The Columnist Manifesto

I don’t know why I have no memory of the shipwreck – maybe it’s a PTSD-induced amnesia – but it’s just as well, because it couldn’t have been pleasant. All I know is there are about eight of us floating in the warm ocean. Three or four are in a rubber raft, and I and a few others are floating on our backs.

I seem to understand that I can float here indefinitely – flotation is not the worry. It’s the sun. We’re going to get burned to a crisp in a day or two if we’re not rescued. So a couple of us in the water decide we have to swim in a direction. If we move, we increase our chances of encountering an improvement in our situation – an island, a passing ship. But the distances are so vast, how could we possibly?

Yet after hardly any swimming there is a change – I drift up to an invisible boundary line in the ocean, where the color changes from a placid sheen to a dark blue. It’s the line where the Pacific, in which we’re floating, meets the Atlantic. And that dark water is way colder – look, I shout to my companions, ice bergs in the distance. But also a snowy, white schooner! It’s motoring by too fast – we'll never be able to swim up to it before it’s gone.

But we try anyway. And the water isn’t so unbearably cold. We miss the schooner, but somehow end up on dry land, on the shoulder of a highway at night. It’s Iceland! We run along the highway, and though shoeless, find that it’s tolerably comfortable if we run on our tiptoes.

The Icelandic authorities put us up in a mountain resort where we can recuperate from our ordeal. Strange, I thought Iceland was flat. I am walking down a long outdoor stairway crowded with resort guests. I’m letting gravity do the work, bounding down hundreds of steps and effortlessly managing the 1,000 feet of vertical drop. Getting back up to the room will be a chore, though. Where are we all going?

A cafeteria line! Three lines, short medium and long. Why the difference? The short line is serving up some unappetizing-looking broiled shrimp. The medium line has burgers and bratwurst. The long line has some overcooked steak, but also a prime rib – how badly could they have screwed that one up?

A young woman wearing the uniform of a resort employee smiles at me – a pick up gesture? – but she’s not cute enough to divert me from the prime rib. But that line! Maybe bratwurst now, and prime rib this evening.