Rowing for My Life Read online

  On Curt’s last weekend in Rhode Island, he proposed that we should marry. Starting the following Monday, he was moving to New York state, where he would begin a job as a medical photographer. With the prospect that the nature of our relationship could change, I wasn’t sure what would happen next.

  In the tiny kitchen of his Providence apartment, amid the half-filled packing boxes, Curt sat with his back to the wall, his arms akimbo. Our normally easy conversation had died out, and I looked at him. He had something to say as I stood in front of the sink, my arms crossed too. We were at a crossroads, and what happened next was going to affect us for the rest of our lives.

  “Will you marry me?” he said in his soft voice, and I smiled.

  “Sure. I’d love to.” And that was it. My life had been changed forever by that simple exchange.

  CHAPTER 5

  Building Our Boat

  Rhode Island, 1980–1981

  MY PARENTS WERE SURPRISED WHEN I returned to Rhode Island less than six months after marrying Curt. Though my father had predicted great success for my marriage, he hadn’t thought we would quit our jobs in New York so soon and move into their house as unemployed full-time explorers.

  For several months, as we settled into married life in Tompkins Cove, New York, Curt and I had talked about a summer rowing adventure in the Bay of Fundy or along the East Coast of the United States. None of the ideas inspired me, though, until one day I delved into the most creative side of my brain and said, “Why don’t we build a boat and row it across an ocean? We could row across the Atlantic. That would be the ultimate sort of voyage in a rowboat.” Curt looked at me like I was crazy, but I could see the idea was intriguing to him, the little wheels of adventure cranking slowly as he tried to imagine the two of us rowing a boat in big ocean waves. Could it be done?

  It gave me a flutter in my stomach to think about rowing across an ocean. I had never rowed on the open ocean, though I had rowed and sailed on Narragansett Bay and gone out on fishing boat trips off the coast of North Carolina. Did that qualify me to make such an absurd proposal? I had rowed for three and a half years in college and more at the Narragansett Boat Club. Did that qualify me to row an ocean?

  Over the last year since the rowing journey in the Maine North Woods, we had both read a great number of adventure books about climbing mountains, paddling canoes in wilderness areas, and traversing oceans in a rowboat. There were Harbo and Samuelson, who successfully rowed a simple dory across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1800s for prize money, and the Brits who flew to America in the 1960s, bought a dory, and rowed out of Chatham on Cape Cod. More interesting to me, though, was the story of a British woman and two men who began their row in Gibraltar, only to end in Casablanca, where the woman parted company with the men, who continued the row to the Caribbean.

  What I was proposing was to become the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean, and the two of us to be the first Americans to do so. The wheels of adventure started turning faster. There was a boat and sponsorship to be worked out. Rowing the Atlantic was going to be a problem-solving task of the first order. Each of us would need to learn new skills, such as ocean navigation and radio communication. We would have to do the hard work of finding sponsors for the boat and supplies to offset the costs of our endeavor.

  The final decision to organize an expedition wasn’t made easily. We would be giving up good jobs, a questionable move in the poor economy of the early 1980s, as well as an apartment in a community whose backyard was the 5,205-acre Bear Mountain–Harriman State Park, where we regularly ran the cross-country trails and on weekends camped out on the high ridges overlooking New York City. But, in the short time we had lived and worked in New York state, Curt’s job at Helen Hayes Hospital was a constant concern. He liked the medical photography work and was good at it, but he and his colleague, another photographer who had been assigned to collaborate with him, didn’t work well together.

  One day, I pulled out the black pattern composition notebook that I had filled with menu plans and itinerary notes from our northern Maine row the year before and found a few blank pages. One of our favorite activities together was planning out camping trips in great detail as Curt had done in his Peace Corps days when he and his buddies climbed in the Andes. I took a ruler and divided the page into a Tompkins Cove column and a Project Row Across the Atlantic Ocean column. Over a period of several weeks, sometimes sitting by a fire at our favorite lean-to on the part of the Appalachian Trail that runs through Bear Mountain–Harriman State Park, we listed the pros and cons of staying in or leaving New York. Financial concerns went into both columns. My job at the local police station went in the Tompkins Cove column. Each time I thought about leaving my secretarial job, I felt guilty and unsure. My new friends there wouldn’t think much of me for breaking my nine-month contract after only five months, and I liked working for my boss, Sergeant Jackson, who saw me, at twenty-four years of age, as capable of doing far more than clerical work. Though very junior, I had shown a keen interest in the aspects of criminal law that the police deal with in their everyday work, and he had suggested that, when my contract ended, I should seriously consider applying to law school.

  In the Project Row Across the Atlantic Ocean column, Curt felt time was of the essence. At our low rate of income, we could look forward only to a better used car and a new home mortgaged to the hilt in the next ten years. We should strike while the iron is hot and do the Atlantic row while we were young, in good shape, and capable of planning a successful expedition. His arguments and the fact that his job situation wasn’t getting any better swayed me more and more. Though my ocean-rowing suggestion had been made, in part, in response to Curt’s restlessness, I was optimistic that our marriage would survive the uncertainties ahead.

  Finally, in May 1980, I closed the door to the apartment in Tompkins Cove for good while Curt waited in the packed Pinto wagon. In the end, my new self-image as modern-day explorer won out, inspired by the words of our favorite Transcendentalist, who had accompanied us on our northern Maine row through his writings. Thoreau wrote, “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.”

  Nonetheless, our decision made little sense to our families and our friends at the Narragansett Boat Club. My parents’ idea of their daughter’s happy marriage to a Yale-educated man was faltering while Curt and I spent days trying to determine the parameters for the design of an ocean-going rowboat. Worse, I asked them if we could build it in their garage in the backyard of their home on the exclusive East Side of Providence. My parents agreed while looking nervously out their back window into the open doors of the garage, where wood and other boat supplies were steadily accumulating. Stacked on the left side was a stash of oak and mahogany planks purchased from a marine store in southern Connecticut with our job savings, while boxes of tools from Curt’s father’s workshop in their Vermont summer home lay on the right. The boat, I pointed out to Mom and Dad, would be built in the middle. They nodded uncertainly.

  Peter Wilhelm, a good friend from the boat club, was enlisted to work with us to build the double-ended Swampscott dory design we had decided on. The Swampscott dory was not only aesthetically beautiful, with its gently rounded lap strake sides, but it was known for its extreme seaworthiness. It had been originally designed in mid-nineteenth-century New England as a lifesaving boat, and many life boat stations along the New England coast still used them.

  For days the band saw screamed away in the garage, until one day it came to a screeching halt. Late that afternoon, while going over the calculations for the boat ribs, we found that the measurements for the boat were off by a full third. The boat frames, costing a few hundred hard-earned dollars, had been cut for a vessel that was approximately one-third smaller. Instead of for a twenty-two-foot boat, they had been cut for an eighteen-footer.
We were all upset, and for a brief time we parted ways with our friend to rethink the boat-building project.

  There were so many things to do to prepare for such a voyage that the whole idea seemed vaguely improbable to some people. At a rowing regatta one weekend, we approached a well-known rowing coach and asked him about the kinds of rowing equipment that might stand up to a long transatlantic row. He thought for a long moment, and then surprised me by saying, “That sounds like a good way to break up a marriage.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I responded. “We get along pretty well.”

  “I’m sure you do. But it can be tough out there. I was in the Pacific during the war. We went for days without being able to take a fresh-water shower…. We were covered in salt, … Even the big ships move around a lot in the waves.

  “I’ve been around boats all my life,” he continued, building to an obvious lesson, “and I get seasick. And you want to be out there in a small boat for months? You won’t be out there for long and you’ll be wet and tired. I can see it: ‘It’s your turn to do the dishes!’ ‘No, it’s yours!’”

  I could see he was really getting worked up over the idea of a married couple aboard a small boat for days on end. His parting shot was, “You’ll regret that you ever thought of the idea!”

  The reaction from Ed Montesi, another boat club member, was different. Ed said, “If I were going out there, I would only do it with the best or close to the best equipment and technology available.” He was a proponent of building with fiberglass, wood, and a synthetic material called Airex foam core. He offered to design an ocean-rowing boat that would be twenty-five feet and five inches long with a five-foot–three-inch beam. Two enclosed cabins, fore and aft, would provide shelter and storage respectively. In the center of the open deck, the two rowing stations would be set up. Watertight storage compartments below deck would be used to keep fresh water, food, and gear, such as a medical kit, cooking kits, clothing, fishing gear, and navigation equipment.

  The best part of Ed’s plan was that the boat would take only six to nine months to build if we worked full-time. He gave us the name of a boat builder who he said might work with us in the initial stages. A week later, we tracked down Rob O’Rourke, a middle-aged Irish American in an old cow barn owned by a retired Portuguese farmer in Touisset, Rhode Island. Rob was lovingly sanding his J/24, a popular recreational fin keel sailboat, for the upcoming racing season on Narragansett Bay when we met him. His son from an estranged marriage was coming to stay for the summer, and Rob was working hard to get the boat ready for the June opening of the summer sailing season. Rob also needed money. He needed it so much that the little we offered him to work with us on the boat hull was accepted without argument.

  Within the week, we had struck a deal with Tony, the Portuguese farmer, and moved into another part of the barn, which was terribly dilapidated from years of disuse and lack of upkeep. The ceiling of the long, one-story, cedar-shingled structure was covered with moldy sheetrock loosely nailed to the cobwebbed ceiling joists. Frayed wires poked through holes in the sheetrock, with low-wattage, excrement-covered light bulbs dangling off the ends. We replaced the ones hanging directly over the boat-building area with clean, one-hundred-watt bulbs and suddenly the barn looked worse. On either side of our boat-building platform were the poop-covered remnants of wooden cow stalls. Tony still kept hay at the far end next to the bunny hutch, where Lucy, a sweet-tempered beagle mix, had her unending litters of puppies. Tony’s boat-building space cost $100 a month, a sum we could barely put together after daily expenditures on fiberglass, marine plywood for the deck and hatches, stainless steel bolts and nuts, and various other marine items. To build a boat and meet minimal living expenses, we needed to live frugally and eventually find sponsors.

  Beginning in June 1980, we worked for more than seven months building the boat. One hot morning in early July, Ed, Peter Wilhelm—who was a fellow member of the NBC and collaborated with us the whole time—Curt, and I met at Tony’s barn to fiberglass the outside of the hull. We unrolled long pieces of fiberglass cloth and mat so Curt and Peter could cut the fiberglass to the shape of the boat. Ed and I mixed buckets of resin and everyone then furiously spread the pink-tinted resin over the hull with paint rollers before it hardened.

  Another weekend we divided efforts, and I took the train to New York City to buy charts and arrange transportation for the boat and ourselves aboard a Yugoslavian freighter to Casablanca, Morocco where we had decided to begin the row across the Atlantic. When I returned, Curt and Peter proudly showed me the major changes that had taken place while I was gone: the hull had been released from its frame, turned over, and put into a receiving cradle. It was beginning to look like a real boat!

  By the end of July, it was time to put the bare hull on the water to see how well she rowed. Early one warm, muggy morning, Peter Wilhelm showed up with a borrowed trailer. Ed, Curt’s sister Lynn from New York City, and Saville family friend Peter Thomas came down to help us with the launching of the boat. It was turning into a brilliant summer day as we drove the big pink hull the short distance down the road to the town’s landing on Rhode Island’s Mount Hope Bay. Since we wanted to know how the boat would row when fully laden, everyone pitched in to load bay water in the hundred empty gallon milk jugs that Peter Wilhelm had brought with him in his VW van. Each gallon weighed slightly over eight pounds, and, combined with all of our weights, the simulated weight was nearly 1,400 pounds, which Ed and Curt thought was close to what the completed boat with all the supplies and us in it would total. Everyone took a turn rowing on the makeshift rowing platform, including Tony, the farmer, who had the most fun of everyone. The day was a great success: the first major test of the boat design and its construction had been met.

  Money, however, was now a problem. There was a boat hull but little savings left to fund further building. All of our time and resources were going toward the project. For the rest of the summer and into the fall of 1980, I spent my days divided between writing sponsorship letters and working on the boat. Some days, when it got too cold to sit in the car and type on my old college portable Smith Corona, I would drive over to my Portuguese grandmother’s house in nearby Somerset, Massachusetts. Grandma never asked me why I wanted to row across an ocean. Or why my clothes were smelly, since I lived with my husband in the barn on a half-completed boat or camped in the car in the cornfields behind the barn. I would come into her kitchen, which was fragrant with the smells of calde and linguiça sandwiches in fresh Portuguese bread, and soak up the warmth and comfort she gave me so I could go back out to the boat again. She always gave me a soup container or two of calde verde for Curt.

  Tony Rodriguez, our barn landlord, never ceased to find humor in the situation. He thought it was the funniest thing to see me typing away in the front seat of the Pinto station wagon. But he was impressed when the results of all that work started rolling in, in the form of boat equipment from sponsors like Frank Beckerer, president of Beckson Marine, who came to see us in October 1980. To prepare, we gathered Curt’s color slides from a long distance row in the unfinished boat we had taken on Narragansett Bay in September and set up a projector and a screen presentation in the barn. As soon as Mr. Beckerer arrived, Tony went out to greet him. The two had a lot in common, since they had both grown up on farms.

  When Mr. Beckerer had seen our slides and examined the boat hull, he declared, “I have to tell you, you have a good boat here. But you have a lot of work to do to finish it.”

  Curt explained we were working on the bulkheads and expected to put the cabin structures in next. Mr. Beckerer seemed satisfied. He took out a catalog that profiled their plastic deck and cabin hatches and said, “Beckson will be happy to supply you with anything you need in exchange for mentioning us on any sponsorship publicity you do.” When Mr. Beckerer had come and gone, we were buoyed in spirit for days afterward, and that night we celebrated at the Old Venice Restaurant in Warren, Rhode Island, with the cheapest and most affor
dable pasta dish on the menu: a heaping plate of $1.99 spaghetti dressed in oil and sautéed garlic. To fill our stomachs with more carbs, we shared a can of Budweiser beer.

  For the fall, to break the tedium of working in the barn day after day, I had offered to fill in temporarily as a coach for the women’s crew at my alma mater, the University of Rhode Island. Curt and I had rowed all our belongings in the incomplete boat hull south through Narragansett Bay to the wooded shoreline of the Narrow River in southern Rhode Island, where we camped out in a tent. By chance, Peter Wilhelm, our boat-building friend, was coaching the men’s heavy weight crew, so the three of us lived together like hobos, camping, coaching, and boat-building on a shoestring budget, since our coaching positions paid nothing.

  The lack of pay for coaching the women’s crew was all the more irritating when some of the women complained about my coaching skills to the team’s university advisor. When summoned to his office, I explained to Dr. Mottinger, my old crew team advisor, that I set our crew practices for 6 a.m. because during the day my husband and I were building our ocean rowboat to cross the Atlantic next year. While I agreed that they might have trouble hearing me call instructions from the launch I used, with Curt at the engine, to travel beside the women’s eight and four, I pointed out that I had no megaphone because the men’s lightweight coach would take it for his team. I was mortified when he told me I was fired. On my last day with the URI women’s crew, most of the girls were shocked to learn that I was building an ocean-rowing boat with my husband, the launch driver, and living in a tent beside the boathouse because we couldn’t afford to live elsewhere. Some even came down to see the boat after our last practice.