Rowing for My Life Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Kathleen Saville

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 201604451

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Cover photo courtesy of Kathleen Saville

  ISBN: 978-1-62872-688-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-689-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Curt, my partner and best friend in the road not taken.

  For our parents, Ida and Bartley McNally and Eugenia and Lloyd Saville. They always stood behind us, no matter where we wanted to go and how we wanted to get there.

  For Christopher, whose gentle spirit welcomes me home every year. I love you.

  “It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.”

  Henry David Thoreau

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  PART I: LEARNING TO ROW

  1 Joining the Team

  2 The Night We Met

  3 Learning to Row Together

  4 A Penobscot River Paddle

  5 Building Our Boat

  PART II: NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN

  6 The Expedition Begins: Casablanca

  7 Lights under the Water

  8 Birthday on the Barbary Coast

  9 Approaching the Canary Islands

  10 Near Miss

  11 Tenerife and Hierro

  12 With the Atlantic in Front of Us

  13 Night Stories

  14 Adjusting to Life at Sea

  15 Red Sails in the Morning

  16 A Gift from the Sea

  17 A Calming Sea

  18 Seed of a Hurricane

  19 The Big Push

  20 A Mid-Ocean Celebration

  21 A Navigation Mystery

  22 Knee Injury

  23 Voyaging among the Stars

  24 Atlantic Encounters

  25 Landfall—Antigua

  PART III: SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN

  26 Preparing and Starting the Row

  27 To the Galápagos

  28 Puerto Arroyo, Academy Bay, Santa Cruz Island

  29 Overboard—Navigating like a Native

  30 Missing

  31 The Color of Life

  32 Hiking in the Marquesas

  33 Forty Days and Forty Nights

  34 Pregnant or Not?

  35 Heavy Weather and Crash Landings

  36 Through the Coral Sea

  37 Black Clouds in the Coral Sea

  38 The Great Barrier Reef and Landfall

  39 Sydney, Australia

  PART IV: NEW IDENTITIES AND NEW LIVES

  40 The Boat Shows and Life on Land

  41 Solar Boat Voyages on the Mississippi and Elsewhere

  42 In Casablanca Again

  43 New Beginnings

  44 Egyptian Lives

  45 A Call from the Desert

  46 Desert Petroglyphs

  47 Understanding Desert Islands: An Eastern Desert Trek

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Preface

  IN 2006, I WENT TO Laos for an education conference and a weeklong kayak trip to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. A chorus of cicadas filled the humid, musty air where I stayed in Vientiane before heading to a river in the southeast of the country. Geckos with transparent skin darted furtively along the walls and ceilings of my guesthouse. Banana, mango, and palm trees poked their branches under the eaves of the red tile roof. In the evening and early morning, the ethereal sounds of monks chanting at the local Buddhist wat drifted over the walls.

  In the five years since my husband Curt’s death in Egypt’s desert, I had traveled at an almost frenetic pace to places like Laos (twice already), Hong Kong, Brunei, Singapore, and Malaysia, with regular trips back to the United States from my job in Cairo, Egypt. It was as though I was searching for something so elusive that I couldn’t make myself stop long enough to find it. Now, though, I was going to go slow, by boat, with a young Lao guide by the name of Eing and take the necessary time. We would kayak the dam-controlled waters of the remote Hinbon River. I was hoping the experience would help me settle down so I could finally begin to write this book about the ocean-rowing trips that Curt and I had undertaken in the 1980s, a story I had tried to tell so many times in the past.

  A week later, as the setting sun became a soft reddish smudge in the western sky, I was back in Vientiane sitting at my favorite outdoor food stand, having a Beer Lao by the Mekong River. I felt let down and missed the Hinbon River and kayaking with Eing; he had been a good travel companion. Idly, I watched a group of saffron-robed monks cross the large sand bar extending far from the river’s bank, while a couple of fishermen in broad-brimmed straw hats walked slowly through the shallows, dipping their triangular nets in and out of the still water. Across the Mekong, on the Thai side, lights began to twinkle through the branches of the trees.

  Here, at the end of my trip, I realized how much of a memsahib I had become over the years, focusing on my jobs and acquiring more material goods as my salary increased. Everything about me felt soft. I thought back to the year Curt and I rowed across the Atlantic, when I sat for hours on the port deck of Excalibur, our homemade rowboat, and wondered if I had the strength and courage to keep rowing day after day toward the western horizon and our intended landfall in the Caribbean. I also thought of our South Pacific rowing adventure, when the only instrument we had to navigate with, the sextant, was lost after Curt fell overboard. As we foolishly carried no spare, we were forced to navigate by the stars alone, using our hands to gauge their angle in the sky and a simple compass. I remembered pushing back on the paralyzing fear that every decision we made, based on where we thought we were, might be undermined by inaccurate sightings with the implication that we would never find land again or, ultimately, survive. I reflected on how my life had changed when our son was born and, through my own dogged efforts to adjust course, we traveled to South Asia and the Middle East as a family to live and work overseas.

  Nothing within me had changed since those years of rowing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with Curt. I was pursuing the life I had chosen. I was still ready to get on a plane and go anywhere. And if I was to revisit those past journeys, it would be not so much to relive them as to seek a new understanding. Curt and I had taken on challenges that many thought impossible or at the very least fatal to our young marriage. We sought to face life alone in an ocean wilderness, exposed to natural forces we could barely conceive of, as well as unimaginable wonders. How had the experience shaped me? How had the rows shaped
our marriage, and what had they meant in my life?

  To prepare for the writing, I reread our unpublished manuscript about the Atlantic row and our self-published book on the Pacific row, as well as our diaries and personal logbooks from both expeditions and other shorter voyages we had taken. I also reread the words of our fellow New Englander and favorite transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, whose motivation for going to Walden Pond matched ours perfectly in undertaking our journeys: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

  Our ocean-rowing expeditions were small and personal, unlike those of our favorite old-time explorers, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott, whom we loved to read about. Except for one expedition for which Curt obtained partial support from National Geographic, our voyages were funded with relatively limited private sponsorship and our own earnings. We built our ocean-going rowboat Excalibur ourselves, with the help of friends, in order to undertake the Atlantic crossing, and later we refitted it for the Pacific row.

  Rowing for My Life explores who Kathleen McNally and Curt Saville were, from when we first met in 1977 on the banks of the Connecticut River at a rowing race until the time in 2001 when Curt walked into the Egyptian desert to hike between the monasteries of St. Anthony and St. Paul and failed to return alive. What had driven us constantly to put ourselves in situations that required we depend on each other for our very survival? Did we bring something out in each other that impelled us to take such chances? Why was I eventually able to adapt that daring lifestyle into something as adventurous but less dangerous, while Curt remained unwilling to give up flirting with extreme risk? Did that say something about who I had become or who I already was?

  While working on this book, I came across old correspondence from my mother dating from March 1981, the month we began the row across the Atlantic Ocean. She was struggling to let me go when she wrote, “Stay safe and happy—I do give you my respect for staying with your convictions. My feelings towards your venture are all necessarily predicated on the possibility of my not seeing you again or you being ill and so on. At least I am sure that you are in good health. That has served to calm some of my thoughts and should give you confidence as well.”

  I realized that the seeds of resiliency and the desire to be self-reliant had been sown in me long before I rowed an ocean. Perhaps they were in my genes. Mom confirmed as much when she wrote in another pre-rowing letter from 1981, “I see you as a positive young girl who [has] already separated herself from her family.” At the time, I was hurt that she was suggesting our family was not as important to me as my rows with Curt. Now, I see that she was telling me, as Curt did years earlier, “When you go, don’t forget to come back because we’re waiting for you.” It was a good lesson that I haven’t forgotten.

  In the end, writing Rowing for My Life has been part of the healing process over Curt’s death, for it has helped me better appreciate the relationship that made us so successful as partners, how we evolved as individuals, and how those rows jump-started my life and contributed to making me the person I am today. As Mark Doty writes in Heaven’s Coast, “What is healing, but a shift in perspective?”

  Isle of Portland, England

  Cairo, Egypt

  Acknowledgments

  THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE WITHOUT whose help this book would not have been completed. Curt’s and my family have played a huge role, from the moral and financial support our parents gave us to the contributions of my sister-in-law, the photographer Lynn Saville, who was with us from the very beginning in 1980. Ed Montesi, who designed and helped us to build Excalibur, was with us one hundred percent of the way, as was Peter Wilhelm, who worked on the boat and provided brilliant ham radio communications, along with his father, Kurt Wilhelm. We might have been only two people on our rowboat on the oceans, but there were so many others on land that made it possible for us to be there. Companies gave us products in support of our expeditions, ham radio operators held regular radio schedules with us, yachties across the Atlantic and South Pacific Oceans shared their expertise and kept an eye out for us. Good people we encountered in Morocco, the Canary Islands, Antigua, various ports of call on the South American coast, the Galápagos, Marquesas, Society, American Samoa, and Vanuatu Islands, and Australia, helped us. Without their collective help and encouragement, we would never have been able to row all those miles from one side of the ocean to another.

  Telling the story of these rowing adventures has been a long time coming, and I thank my mentors Cait Johnston, Barbara Hurd, Debra Marquart, and Scott Wolven at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program for providing their invaluable feedback. Without the expert guidance of my editor, Cal Barksdale at Arcade Publishing, my stories might have been told lightly, without the reflections that he pushed me to. It would have been far easier to narrate only the events and not dig deeper into the reasons and motivations behind each journey.

  PART I

  LEARNING TO ROW

  CHAPTER 1

  Joining the Team

  Fall 1974

  I WAS A FRESHMAN WITH TWO papers to write and a hundred pages of reading waiting for me in my dorm room. I ate my cafeteria dinner as slowly as I could, putting off the moment when I’d have to go back and start working. I wondered if my roommate, a senior with a full-time boyfriend, would be around this weekend.

  I took one final bite of my Swedish meatballs, scooped up the rest of the rice, and drank the last drops of milk. I was restless. What I really wanted to do was catch a ride to Providence so I could spend the weekend at home. I was lonely for familiar faces and for my parents’ company. Most of the students at the University of Rhode Island regularly returned home on the weekends, leaving the campus virtually deserted. The thought made me sad with homesickness.

  I pushed open the exit door to the cafeteria and started down the stairs. That’s when I saw the poster:

  WANTED: ROWERS FOR THE WOMEN’S CREW TEAM

  JOIN US TONIGHT AT 7 PM

  STUDENT UNION

  I didn’t know anything about crew or what one did on a crew team, but the directness of the message grabbed my attention. I imagined it might include traveling by boat somewhere, maybe on the nearby Narragansett Bay. The idea of rowing sounded kind of sexy and a good way to meet guys. I looked at my watch: it was 6:30. I decided to check it out.

  Three days later, I waited in my dorm room for Jess, a senior on the women’s crew. I was wearing what I considered appropriate workout clothes for rowing: red hot pants, an orange-red stretchy knit top, a zip-up sweat jacket, and a pair of sandals. I stubbed out my cigarette when the knock came.

  In the back of a truck owned by one of the experienced men’s rowers were the other new recruits, including my friend Marion who was dressed in gray sweatpants, a blue pullover, and Adidas sneakers. Marion had been a field hockey player on her high school team in West Hartford, Connecticut. Maybe she knew something I didn’t know about crew.

  The wooden dock, attached to the banks of the Narrow River, rocked gently with the weight of new and returning crew members. I stood with Marion and the other women on the grassy riverbank and watched the men’s crews carrying their rowing shells past us. I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my sweat jacket. It was cold, and my legs were as red as the tip of my nose. Almost as red as my shorts.

  Jon Beamer, the coach, stood at the far end of the dock, giving a pep talk to a group of new male recruits. He leaned toward them, eyes wide, voice loud. Each freshman stared back, intimidated. But he was connecting with them, and they were ready to do whatever he wanted so they could be part of his crew team. Jon, a recent graduate of an Ivy League university, had rowed lightweight for the varsity men’s crew. His private university pedigree was an odd fit with our state school, and our University of Rhode Island crew did not have the history or the impressive funding of his former tea
m. Every boat that the URI crew rowed and every piece of equipment it used was purchased only after arduous fund-raising by each dedicated crew member. Unlike the URI football team, which had a million-dollar budget, the crew subsisted on minor contributions from the athletic department.

  I learned pretty quickly that day that whatever equipment the crew had was doled out according to gender. The men’s crews rowed the lighter and newer boats. Their oars were also lighter and less beat-up than the women’s. With a push on the boat and oars, Jon sent the new rowers and returning rowers off in the lightweight Schoenbroad. He turned back to glare at our little women’s group, huddled between the riverbank and dock.

  “Sue, send them up there to get the Pocock. Get the oars and shell down here.”

  Sue, the women’s captain, and Jess, the senior, gathered all the new women and led us up the boathouse hill, its side gouged out with railroad ties for stairs. It took care not to trip on those steps. In the boathouse, Sue led us over to a huge, wooden eight-person rowing boat. Its outriggers were chipped, blue-painted steel piping with bubbly welded joints, an indication that it had been repaired many times. The boat looked enormously heavy.

  “The Pocock used to be the men’s, but it’s our boat now,” Sue explained. “It’s heavy, but it’s one of the best. If you get used to rowing this boat, you’ll be able to row anything.” We all nodded, though we didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. I don’t think any of the new recruits had ever rowed before, never mind seen a barge like this Pocock. Images of Roman galley slaves came to mind, heaving at their oars while a brute of a slave driver flicked a whip about their shoulders.

  “First, you need your oars.” I tore my eyes from the boat. “Pick out an oar and bring it down to the dock and come back.”

  I chose the smoothest-looking sweep oar and tried to pull it out of the storage bay with one hand, but it was too heavy and its twelve-foot length made the balance extremely awkward. For the first and last time in my rowing career, I carried my eight-and-a-half-pound oar down to the water with two hands. Some of the men’s crew who hadn’t gone out with the first men’s boat, egged on by Jon, thought it was hilarious to moo like cows as the women walked by with their oars. Eventually, like the experienced women rowers, I learned to carry my oars and our boats with no expression on my face. If any woman ever gave the slightest indication of how heavy the boat was, the men would be right on us, mooing and catcalling.