Message from this chapter

At this point in this book, no matter what your feelings may be when you read it, there is at least one category of people who need to understand that friends who are struggling with hardship may often lament, "Is there anyone more miserable than me?" , why does God tease me and tease me like this? Now, you understand, there is, and there are a lot of people, at least, there is Wu Luoyin's bowl of bitter wine at the bottom.

I try to persuade you to read this book, and think about it, if God and his old man are really targeting you and playing tricks on you, then your situation must be much worse than now!

body

Every time I see the "self-developed" handmade ship that seems to be stranded in the deep forest, my heart is as if it has been deeply struck by a heavy hammer, which makes me think about whether the current way this boat is my own fault or God is deliberately teasing me?

A year and a half have passed, and although I have taken the initiative to warn myself that God has rescued me here very humanely, the kind of grievance in my heart still lingers.

It is this long-accumulated grief mentality, when I was tidying up the cave, I accidentally glanced at my time scale card, but found that the long scale on the wooden card is always very regular, and the short line is densely separated by the average distance between the long lines.

This timescale is the one I made when I moved into the cave, originally to keep track of dates and weekends, and then I would carve some important anniversaries into it with longer grooves, and use a knife to engrave a keyword or two to make it memorable, after all, I don't have pen and paper, otherwise the job would be much easier.

But now, over time, I have found that these important anniversaries are always very regular! Especially those tragic events!

I finished the useless wreck like a memento on June 23; On February 23, when I was felling, I almost broke my right leg by the dumped rough wood, and the time when I ate the poisonous turtle was turned over by the turtle poison and was about to give up at the most serious point of the Yellow Spring also happened on October 23 of the previous year, and the day I boarded the shipwreck of Zheng He was not also September 23 of the previous year? Even counting back, I enlisted in the army on the 23rd, and even my birthday is the 23rd of April in Taurus!

If, I mean, it's all a coincidence, it's all superstitious thinking, then this kind of overly clever collision of time is really unacceptable to me.

I had to begin to interpret the existence of such things with superstitious thoughts, because, in my opinion, the occurrence of these things could never be accidental, it was almost as if it were destined to exist, and even, I recall that the day when I made a mistake in the exercise and injured my right leg in the explosion and was taken to the field hospital, which was also the twenty-third of summer, I was even more sure of this accidental superstition, and I remembered that day too much, because, on that day, she left me, The reason was simply my bandaged right leg, which was still oozing red blood, which she thought had declared my disability.

The deep and painful memories of that day are like the day of the shipwreck, which I will never forget, but that incident will only be buried deep in my heart, and no one in this world will know about it except my sister who was present that day.

Eventually, I spent three days in the cave thinking about the number twenty-three, and although I didn't want to call it superstition, I picked out the number twenty-three in my heart, and henceforth there were only twenty-nine days in the month, and thirty days in the great month, even though it violated the Gregorian calendar of the earth around the sun, but I did it, and why, it was: "The king of this island hates this number!" ”

However, a few months later, I still resumed our usual method of calculating the date of the Gregorian calendar, because I felt that in the face of science, superstition should still stand aside a little, and the final compromise solution was: I erected a wooden carving figure carved by myself with a wooden billet, and then rubbed the surface of the little man with coconut oil to make him appear a transparent glaze, and then put it on the fire to bake, then oil and bake, and finally formed a wood-colored black and shining statue of the god, I named this statue "Twenty-three", and its nickname, It's called "Lao Tan", after all, I am a wooden billet made according to the proportions of his body, and at the same time, in my heart, the existence of Lao Tan is itself a shackle and bondage, and whenever he appears, I live like fasting.

Since then, whenever this date is met in the Gregorian calendar, I will bathe, change my clothes, fast, and drink some fresh water, and then place the statue of "Lao Tan" at the door of the cave, between me and the sun god, to express my admiration and prayer for this statue.

Only in this way can I think that the old man who lives in heaven will no longer punish me on this day, and will make my fate no longer so miserable, but there are exceptions, such as September 23 every year, this day I call "National Birthday", bathing and changing clothes as always, but food is not prohibited, and to eat is different from before, to take out all the sumptuous food, Moutai also has to open a bottle, to celebrate every year that I still exist in this world.

In the two years since then, I haven't done anything out of the ordinary, just busy with my routine day and night, and it seems that the mascot of the ship that is still stranded in the deep forest has a great deal of restraint on my innovative ideas or progressive thinking, and it seems to whisper in my ear at any time and say, "Don't be busy, what you do is useless!" It's hard for me to forget that all my physical energy and time have been wasted, so I have returned to my normal life, and I have been here for three and a half years now.

But people always have to toss, if you don't make some movement, it will make me feel that I have become decadent and become a walking corpse, so I built another canoe that is much smaller, absorbing the experience of the last time, I first rolled the big log to the beach with rolling logs, and then started to build, I set the boat only 1.8 meters wide, and the length is only 4 meters, which has taken me half of the past two years, but it is not so preoccupied with building, but I have to cut a few chisels or shovel a few edges when I have to be empty, so, Even if the boat didn't take me far, I wouldn't have cried as sorry and frustrated as I did last time.

Unfortunately, I still miscalculated the power of the sea, and although this time I rowed farther than the raft, it was still more than 400 meters from the coastline, which made me give up the idea of landing on the land across the sea, and suddenly realized in my heart that the boat seemed to be small again! If the boat were a little bigger, the stability would be much better! But I didn't feel emotionally sad this time, although I still couldn't get there, but at least, the canoe could carry me to do a lot of things, such as transporting turtle eggs and edible fruits on the beach that didn't welcome me, and even, I was able to paddle it around the island to see what it looked like, or maybe the trip around the island could reveal the secret of the "Kaka" that killed a thousand knives.

But people will always become cautious after being bitten by a snake many times in a row, and even shiver when they see a rope.

After two failed expeditions, it became clear to me that there was a lot more to prepare for a circumnavigation around the island, such as the fact that I had installed a small coconut tree on a canoe and erected a mast and a simple but 360-degree triangular sail with those red flags from a few years ago, and I was never willing to use those boxes of canvas buntings, but they were only blown away as an awning in the initial storm. That's where I came in handy.

Now put the canoe back into the sea, and I'm not sure if it will carry me to land across the sea, but at least it has the full appearance of a boat, and circumnavigating the coastline shouldn't be a problem.

On the third day after the fasting day of the month, I couldn't wait to conduct a sea trial, perhaps because I avoided the fasting day, and the results of the trial sea test really verified my judgment, and it was very successful!

That day deserves to be recorded in the history of the scale in the cave, but that doesn't mean that I can prepare some food and fresh water and leave immediately, I don't seem to have committed that kind of reckless thought for a long time, and the experience of more than three years has taught me that the chance of failure for me is usually only once, and it is likely to kill me completely.

Once again, I used tools to carve out a lot of space at both ends of the boat to store more jars and jars, which meant that I could bring more food and fresh water, and I used a chisel to cut a shallow trench on the left and right sides of the boat, just enough to stuff two bird guns wrapped in plastic sheeting, and I even put a high stool made of wood in the boat, so that I could use the red sails to block me from some sunlight, in fact, I wanted to make a parasol because I had enough plastic sheeting to make this thing, But unfortunately after two experiments, I gave up on the idea, it was too hard.

Even so, I still didn't dare to risk rowing too far, and just walked around the house like a little driver who had just got a car book, you know, it's easy to run too far, but it's hard to row back, God knows where the waves and the sudden wind will, even though I have a spinnaker, but in front of the sea, it must not help.

This continued until my fourth anniversary on the island, and before that day came, I had prepared a full jar of jerky and a large jar of fried rice grains, oh yes, I forgot to mention, after several years of hard work, my grain harvest made me very rich, and now I throw it in the rice jar every year because I can't eat enough rice and get moldy, I once tried to make steamed buns that can be stored longer by the fermentation method handed down from our ancestors. However, I found that the adhesion of this grain after grinding into flour is not as strong as the wheat or rice and millet that we often eat, so I think it may only be suitable for pancakes.

But I still found a way to keep them from getting moldy, one is to store them in a long-term ventilated place and often spread them out in the sun, and the second is to let them dip in coconut oil and fry them over the fire, so that the fried grains can be left in the cave for at least half a month, although I won't eat them, because they are too hard, I have a lot of fresh rice to eat, and the fried rice is only for emergency or storage purposes.

I also made two sets of leather quilts with the bark of thin strips of bark and pointed wood perforations that I had accumulated over the years, you know, the sea surface that has rained is sometimes very cold, and there will be no weather forecast for rain around this island, so it is always good to be prepared, and I also figured out what to do in the past two years to sew this set of techniques, the reason is that the shoes really can't help me toss so poor every day and fall off the bottom, and I have no choice but to make a pair of simple shoes with the rabbit skin that has been roasted off. Later, I felt that my feet were too stuffy, and I was miserable, so I threw the rabbit shoes into the sea, and made straw shoes with straw rope and dried leaves and wore them on my feet.

After all the preparations, I walked back to the hill to prepare for the "grand ceremony" of my fourth anniversary on the island, remembering the shabby demeanor I had when I first came here, and looking at the sumptuous setting on the table now, it was a world of difference, and even the table, I had remade it and replaced it with a new one, and the original table was a monster in comparison.

The stamina of Moutai made me climb out of the cave on the second day of the National Birthday Ceremony, and the three poles on the sun were not the idioms I wanted to use, but I really set up a tree trunk in the yard to calculate the time.

After checking all the supplies and preparations again, and wrapping some gunpowder and buckshot in plastic sheeting, I began my first trip around the island on September 24, the fourth year of my reign as the actual owner of the island.