A Delusional Diary of Deserted-Island Survival (The Bamboo Rescue Method)

Having watched plenty of disaster and end-of-the-world movies over the years, I even stage various wilderness-survival scenes in my dreams at night. What follows is one fragment from countless nightly dreams: ‘How to escape a deserted island at sea using bamboo!’

Speaking of bamboo, you might think I’m about to talk about building a raft — or even a boat[1] — to escape.

Well, if it were that simple, there’d be no need to write it up specially. In this dream, I used a thoroughly bizarre method that somehow still seems a little convincing.

In the dream, I cut down bamboo stalks one by one. Each stalk was joined end to end with the next, and then I tossed them into the sea in sequence. What followed was rather tedious: longer and longer and longer. Eventually I could crawl out along the bamboo toward the open sea, and thus reach another inhabited islet from the island where the plane crashed.

That way, whether I crawled to the next inhabited islet or intercepted a ship at sea and was discovered, the castaway could actually be rescued during the ordeal of being stranded.

Let’s do a rough calculation. Taking the shortest distance between the island of Taiwan and mainland China, the two sides of the strait are only about 125 kilometers apart.

125 kilometers = 125,000 meters.

Assuming one bamboo stalk is 10 meters long, then only 12,500 stalks would be needed to span the Taiwan Strait. (As early as the Qing dynasty, there are records of logs being thrown directly into the sea from the Fujian coast and drifting with the currents to Taiwan to be used as building material — so we know the currents make it possible.)

And since roughly 8,000 bamboo stalks can grow per hectare, we would only need to harvest 1.5625 hectares of bamboo to complete our magnificent escape plan!

References

1. A raft floats on the water by buoyancy generated from differences in material density; a boat floats by pushing water aside through its structural form (basically a V shape) and generating a reaction force.