Emma Walters, September 22, 2009

I don’t know why I opened this diary with my last words. We have enough rations for another six weeks and we’ve already started fishing to great, weird looking, results. We can probably survive for quite a few months considering the assortment of skills we have on hand. I’ll introduce the others in this entry, yesterday I was just letting my anxieties have some fresh air.

Once Garrett and Jerry cleared off the bodies of the other passengers, it wasn’t so bad. It’s kind of like summer camp. I’m hanging out with a bunch of strangers with common struggles and we’re learning all kinds of outdoorsy stuff while we spend most of the day in the sun. I even went swimming. It really isn’t all bad.

I think I saw a dinosaur, or at least a two foot tall lizard, so… I can probably write a sick novel about this whole experience and coast on all the documentaries that get made about this island for the rest of my life. I was worried about being an American political journalist writing about British Politics, if that would even work, but I guess if I make it off this place I won’t have to worry about that anymore. Smooth sailing!

So, Garrett, he’s a tall, noble, bad-ass, black Scottish guy who was in New York visiting family, which is honestly hilarious to me, sorry Black Scots! I’m an ignorant white American so you’re really amusing to me. No really, I worked in Obama’s campaign, even after the loss became obvious and our pay was cut by forty percent, so I’m “woke” or whatever they call it these days. Garrett is a great guy, and I’m aware of how silly my feelings about his accent are. I'm from Texas, y'all. Cut me some slack. Sorry I spent three whole sentences justifying that, white guilt is a hell of a drug.

He’s a firefighter, and a veteran of the Kazakhstan War, part of operation Desert Storm back in 2003 and everything. He helped me get my leg out of a predicament after we first "landed". I could have been dragged down into the ocean with the other passengers in coach. Garrett saved me and two others, and the mid-section crashed on the island, leaving two more survivors. Five total, including me. We think the front could have crashed on the island, and there could be more survivors, but we’ll have to wait a while before it makes sense to do an expedition.

I know my tone might seem a little candid, but trust me, I’m pretty broken. I’m focusing on the details and the positives for obvious reasons : clarity in my notes and sanity in my mind. Allow me the luxury to pretend it’s all numbers and summer camp activities for the hour or so I sit by the campfire and write my diary.

Next Survivor! Anna Schmidt, a biology research assistant from Berlin, the eastern half, who was catching a connecting flight in London back to the grand old USSR. My high school German classes paid off just enough to where I could figure out some basic things about her, and interpret the gist of what she had to say to the other survivors. She started studying her German-to-English Traveler’s Dictionary more seriously since the crash and I’ve been helping her as much as I can.

Next we have Jericho “Jerry” Baesler. He’s a missionary, for the Church of The Latter Day Saints, an experienced handyman, and equally bad-ass to the aforementioned Garrett. He turned a part of the fuselage into a really comfortable shelter with like two days of work. He and Garrett have done most of the heavy lifting around here. Without the two of them, we wouldn’t have made it more than a few days without going crazy. He kind of reminds me of this other Mormon, Tim, that I worked with back at my internship at The Atlantic, but I feel kind of Mormon-Racist for saying that. Sorry Vice Pres. Romney! Maybe I’m still bitter about 08. ( By The Atlantic, I meant the newspaper, not the ocean. I guess you could call this my second internship "in The Atlantic"… First I complained about my mom always being right but now that I think about it, my editor is worse! “You’ll be back.” My ass, Marshall.)

Anyways, Jerry’s a great guy. He showed me how to gut a fish, how to make a vaporization chamber thing to turn saltwater into freshwater, and along with Anna he went into the forest and found us a bunch of edible fruit. Sometimes I feel like I can’t add a lot to the team, but everyone here seems to love helping me out, and I half-jokingly told them I could help them tell their life story. I found some more notebooks, so that will probably happen if current circumstances persist long enough.

Last, and least, is a little boy named Hunter Lawson. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t seem to listen, either. He looks about eleven years old, he’s got pale, now sunburned skin, piercing blue eyes, and a crew cut that grows slower than you’d think. I’m describing him more in detail because he’s a child and might not look the same in the future, so I want to make sure he’s identifiable, I guess.

I say his name is Hunter Lawson because that’s the name on the briefcase he won’t let go of, and that’s what we all call him. Sometimes, if you’re quiet, you can sneak up on him with the briefcase open, it’s full of what seems to be old letters, some written in a language I can’t recognize. He keeps them all inside the case as he hunches over to read them, and he does this whenever he gets the chance. He's never around for very long. He usually runs off between meals to go and read until the next one. I can't say I'm not curious but I guess they aren't my business.

We all seem to have agreed to respect the boys privacy, oddly enough. You figure one of us would have got mad at the kid for being a “useless brat” or something, but I think something about being stranded on the island here has… softened us? Definitely no “Heart of Darkness” here. Not to say there’s nothing bad here, those two-foot lizards we call “The Clever Girls” are vicious little things, and I had to kill my first animal in self defense not three days ago. I just mean that we all seem to get along fine for a bunch of strangers stranded on an island together. 

I think the worst part of being on this islands has to be the nightmares. 
I talked to Jerry about it, and he's having them too. Nightmares about Hunter, but without a face. Not in a gory ripped-off way,  just a weird smooth skin thing instead of a face. What kind of island gives you shared nightmares?