Castaway
- Laurie Drabble
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Laurie Drabble
I lay on the grass in Barnsdale Park, the southern California sun warming my back and pinning me to the earth, like an elephant seal collapsing on the warm sand in molting season. The sound of cars in the background lulls me into half-sleep, like a comforting roll of waves.
When the sun goes down, I return to my single-room occupancy hotel, a battered three-story building on the corner of Sunset and Gower in Hollywood. It’s a week-to-week furnished studio rental with a worn bed and tiny, battered bathroom overlooking an asphalt parking lot and immediately across the street from a busy liquor store. It is an address co-located on a busy LA intersection at the corner of limbo and survival, marginally housing an assortment of souls consigned to loiter in this in-between space by financial or psychological precarity. As one of the few residents managing to stay employed - at a graveyard shift answering service - it might be feasible to find more stable housing, but I fundamentally do not know where I belong and cannot muster enough confidence or concentration to become unstuck.
For now, my hands rest gently on the comforting, solid hardback bindings of the books I borrow from a small library in East Hollywood. Each week, I exchange books and make my way to a safe, warm patch of grass, flatten my body on the ground, and read. Although I hold the books loosely, I dimly recognize what they are to me - life preservers. Gripping onto the edges of words that articulate richly the journeys of others who have navigated across uncharted oceans, I am barely kept afloat, buffeted by swells of desperation and teased by hope in the break of a storm.
Depression and dependence were my plus one and two on an ill-fated voyage through young adulthood. I did, admittedly, hunger for escape from the chaos, for temporary respite from worries both real and imagined. Alcohol and drugs seemed like old friends. A comfort. A relief. A vacation from my discontent and confusion. But they were mutinous. They began to jettison all that I had valued, one item at a time: a suitcase of self-worth, stable housing, one friend, and then another. Suddenly, I was a castaway, tossed from the ship and into the turbulent sea.
I remained adrift, but reading gave me one superpower. It taught me to wait. To hold on for just a bit longer. Sometimes the lost are tempted to simply let go, to take any way out of the endless waters. Studies have found that any kind of delay at the moment of suicidal intent may be life-saving. Delay can be idiosyncratic. For me, delay was made of paper and leather, lying on the grass with a few borrowed books, where I felt temporarily washed up on a deserted island. Still alone, but at least able to rest before I was washed out again.
The books argued for hope when there was no empirical evidence for its existence in my everyday life. Although the waters felt cold and turbulent, stronger than I was, a line or phrase would often break through – a hot ray of sun shocking me alert. The words warmed my body and metabolized into a motivation to kick toward an imagined shore on the horizon. They whispered to me to hold on a bit longer, igniting a tiny flame of curiosity, saying, “Don’t you want to see what might happen next?”
I inherited a love of books from both parents, a predisposition for alcohol dependence from my father, and an aversion to being a bother to anyone from my mother. Growing up, the local library was a small one-story building, tucked away off a main road, with a modest demeanor garbed in red brick, an anomaly in the earthquake-prone San Fernando Valley. It was a summer tradition for my mother to take me, my younger brother, and my older sister to forage for books, herding us into the Ford Country Squire faux wood-paneled station wagon with vinyl upholstery sticking to our sweaty legs on the short drive to the library. I would step into the building, inhaling the fragrance of warm pages and leather binding, and bustle to the children’s section like a greedy contestant on the then-popular TV show, “Supermarket Sweep,” determined to snag a delicious meal of fantasy and magic. The library was bountiful, but the check-out limit was 10.
I remained a greedy patron during my young adult lost years. I did not find books based on reviews in the New York Times. Nor did I receive recommendations from friends, having disappeared completely from my prior life, hiding out with alcohol and drugs like lovers on the run. I was not tethered to a particular genre any more than I felt anchored in my own life. I would walk into the library and snatch fiction from the new releases shelves, wandering up and down aisles randomly choosing mysteries, horror, memoir, poetry, thrillers, and literary fiction. They would come home with me, and I would be obligated to care for them and stay alive long enough to return them. When desperate to feed my reading habit with the newest books not yet available at the library, I would head to a chain bookstore and steal several hardbacks, then later exchange them for paperbacks at a second-hand shop. Through my treasured library card and occasional piracy, I populated my deserted islands with the only companions I could tolerate.
As a child, I regularly watched Gilligan’s Island. The show, featuring a mismatched group of castaways washed up on an uncharted tropical island, centered its laughs on the many failed attempts to escape their predicament. I found this premise frustrating. “Why can’t the story be about different ways they get off the island every week?” I asked my dad. “Because the show would be over then,” he explained. I didn’t entirely buy it. I wished for episodes portraying ingenuity and rescue every week. I would have traded the humor of being trapped in paradise as weeks and years drift by for weekly doses of hope and escape.
Many years later, I found my own mismatched groups of survivors. One of my favorites was an Alcoholics Anonymous “home” meeting, as they call it, designated as a women’s meeting. It was populated by older housewives calmly knitting, self-described biker chicks in leathers, and young to middle-aged lesbians in comfortable jeans and sneakers, eschewing the ethos of glamorous West L.A. L-Word stereotypes which had not yet made their way to the small screen. Each weekly meeting was full of tales of near-death experiences from accidents, poor choices, or despair, anecdotes of navigating through work, repairing old or creating new relationships, and sorting through the tangible and psychological debris of the shipwreck of addiction.
Stories are where survival is found. The stories we tell ourselves and each other change lives and can change the world. Stories provide a compass, helping the lost find their bearings. They map passages and hazards lurking beneath the surface, important landmarks, and shorelines.
I am a long way from my castaway years. With an expanded repertoire of survival skills, I know now how to signal for help when the waters are rough. But still, in the moments I feel marooned by loss or life, I reach for a book to help me float a bit longer, and guide me to the nearest safe harbor.
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Laurie Drabble is a passionate lifelong learner and seasoned academic with over 100 research-based publications focused on LGBTQ+ health and the ways we can better prevent and treat the effects of alcohol and drug use on women’s health. She is a recipient of a Harriett A. Rose Legacies contest prize (Carnegie Center, Lexington, KY) for her essay, “Dispositions.” Her storytelling celebrates the wonder and complexity of human behavior. When she’s not writing or researching, Laurie enjoys life in California with her partner—and an ever-expanding stash of quilting supplies that will soon rival her book collection.