I would get up in the morning, put on my pareu, brew my coffee, and suddenly reflect that by rights I should be in a pair of long trousers, jangling a bunch of keys ready to open the store. I had escaped! I had cheated authority, fate, life itself.
The Suvarov Atoll, now one of New Zealand’s national parks, was home to a modern-day Robinson Crusoe named Tom Neale in the Fifties and Sixties. His 1966 memoir of life in a rehabbed coastguard hut is a tale of industrious contentment chronicling his first two of three sojourns with his cats and chickens, a lifestyle he abandoned only as health and age demanded. There he fished, gardened, and beachcombed, living as free as the tradewinds. He thatched palms, built an oven and out-buildings, and slaughtered hogs. He survived fevers and storms, hunted wild boars, and pined for tinned beef and tobacco. But most of all, he counted himself lucky to have escaped civilization, such as it was even on Rarotonga, at that time populated by a mere 18,000 people.Reading his story,
I was struck by Neale’s remarkable sanity in his preparations and execution of an adventure many would label insane for its deliberate seclusion and open-endedness. It was such a page-turner I found myself rushing through the 192 pages on the treadmill and going to bed early to see what would happen to him next. I cursed the crabs that ate his crops and practically felt the warm sand between my toes as he watched the sunset over a nightly cup of tea. For a sense of his daily routine, check out this slideshow Neale in his loincloth, keeping order in paradise.