it over the man’s head and then reached around to thread each bony arm through a sleeve. Doubting if the other man could even walk, Russel hoisted the stranger on his back and struggled to cross the canal with the bearded fellow clinging to him. “We took him back to our house. I got him a glass jar of water,” said Emi. “He gulped it so fast. I poured him another glass of water and this time I motioned for him to slow down because I didn’t want him to have a stomachache.”
Safely onshore with his rescuers, Alvarenga broke down and began to sob. Emi and Russel also began crying. “I told my husband to hug him and comfort him with pats on the back,” said Emi. “Like white people do.”
Using Russel’s spare clothes they clad their guest in a sweater, pants, shoes and socks. Even a belt. Although he felt physically warmed, Alvarenga was scared. “I was trying to not see people. I didn’t want to see people. When they came close, I would cover my head. I wouldn’t look at them. I wouldn’t let them touch me. I thought maybe they were going to eat me.”
Russel could tell the man was starving so he suggested his wife make a batch of pancakes while he went out to collect coconut husks to feed the fire. Emi tried to convince the fisherman to bathe. He declined, indicating he was too cold, and edged his chair closer to the fire. As Emi prepared pancake mix he sat with his feet practically touching the flames. It was the first time in a year he had seen fire. The flames danced and he looked at Emi. They both smiled.
Alvarenga bonded naturally with the lifestyle of the generous couple from this mystery tribe. These islanders lived on the edge of civilization. Their fragile hut was on par with his precarious palapa in Mexico. Stores of freshwater were stashed all around the house just like the seventy-three water bottles he had religiously guarded aboard The Titanic. When Emi lit the fire she took care not to use a second match. Alvarenga felt affection for such frugality. He understood the value of a single match.
“When the fire began to die down, I started cooking the pancakes. I can’t remember how many I cooked but as they were coming off the pan, he began eating,” Emi said. “In the end Russel and I only had one each. At one point he pointed at the plate of pancakes and motioned for us to eat. We motioned back to him, ‘No, you eat.’ ”
Emi also provided plates of fresh coconut meat and glasses of coconut milk. Russel made another cooking fire and prepared a pot of rice. Alvarenga hinted they could eat the domestic animals, beginning with the rooster. “It was aggressive and big. I was thinking, ‘What a good soup,’ but the rooster gave me the eye and I couldn’t catch it.” Alvarenga then convinced Russel to slaughter one of the chickens and while he prepared the bird, Alvarenga “ate as many coconuts as she could peel. I ate so much she was scared.”
After eating, Alvarenga felt invigorated not only by a full stomach but also by the fact that he had not been carved up. As his fear of Pacific island cannibals receded another deep fear arose: the fear of not moving. For Alvarenga, movement was synonymous with sanity. A migratory instinct pulled him to abandon the safety and shelter of this newfound refuge. “I was restless. After breakfast I wanted to walk,” he said. “I went to the edge of the water but was afraid I might drown. It was terrifying. I couldn’t even walk back to the house. They had to help me.”
Alvarenga hadn’t been under their roof more than three hours and already Emi and Russel were slaughtering animals, cooking up a second feast and handing him glass after glass of refreshing coconut water. Although he didn’t know it, Alvarenga had washed ashore on Tile Islet, a small island that is part of the larger atoll. Ebon is the southern tip of the 1,156 islands that make up the Republic of the Marshall Islands and one of the most remote spots on earth. Airplane service is practically nonexistent and a boat leaving Ebon searching for land would have to churn either 4,000 miles northeast to hit Alaska or 2,450 miles southwest to Brisbane, Australia. Had Alvarenga missed Ebon, he would have drifted north of Australia, possibly running aground in Papua New Guinea, but more likely continuing another 3,000 miles until he hit the eastern coast of the Philippines.
“A long-standing tradition in the Marshall Islands is to share food,” explains Jack Niedenthal, a documentary filmmaker who came to the Marshall Islands with the Peace Corps in 1981 and settled. “The cycle of long-lasting droughts and the remote nature of the island civilization have long prepared the islanders to be both flinty survivalists and generous hosts. A lot of the culture surrounds food; there are times when you run out of food. Everybody shares. It is a big thing. I ate some bizarre stuff on the outer islands because someone gave it to me. You learn to never refuse food from anybody. It is like saying ‘I hate you.’ ”
After he finished eating, Alvarenga began signaling in an attempt to communicate with his hosts. He used hand signals to indicate that previously he had short hair and no beard. He also indicated that he used to be more robust. He motioned a bird sign and pointed at the fire and motioned no fire. He was trying to explain that he had eaten raw birds. Alvarenga drew a boat, a man and the shore. Then he gave up. How could he explain a six-thousand-mile drift at sea with stick figures? His impatience simmered. The frustrated fisherman began to shout in Spanish. God had guided him to this tropical oasis; why was basic conversation so difficult? For his entire life, Spanish had served to get him out of a jam, around corrupt policemen or into a tight skirt. But now he was incapable of even the most basic phrases. He asked for medicine. He asked for a doctor. “Painkillers. Bring me painkillers,” Alvarenga pleaded. The native couple smiled and kindly shook their heads. “Even though we did not understand each other, I began to talk and talk,” Alvarenga said. “The more I talked, the more we all roared with laughter. I am not sure why they were laughing. I was laughing at being saved.”
Emi laid out a mat and a piece of foam the size of a single bed and covered it with a sheet. She placed the foam bed on the ground under the shelter of the roof. The rain had paused. It was low tide and the water had pulled back, exposing a white, sandy beach. Emi gave Alvarenga a pillow and told him to rest. “My mind filled with happiness. I was thinking how different is life when you are not lost.” Alvarenga had a roof, a pillow and solid ground. “How tasty,” he thought. “I closed my eyes. I was blocking out the world.” He got up from his nap to pee on a tree. “I looked at my urine and remembered when I drank it.”
Although it was day, Alvarenga asked that the light above his makeshift bed be switched on. “I slept and slept! What a luxury,” he said. “Finally I didn’t have the ocean slapping at my side. When I awoke I asked them to go get my boat over on the coast but they didn’t understand.”
Using pen and paper Alvarenga drew a boat. “Once we realized what he was trying to communicate, Russel left and headed in the direction of where he was pointing,” says Emi.
Emi prepared a plate of rice and chicken and signaled to Alvarenga to pray and give thanks for the food. Alvarenga prayed then dumped a pile of salt on his food. Any spice the native cook offered, he eagerly added to his plate. “I didn’t use any fork or spoon. It was ugly,” he explained. “I shoved the food in my mouth with both hands. She served me lunch twice and I was still hungry.”
After his third meal in roughly six hours, Alvarenga drank a cup of coffee. Emi was worried this wild man was going to eat until he was sick. She urged him to slow down. Alvarenga then spotted a bag of tobacco and asked for some leaves, rolled a huge cigar and puffed away for the first time since his last toke outside the Costa Azul lagoon. He almost fainted. Emi stared on in wonder.
Russel returned and told Emi the boat was “reefed” (washed ashore) on the next island down. He would wait for high tide to recover the boat. “After we ate, I got some paper and a marker and motioned for him to write,” Emi says. “My intention was that we would deliver his writing to the Local Council as evidence that we discovered a person who washed ashore.”
Russel and Emi could tell the foreigner was unsure of his own handwriting. The letters were large and crooked, like a child in first grade. They gave him a thick black marker to make the letters bigger and hopefully easier to decipher. Even had they been able to read Spanish they would have learned little from Alvarenga’s haiku-like scribbles.
When Alvarenga finished his note, Russel climbed into a small sailboat and sailed off to deliver the unusual message. His journey was helped by a stiff wind and in less than an hour he arrived in Ebon, the main town and port on the island of the same name. When Russel arrived in Ebon, he saw a young boy riding past on his bike so Russel handed him the note with instructions to urgently deliver it to the chief of police or the mayor. “Let them know,” Russel told the delivery boy, “that a man washed ashore.”
The delivery boy found the mayor first and relayed the message. Mayor Ione DeBrum looked at the note and instantly recognized the Spanish word for “friend” but little else except for “Mom” and “Dad.” DeBrum, a nutritionist by training, worried that the castaway might be dying from exposure. She packed a first-aid kit with IV solutions, coconut milk and ripe bananas to help stabilize what she figured would be a famished drifter. “I picked up the policeman that I have on the island and a health assistant because I thought I was going to see someone who was very weak.” As DeBrum and the policeman headed to the dock, she also invited along Ola Fjeldstad, a Norwegian anthropologist conducting field research on Ebon Atoll. As they prepared a boat to cross the lagoon and scout out this report of a drifter, rumors of Alvarenga’s arrival were already spreading across the island. A castaway raised all sorts of wild scenarios. Was he a drug trafficker? Or perhaps he fell off a sailboat?
Alvarenga was resting and ruing the stormy weather. It was gusty, cold, and the rain was pouring down again. “My bones, my body; everything felt totally collapsed. I was very malnourished after being adrift for so long.”
Emi provided Alvarenga with a bucket of water, a bar of soap and a towel. “I smelled terrible,” said Alvarenga. “There was an oil coming out of me, like fish oil.” Alvarenga scrubbed his tender skin and looked at the bar of soap with curiosity. “I wanted to eat it. Then, since there was no shampoo, I tried to wash my hair with soap but it was impossible, it was all tangled. I managed to clean my face and my beard a bit.”
After the wash, he sat and thought, “How do I get out of here?” Alvarenga began to brainstorm. He needed to consult his intuition and that meant talking aloud. Emi couldn’t understand the man’s animated conversation. But she sensed he was pleased with his musings so she started singing.
Emi’s voice soothed Alvarenga. His desperation eased. Song allowed him to calmly take stock of this new world. Emi approached Alvarenga and looked at him with a tender curiosity. She tried to touch his hair. Alvarenga pulled back. “I said no but she kept wanting to touch my hair.” The dance continued until Alvarenga convinced her. “I was not ready for that.”
The only argument between Alvarenga and Emi erupted when he looked at himself in a handheld mirror. The image so shocked him that he violently threw the mirror. It smashed and led to an angry rebuke from Emi. Alvarenga for his part was glad to be rid of the only mirror in the house.
Alvarenga dreamed he was trapped in the open ocean. The boat crashed atop him and he fought to avoid drowning in the sea. He awoke screaming, “Where am I? I can’t find my boat! I can’t find my boat. Where is my icebox? My icebox!” Alvarenga was unnerved by his own behavior. “It took me an hour to understand. This is the world. This is the world.” He repeated the phrase in the hope it was true.
As Alvarenga watched the birds in the trees, a commotion from the waterfront roused him. Emi began to jump and shout. He turned to see a motorized launch approaching. A uniformed man, like a police officer, was aboard as well as three passengers. Alvarenga panicked. Was he being arrested? A policeman and three people in civilian clothes hustled off and began walking toward Alvarenga. He clenched his eyes shut. When he saw the official he assumed he was going to be arrested. It didn’t matter that he had committed no crime. Having lived in Mexico for over a decade, Alvarenga was accustomed to injustice arriving in the form of uniformed officers. Foreigners in prison was an ugly tale that never ended well, he thought. He knew cases of El Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants who entered but never left the Mexican prison system.
But the first order of business was not to arrest him but for Alvarenga to submit to medical exams. The nurse’s assistant took Alvarenga’s blood pressure and did a cursory exam of his vital signs. He appeared weak but not critical. Russel’s return interrupted the medical checkup. He called everyone’s attention to a gruesome scene: the fisherman’s boat, which he had recovered en route and towed to the beach. “Take a look,” said Russel as he gestured inside the boat. The mayor, Ola the anthropologist, Emi and the police officer crowded around the boat. No one spoke. It looked like a movie prop. The deck was covered in a thin coat of green mold. The motor was stripped, like it had been pulled to pieces. Nothing shined anywhere on the boat; the surfaces were worn, the paint uneven. On deck, two plucked birds the size of chickens glistened, the pink meat a testament to their freshness. Seabird feathers caked the walls, stuck to the seats and floated in the water that sloshed across the filthy deck. A tangle of blue and white nylon cord was attached to the shards of Alvarenga’s trusty sea anchor. Bird bones scattered the deck like whitened twigs. A dead turtle, partly eaten, lay next to an empty turtle shell. The entire boat was engulfed in the stench of death. “It looked messy, like it had been outdoors for quite some time,” says Fjeldstad. “We kind of realized what happened when we saw that boat.”
While the authorities took stock of the wreckage aboard his boat, Alvarenga made a quick decision: no way he was going back on the water. The policeman indicated for him to come. Alvarenga refused. Fjeldstad tried to explain in broken Spanish that they would go to a hospital and to a city where he could get help. Alvarenga’s eyes didn’t leave the water. Another boat ride? Impossible. He had been off the water for hardly twenty-four hours and they wanted him back in a boat?
Despite his resistance, the policeman and Fjeldstad hauled Alvarenga aboard a panga boat, practically an identical twin to his Titanic. He didn’t writhe or seek to escape, but his mind fixated on this strange new reality. Who were these people? A chatter of unintelligible languages clacked around him. What country was this? Who were these dark-skinned natives who lived off coconuts in the middle of the ocean? Did they have contact with the world?
Alvarenga looked at his own boat with nostalgia. He stroked the rail as he said good-bye to his beloved craft. “I was giving thanks. I survived atop her. I wasn’t sure when I would use her again. She saved my life.”
Then the engine fired up, and the council boat turned around and motored across the lagoon. The bewildered Alvarenga was back at sea. “I couldn’t believe that I was in a boat again. Give me a bike, a car to get out of there . . . anything but a boat.”
“At first when we were on the boat going to the island he was looking around,” recalls Mayor DeBrum. “The only thing I remember him commenting was ‘Police. Police.’ I tried to signal to him that the policeman wasn’t in charge, and that we were taking him somewhere to help.”
Fjeldstad handed Alvarenga a small notebook. “I was trying to ask him, Where do you come from? How long have you been out? What was your goal? We didn’t get far. He was way too tired to make any effort to communicate. And since none of us spoke Spanish, we couldn’t have a conversation with him. Our Spanish skills were pretty lousy, or nonexistent. So we made gestures. And he did nothing back. He was an empty shell of a human.”
“I would draw boats, airplanes, it was impossible to communicate,” Alvarenga said. “I wanted to cry.”
As they motored across the lagoon, the policeman stared at the specimen before them. He had washed up and bathed but there was no hiding that he had been out at sea for a considerable time. His hair lay matted up like a shrub. His beard curled out in wild disarray. Fresh scars crisscrossed his browned hands. His ankles were swollen. His wrists were tiny and he could barely walk. Everything about him was mysterious. But it was his eyes that betrayed the depth of his trauma. He refused to look back and often hid his face. He had survived something terrible. His journey—whatever it was—had left a dark mark on the man. Even his hunger was otherworldly. The wild man consumed vast quantities of bananas, sandwiches, and pretty much anything put before him. His eating style was like that of a wild animal. He shoved food into his mouth. He ripped and shredded the meat, then crunched through the bones. Toward fellow humans, he showed no signs of violence or hostility. Alvarenga’s mind had overwritten thirty-six years of socialization with a far more primitive mind-set. He didn’t have the mental bandwidth for social niceties.
Alvarenga lay in the boat and observed as one of the crew trolled a fishing line. When the man snagged a two-foot fish from the lagoon, Alvarenga’s face flashed with happiness. He gave a thumbs-up—a fisherman-to-fisherman congratulations. Then Alvarenga went to sleep. How long did he sleep? He never knew but estimated the entire trip took approximately twelve hours. The sun was going down as they neared the far side of the lagoon. Alvarenga was uneasy looking at the water for such long stretches. It wasn’t good for his psyche. It would be months before he could comprehend that the entire trip lasted just fifteen minutes.
Alvarenga was now in a dense mental fog, his mind tortured by his inability to understand the language. Even the passage of time was unfathomable. During his drift he had watched the crescent moon grow slowly more bright, then attract monsters of the deep at full moon and finally go back to absolute darkness. The twenty-eight-day cycle felt natural. But hours and days were a mystery. And how could anyone possibly keep track of minutes? Alvarenga was certain that he had spent three full days with his glorious hosts Emi and Russel. He had slept entire nights, eaten multiple breakfasts and shared unforgettable dinners. In reality, he had been on their island less than twelve hours.
Alvarenga was also fighting bouts of agoraphobia, which is literally “fear of the marketplace.” Vast, open spaces were associated with danger. His condition was deteriorating rapidly into the “opposite of claustrophobia,” explains Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger, who has studied thousands of patients with PTSD and finds that many people, “when traumatized, don’t have a cohesive memory. It is all shards of emotions, images and sensations but they don’t fit together. Because of that the person isn’t able to form a coherent time line. . . . I would guess that when Alvarenga was in somebody’s home that is when he would have started to come apart.”
Alvarenga’s encounter with civilization was becoming increasingly tense. Nothing made sense. At sea he hadn’t asked permission of anyone for anything. Every action had been free will. Adaptation to society was uncomfortable. Alvarenga preferred being alone. His personal space had been several thousand square miles of primeval ocean. Reduced quarters and being surrounded by people were enough to burst his fragile grip on sanity. Police uniforms in particular ratcheted up his fear. Why was he being taken prisoner—and by whom? His freedom was gone. But he could reverse that. Escape was possible. Alvarenga had beaten the sun, salt and waves—how difficult could it be to trick a few slow-moving humans? It wasn’t time yet; first he needed to recover his strength. In his weakened condition he could do little but observe and plan an escape.
Alvarenga was unable to comprehend that he had just completed one of the most remarkable voyages in the storied history of seafaring. He didn’t navigate, sail, row or paddle—he drifted. Unable to alter his course, he had been forced to build a world of survival starting with water and then branching into the depths of designing his own mental health program. He was extremely unlucky and terribly fortunate at the same time. “If you said someone left from the coast of Peru and drifted to Micronesia, that’s completely unbelievable,” says Shang-Ping Xie, the noted climatologist. “In the southern hemisphere, there’s no rain to sustain life. People lost at sea off Peru have no chance of survival.” But looking at the band of clouds just north of the equator, Xie has no doubts that Alvarenga’s feat was possible: “Nature dictates our luck.”
Drifting across the Pacific Ocean, watching the moon’s light ebb and flow, Salvador Alvarenga battled loneliness, depression and bouts of suicidal thinking, yet he maintained his sanity by envisioning success. But surviving alone in a fantastic world of wild animals, vivid hallucinations and remote peacefulness did little to prepare him for the fact that he was about to be a pop celebrity, object of curiosity, target of derision and trending topic on Twitter.