A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 25

This is the seventh year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months.

As they motored across the lagoon in the Marshall Islands, deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the policemen stared at the specimen laid out on the deck before them. There was no hiding the fact that this man had been at sea for a considerable time. His hair was matted upwards like a shrub. His beard curled out in wild disarray. His ankles were swollen, his wrists tiny; he could barely walk. He refused to make eye contact and often hid his face.

Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, had left the coast of Mexico in a small boat with a young crewmate 14 months earlier. Now he was being taken to Ebon Atoll, the southernmost tip of the Marshall Islands, and the closest town to where he had washed ashore. He was 6,700 miles from the place he had set out from. He had drifted for 438 days.

Floating across the Pacific Ocean, watching the moon’s light ebb and flow for over a year, Alvarenga had battled loneliness, depression and bouts of suicidal thinking. But surviving in a vibrant world of wild animals, vivid hallucinations and extreme solitude did little to prepare him for the fact that he was about to become an international celebrity and an object of curiosity.

Days later, Alvarenga faced the world’s press. Dressed in a baggy brown sweatshirt that disguised his reedy torso, he disembarked from a police boat slowly but unaided. Expecting a gaunt and bedridden victim, a ripple of disbelief went through the crowd. Alvarenga cracked a quick smile and waved to the cameras. Several observers noted a similarity to the Tom Hanks character in the movie Cast Away. The photo of the bearded fisherman shuffling ashore went viral. Briefly, Alvarenga became a household name.

Cast Away. Also All Is Lost. So perhaps not a straight-ahead survival story. Been there, done that. Two alternate approaches. First, what if we followed the life of a survivor after the trauma? Here is a taste of what that could look like from the article:

Life on land has not been straightforward: for months, Alvarenga was still in shock. He had developed a deep fear of not only the ocean, but even the sight of water. He slept with the lights on and needed constant company.

The survivor. The survivor’s family and friends. Survivor’s guilt. PTSD. Paranoia. Nightmares. How to handle what the rest of us call a “normal life”?

It wasn’t until a year later, when the fog of confusion subsided and he scanned the maps of his drift across the Pacific Ocean, that Alvarenga began to fathom his extraordinary journey. For 438 days, he lived on the edge of sanity. “I suffered hunger, thirst and an extreme loneliness, and didn’t take my life,” Alvarenga says. “You only get one chance to live — so appreciate it.”

So a positive transformation arc. Or maybe not. A second take. Let’s switch Protagonists. A family. Husband. Wife. Adolescent children. They are wealthy and have a remote island retreat. In fact, the own the island and when they visit, which they do once a year for a month, they are the only inhabitants.

One fine morning while taking their morning walk on the beach, they stumble upon a man in the tide. Barely alive. The Survivor manages to say he was afloat for hundreds of days in the ocean in boat destroyed by a storm.

Of course, you take him in. You start to nurse him back to health. Hard to do with his ranting, raving, and hallucinations. You call on your radio for help. But for some reason, the radio isn’t working.

Then strange things start to happen. Water supply damaged. Food spoiled. And the Survivor becomes hostile, even threatening.

Here you are stuck with a seeming mad man… with no help in sight.

It’s Cast Away meets Dead Calm.

There you go: My twenty fifth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

What would you do with it?

Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.