The Uninhabited Island Beach
By the time I had the campsite more or less finished, the sun had already slid a good way down the sky.
It was nothing you could grandly call a house. I had laid a thick branch between two trees for a frame and stacked broad leaves and twigs over it until I had a roof sloped off to one side. That was the whole of it.
Still, it looked like it would hold if a little rain came down tonight.
I stepped back a few paces, checked my work, and nodded.
"For the first day, this is enough. Better to check the state of the island tomorrow and reinforce if I need to than burn myself out trying to build a palace tonight."
"It's a private ocean-view cottage. How high are you willing to go?"
"Yeah, the neighborhood's a little rough."
I added a few more thick logs to the campfire. It didn't look like it was going anywhere anytime soon.
There was still a little time left before full dark, so I grabbed my knife and headed down toward the beach.
"We'll look for water first thing in the morning. For what's left of today, let's take a walk along the shore."
"If I can catch it, I'll catch it. If I can pick it up, I'll pick it up. Places like this are surprisingly full of trash, and a lot of it turns out to be more useful than you'd think."
Just because an island was uninhabited, with almost no human footprints on it, did not mean the beach would be clean. Often it was the opposite. The ocean has a way of carrying whatever people throw away to the farthest places it can reach.
I walked slowly along the line where the waves came in, and found a clear plastic bottle half-buried in the sand.
"Things like this are surprisingly precious."
"In civilization, sure. Some mannerless bastard probably chucked this into the ocean too."
I picked the bottle up and checked the crumpled body and the cap. The cap was gone, but luckily nothing was badly cracked.
"Out here, it's a container. Wash it and treat it properly and you can use it to move water, or for any number of other things. Of course, you don't just scoop water into something you found washed up from god knows where and start drinking."
A little farther on, a length of synthetic cord was tangled in the sand and seaweed. I pulled that free too, checked the condition, and cut away only the usable stretch.
"What you are watching right now is a marine cleanup operation."
The cord was in better shape than I had expected. I could use it to reinforce the shelter, or to tie and hang things. There are ways to make cordage from natural materials, but when perfectly good synthetic fiber is lying on the ground, there is no reason to sit there twisting fibers until your palms hurt.
I slung the cord over my shoulder and started walking again. Then the sand right in front of my foot twitched.
Something white bolted sideways in a frantic scramble and vanished into a small hole.
"Huh."
"It's a crab."
I stepped closer and crouched. Fine sand was scattered around the hole, as if it had just been dug. On tropical beaches like this you run into ghost crabs — the ocypodids people also call moon crabs — without much trouble, and once the sun starts going down they come out of their burrows to forage.
"Side dish for dinner, added."
"Eat or be eaten. That's nature."
"We're done talking about that."
I picked up a thin stick lying nearby and checked how deep the hole went. There was no need to shove a hand in from the front. I loosened the sand a little to one side with the knife and scooped it out by hand; the crab tried to bolt out the other way, and I was waiting. I pinned it from above in one quick motion.
"Got it."
"I'm the one you should feel sorry for. I fought a shark on my period today."
I wandered a little farther, found similar burrows, and caught a few more. They were small enough that they wouldn't fill me up on their own, but I still had the shark meat, so it would be plenty for one dinner.
Wandering the beach like that, I realized the color of the sea had changed. I stopped walking.
"Wow."
The edge of the sky was bleeding red. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the ocean shed the hard blue of daytime and took on orange and gold all at once. Even the thin edges of the clouds were burning, and every quiet wave that rolled in stretched that light out long across the water.
I just stood there and looked for a while, saying nothing.
"Right?"
I picked up a thick, straight branch from the beach. Then I took off the sports-sunglasses bodycam I had been wearing.
"Let's switch the shot for a second."
I spread the temples and hooked them over the end of the branch, then lashed the whole thing roughly in place with the synthetic cord I had just picked up so it wouldn't shift. Looking at the finished product, it was tragic.
"Selfie stick."
If I had tried to sell it as a product, it would have been refunded on the spot.
"Ah, hold on… okay."
I adjusted the camera angle by hand and held the branch out in front of me. This time I would be in the middle of the frame, the sunset at my back.
With the glasses off, I couldn't see chat. For the first time in a while, I just looked at the ocean without worrying about how the viewers would react.
"People ask me this sometimes, when I go to places like this."
The sound of the waves came in, steady, against the shore.
"Why do I go that far."
I thought about it for a second, then laughed.
"I mean, I wrecked two marriages doing dangerous crap, I go out of my way to find places most people might visit once in a lifetime if they're lucky, and now even my body's like this — and the second I take three months off I crawl right back out into the Pacific."
Saying it out loud, it really wasn't a normal life.
"But looking at this, I kind of get it."
I watched the sun hanging close to the horizon. It was the same sun you see in a city sunset, and somehow it felt completely different. Maybe because I had paddled all the way here myself, fought a shark, sweated through building a place to sleep, and only then looked up.
"I come for things like this, too. This kind of thing… how many times in a life do you actually get to see this?"
The words dropped off for a moment.
"Going after a lion to steal its meat had nothing to do with sunsets, of course. Even I know that one was just insane."
I laughed by myself. A lifetime of laughing like a middle-aged guy — that big keo-keo-keo — had become a habit, so doing it now in a voice that had gone thin and high and pretty after I became a woman felt deeply weird.
"Live close to forty and you get a pretty good idea of what kind of person you are. I think I'm just the kind of human who can't sit still. Two marriages didn't change it. Changing sex didn't change it… I'm just a person whose whole being is addicted to dopamine, who has to go out and do every stupid dangerous thing there is."
I shrugged once.
"Still. As long as I'm alive, I might as well see a lot of interesting things."
I held the sunset a little longer, then pulled the branch back in. I untied the glasses from the cord and put them back on my face, and the chat window that had gone dark bloomed into the corner of my vision again.
And for a second, I froze.
"……."
Three months in, and I still hadn't gotten used to this. In the old streams, if anyone talked about my looks it was mostly shave the beard or your old-man face is way too tanned.
I adjusted the glasses on my face for no good reason.
"We're talking about the scenery. Why are you rating someone's face."
"No."
"That's the sunset making it look that way."
"Banned."
I busied myself gathering up the day's haul from the sand. One scavenged bottle, a usable length of cord, and the crabs I had caught for dinner. Beyond the beach, the bottom of the sun was already catching on the horizon.
"Alright. Time to actually head in. Once the sunset's gone, it gets dark in a blink."
"Shark and crab."
"Anyone listening would think we were on some luxury cruise."
I turned back toward camp with the haul in my arms. Far off between the trees, the fire I had built a little while ago showed as a faint glow.
"Let's go eat dinner."
Starting tomorrow I would have to head inland anyway. Tonight, I figured, it was fine to look at the ocean and eat easy.