Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [51]
To remind us of more familiar smells we developed the weird habit of sticking our little fingers in our ears and sniffing the earwax. Very satisfying.
Hunger, of course, prevailed. When we caught the second albatross I said, “Hey, we’re going to have to try and eat at least the breast.”
I didn’t even let it sit in the sun to warm up, perhaps cook a bit. I just tore into the raw meat, and boy, was it hard to swallow. I was also concerned about Mac again. He didn’t look good, and I feared he had begun to fade. By the time I caught the third gooney bird, we weren’t so finicky. I tore off its head and put the bleeding neck into Mac’s mouth and allowed the blood to flow. I squeezed that gooney’s carcass until the last drop went down his throat. We were now so starved that we ate the entire bird with gusto. This time it tasted like a hot fudge sundae with nuts and whipped cream on top. I ate the eyeballs and all the rest, dipping the legs into the salty ocean to give it flavor. It was so delicious we made a humorous vow to eat raw meat the rest of our lives.
ONE MORNING I caught a dark gray tern and was so famished that while I was killing it I was simultaneously tearing off its feathers with my teeth. Later, my beard itched. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but there was only one explanation: a bird way out in the middle of the clean, beautiful ocean—with lice! I went crazy. I had to get Phil to keep the sharks away while I stuck my head in the water five or six times and tried to wash the bugs out of my beard.
TO COMPENSATE FOR not having enough real food, I cooked us make-believe meals. This required exhaustive and extensive planning. First I’d create the whole menu. We’d have salad, soup, gnocchi, chicken cacciatore, omelets, steaks, desserts—whatever I’d watched my mother make when I was young and learned to do myself. I’d include bread, wine, olive oil; if I eliminated any step or detail of the preparation, the guys would pounce. “You forgot to grease the skillet,” Phil once chided me. Or “What about the butter? Don’t you need butter in gravy?” I had to say how much salt, how much baking powder—“Just a teaspoon”—how long to bake at what temperature, how much to knead the dough, how to make the crust crispier, how to make spaghetti sauce, or turkey stuffing, how long to bake the turkey. I cooked breakfast every morning, lunch every afternoon, and dinner every evening. I drew the line when they got selfish and wanted brunch—except on Sundays. I did it by the seat of my pants, and it was great because it killed time, it acknowledged but deflected our hunger, and it exercised everyone’s mind, especially mine.
BESIDES FOOD AND water, the mind is a crucial line of defense against adversity. I knew this from college. Dr. Roberts, the physiology professor at USC, had told us, “Your mind is everything. It’s like a muscle. You must exercise it or it will atrophy—just like a muscle.”
I immersed myself in routine, glad to do mental exercises like making meals for my crewmates. I also added columns of figures in my head. Then double columns. I solved equations. I hated math and may not have gotten the answers right, but I didn’t care. I also took a mental inventory every day.
In movies, the longer someone stays isolated the more they lose their minds. It’s not necessarily true in real life. In the movie Cast Away, instead of going nuts, that guy had it made! Sometimes the greatest thing in the world is to be alone; there’s no reason to go stir-crazy or buggy. It’s a beautiful life. Everything you do to survive is positive and an accomplishment. You figure out how to catch the fish, get water, build a hut. Even if a castaway isn’t the happiest guy in the world, there’s no reason for him to go insane.
Proof of that is Robinson Crusoe. When the longboat came ashore for him after four years, naturally