Rowing for My Life

by Kathleen Saville

  Back in the boathouse, ten of us lined up on one side of the Pocock and pulled it halfway out. At Sue’s command, Marion and her group ducked under and stood up on the other side. Then, at the next command, we lifted the 61-foot, 285-pound boat to our shoulders. Again at Sue’s command, we marched forward, some of the new people staggering under the weight of the boat, the gunwales digging into their shoulders. It was hard to believe that we weren’t going to fall down the hill with the Pocock crushing us to the ground. As we began our descent, the experienced rowers gripped the gunwales harder while the new women cringed under the boat’s weight. Just when the boat began to dip precariously toward the ground, a loud voice boomed out, “If you’re going to fall down, make sure your body is under that boat. I say again, make sure your body is under that boat! That boat is worth more to me than you are.”

  That was Jon, of course, who was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. I straightened my legs and climbed downward, stepping carefully over the railroad ties. At the dock, Sue told us to push the boat up and over our heads while grabbing for the footrests in the center, all in one fluid motion. The boat plopped into the water, with the new people letting go at the last second when the boat’s weight was the heaviest.

  “Hold on to that boat and don’t let it go!” Jon again. I didn’t recall hearing him scream so much at the men.

  Marion went out with the first group, coached by Sue, while I waited with the others. I stuck my hands in my sweat jacket and looked at Jon. He had a scowl on his face.

  “Most of you girls are here for a scenic tour of the river.” The guys aren’t too bad looking either. “Most of you won’t be here tomorrow because all you want is a pretty little trip down the river.” He scowled some more and stepped away.

  He was beginning to irritate me. This guy didn’t know me at all, and he had just lumped me into a general category of useless people that he obviously wanted nothing to do with. Maybe his plan was to discourage the women rowers so he wouldn’t have to coach us.

  The next day, I exchanged my little red shorts for gray sweatpants and joined Sue and the other women for the next practice. After one afternoon’s scenic row on the Narrow River, I was hooked. And Jon was just going to have to put up with it.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Night We Met

  November 1977

  IT WAS DRIZZLING LIGHTLY AS I walked along the soggy banks of the Connecticut River carrying a couple of oars. My crew team had just posted a solid third-place finish among ten women’s fours at the Head of the Connecticut, a two-and-a-half-mile rowing race. Despite the cold rain, I was buoyed by the excitement of the race as I shoved the wooden sweep oars onto the boat trailer.

  “Hey, Kathy!” When I looked over, I saw an old friend waving and drinking beer by a couple of single rowing shells in boat slings. Next to him was a man I didn’t know. I strolled over, and Ron introduced me to Curt Saville, the newest member of the Narragansett Boat Club, a Providence, Rhode Island rowing club that I had been a member of since my sophomore year, in 1975. We shook hands and surreptitiously looked each other over as Ron chatted about the latest NBC gossip. Curt Saville, whom I later learned was ten years older than me and had come to Providence to teach at Brown University, was about my height with a stocky build. He must have been cold, because his blue eyes were startlingly bright in his pinched white face. The hood of his sweat jacket was tightly knotted under his chin, making him look older than his thirty-one years.

  Amid all the bustle of competing rowing teams carrying long, sleek rowing shells to and from the river, I chatted with Ron and Curt about rowing and the Narragansett Boat Club. When Maggie, our women’s coxswain, strolled by to say it was time to pack up our boats and return to Rhode Island, I said a quick goodbye and left.

  A week later, with nothing special to do, I caught a ride to Providence with a rowing buddy to go to the annual fall Narragansett Boat Club cocktail party, held at their boat club on the Seekonk River. There, amid the cases of tarnished silver trophies and old wooden oars fixed to the walls, was Curt Saville standing by the bar with a drink in hand. I threaded my way through the crowd to the bar and ordered a Coke. When I looked over at Curt, he smiled. I smiled back, and we began a conversation that went on throughout the cocktail party. We moved to the center of the room and continued talking, while friends occasionally came by to say hello. I learned that Curt had planned to go to a Peace Corps interview in Boston the evening of the cocktail party but the call confirming it hadn’t come in time for him to catch the bus to Boston. When I asked him why the Peace Corps, he replied it would be his second stint if he got in; his first had been in 1968 to Bolivia and El Salvador.

  “What did you do there?” I asked.

  “I was first horn in the National Orchestra of Bolivia and trained local musicians. One of my students, in fact, came to the US through a fellowship I helped him get.” He added, “I also did a lot of climbing in the Andes before the Peace Corps was kicked out, and I finished up in El Salvador.”

  I looked at him, my interest piqued. That was a lot of information. “That’s really cool. How did you manage to climb and play in an orchestra at the same time? I mean, didn’t you have to be in La Paz?”

  He smiled and looked happy at the memory. “We did a lot of tours to villages outside of La Paz, in the Amazon basin and to remoter areas of the Andes. My Peace Corps friends and I played informal concerts and did some climbing.”

  He went on to tell me about climbing 21,122-foot Illimani and others in the Cordillera Blanca range, and the one that he was most proud of: 22,841-foot Aconcagua. He had done Aconcagua with his fellow Juilliard graduate and Peace Corps volunteer Richard “Dobbs” Hartshorne, who was also on those local concert tours with his double bass.

  I was impressed. My only travels outside the United States had been to Spain and Portugal as a teenager with my mother. When he told me his family had lived in Italy a couple of times during his parents’ sabbatical years while on the faculty at Duke University, I was even more impressed. His years living overseas were so exotic to me and his attending schools like Juilliard and Yale for an MA in music so prestigious that I wanted to know more, as though by knowing how he did it, I might someday have such an adventurous life too.

  After an hour of solid conversation, I was looking at him, his face framed by his lanky, straight blond hair and arms sketching out the shape of a mountain or length of a note he would play in a Mozart concerto, when I noticed he was outlined in a soft glow from the dim lighting. At that moment the entire room shifted and tilted. I blinked, and the room was upright again. There had been no physical earthquake, but a seismic shift in my being had left me breathless. I was falling for this man.

  Peter Plimpton, a friend from my high school days at a Quaker girls’ school that shared classes at the nearby boys’ Quaker school and now a fellow member of the boat club, came up to us. Curt knew Peter slightly, so we three chatted together for a short while before Curt and I moved off to the deck of the boathouse to continue talking about his Peace Corps days and his climbing adventures on Baffin and Ellesmere Islands in the High Arctic. In the dim yellow light cast through small square panes of the French doors, he described his travels among the Quechua in Bolivia. He spoke so passionately about the muscular arms and strength of the Quechua women compared to American women’s arms that I felt I had to defend myself. My arms were strong and muscular too, I said, pulling up my sweater sleeve. There had to be something I could best him at in his storytelling.

  “I row crew, and I’m pretty strong. Here. Feel my muscles,” I said, making a fist and flexing my forearm. He nodded and agreed that I was strong like those Quechua chicks. I smiled, and before I left to go home that night, I accepted his invitation to meet at the boathouse the next morning for a row on the Seekonk River.

  The crisp fall air felt fresh and invigorating the next morning as I waited for Curt on a wooden bench on River Road, across from the NBC. I was reliving our meeting at last nigh
t’s cocktail party and thinking about how much fun it was talk about adventurous travel, when I was startled out of my reverie by a guy dressed in white shorts and a blue sweat jacket who came running up to me. For a moment I didn’t recognize Curt, and then I was so happy when I realized this smiling guy was here for me.

  We crossed the road, undid the lock to the chain fence that secured the boathouse along the riverbank, and signed out a boat to row together. We took our oars down to the dock, then lifted the double rowing shell from its rack in the boathouse and carried it down to the water, where we set out to row our first miles together on the flat, calm waters of the Seekonk.

  CHAPTER 3

  Learning to Row Together

  1978

  BY THE OFFICIAL START OF the rowing season in the spring of 1978, Curt and I had decided to train together for a race in the mixed (one woman/one man) double category. We had found that we could depend on each other to be at the boat club for practices. Though we liked rowing together, sometimes rowing the double with two oars apiece, it was a challenge to combine our styles and make the shell move smoothly through the water.

  My three and a half years of rowing on a university crew team, along with summers spent rowing singles at the NBC, had endowed me with a certain amount of expertise over Curt’s homegrown style of rowing. I had the benefit of almost daily coaching and the experience of numerous races competing against college and club teams in boats with four and eight rowers. After my freshman year and a summer of rowing and competing in singles at the NBC, I had decided that rowing stroke, the position nearest the stern end of the boat and the most competitive seat to win, was where I belonged. I rowed stroke for two and a half years until my plummeting GPA took precedence over my rowing career. In later years, I would facetiously tell people I had majored in rowing and minored in textiles and history, my real majors, at the university.

  Curt had experience kayaking and rowing simple wooden rowboats, but his training at the Narragansett Boat Club was limited to a few coaching sessions in singles and doubles. After we had spent part of the fall of 1977 and early spring 1978 rowing together on the weekends, I felt we worked together well enough to compete as a mixed double in races in the New England area. Curt had no idea what he was getting into when we began racing together. It was at our first event that he learned how competitive I could be.

  “Come on, sprint! Dig those oars in, put some power on!” I shouted from the stern rowing seat of our racing shell as we approached the finish line of our premier 1500-meter race.

  “I’m rowing as hard as I can,” Curt gasped. He thought we were doing well because out of a field of three boats, we were in second place and holding off the third-place team by several boat lengths. In the last 250 meters, I increased the rowing stroke, the number of times per minute the oars are pulled through the water, and we glided across the finish line to come in a close second. Curt dropped his oars and let them drag in the water. He leaned over the gunwales with a sick look on his face.

  “Pick up your oars and keep going!” I yelled, turning back to glare at him.

  “I thought the race was over!” he protested, but we rowed another ten strokes before I deemed it was OK to put the oars down. If I had tried to drop my oars right after reaching the finishing line in my college races, not only would the coxswain who steered the boat yell at me, but I might have gotten an oar jammed in my back from the rower behind me who had kept on rowing.

  One afternoon, after work in his new job as a photographer with the city of Providence and before our daily rowing practice, Curt decided to stop for a beer with a mutual friend at the old Met Café in downtown Providence. Though he didn’t tell me, I sensed something was wrong with the balance of the boat when we started our practice.

  “Come on, you’re throwing the balance off! Pull through evenly.” There’s nothing worse than an overly competitive college rower, which I was at the time.

  “I am pulling through evenly! You’re leaning to one side and tipping us over.” And so it went, back and forth, until Curt got so angry and aggravated that he just wanted to jump overboard and leave me to get the boat back to the dock by myself. But since we were nearly at the NBC, he held his temper and said, “All right, let’s just go in. This practice is not working out.”

  We put the boat and oars away in silence. But the next day at 5:00 p.m., we both showed up at the boathouse for practice. We knew we had made a commitment to train and enter other races together, and neither of us would let disagreements stand in our way.

  A few nights later as the metal window fan pumped away in the small living room of Curt’s second-story apartment in Providence, we had a long discussion that would begin to define what our relationship would come to embody.

  “You know, rowing in a double can be frustrating,” he began, while mixing up a couple of the Black Russians that had become our favorite summer evening drink.

  “Yeah, I know,” I interjected. “We’re bound to have differences. I’ve been rowing and competing for over four years, you know.” He nodded as much to himself as to me as I added, “And I think that I know the sport better than you.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve put in a lot of time on the water in the last year, so I think I know how to row.”

  “Right,” I said, “just like if I started playing the French horn a year ago, I would know as much as you do?”

  He laughed, and I had to admit to myself that it was a weak rebuttal, because four years of college rowing couldn’t be compared to fifteen years or so of conservatory and graduate-school training in classical music.

  “Okay, okay, we’re bound to have different ideas on rowing styles like we do on life, right?” I countered. “So let’s leave any differences at the boathouse and not carry them into our relationship.” Neither of us liked to fight. We understood that about each other. Later on, when we were to spend long periods of solitary time in each other’s company, this ability to resolve differences amicably helped us enormously. But early on in our relationship, I wondered if this almost compulsive distaste for fighting when one or both people lost control of their tempers, especially on my part, would result in issues that would never be worked out.

  We toasted our new understanding with a click of Curt’s yard sale glasses filled with Black Russians, and the issue was closed. For the next few rowing seasons, we continued competing as a mixed double, though we never won a race. Instead, it was becoming apparent to both of us that our forte was in our ability to row long distances, albeit at a slower but steady pace than our competitors, who would leave us in their wakes as they sprinted to the end. Knowing that we were on our way to developing a strong relationship where we could always depend on each other helped to push us over those finish lines.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Penobscot River Paddle

  September 1979

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER WHEN THE autumn leaves were turning shades of deep gold and claret red, I grabbed my backpack and joined Curt Saville as he packed his old Pinto station wagon full of camping gear for a week-long canoe journey in northern Maine. When we arrived at the foot of Moosehead Lake, at the small town of Greenville, we drove over to Holt’s Flying Service where we met John Holt and rented one of his sixteen-foot aluminum canoes. Curt arranged for us to be picked up by a floatplane ten days later at the foot of Chesuncook Lake. We pushed off from the dock, with the canoe outfitted with rowing seats that Curt had brought along from his family’s summer camp and a boatload of carefully packed dry meals and camping equipment. Amid the festivities of the annual Greenville floatplane rally, we pulled at our oars, skirting the edges of the course where one noisy floatplane after another landed like an oversized loon, kicking up choppy waves and a cold spray.

  Over ten days’ time, in cool temperatures and occasional rainy days, we followed Henry David Thoreau’s route memorialized in a trilogy of essays that make up his book The Maine Woods. It was the first time I had ever gone on a long-distance rowing trip and in such a remote a
rea. Curt, who was an old hand at canoeing and camping, loved being out in the wilderness again. Every night, after the food and cook kit were packed up and hung in the trees away from the bears, we settled on our down sleeping bags while I read passages from The Maine Woods, comparing our experiences in 1979 with Thoreau’s in 1853, nearly 130 years earlier. The banks of the present-day Penobscot River, I had noticed, were still cluttered with standing and fallen pine and spruce trees that sheltered the moose we would spot slipping into the river. All along the shorelines of Caucomgomoc Stream and the Lobster and Chesuncook Lakes were enormous piles of bleached gray driftwood left over from the days of heavy logging. Time in the Maine woods, it seemed to me, had stood still since Thoreau’s journeys.

  Every day we spent rowing and camping in the cool fall air of the North Country softened any uncertainties of the future of our relationship, though Curt was now considering a move to New York state for a new job. I had strong feelings about what teamwork consisted of that came from my years rowing in college. To me, it was about unwavering commitment and giving your all to the team, whether it consisted of two people or a shell of eight rowers. If we were going to continue this relationship, possibly long-distance, could I count on him to “stay with the team” and be a good partner? Did I even want a long-distance relationship? When Mr. Holt arrived ten days later, first circling overhead with the floatplane’s two, large, boat-like feet protruding from the wing struts, I felt pangs of wistfulness and regret. I was sorry my days as a novice explorer of remote, uninhabited rivers and lakes of the Maine woods had come to an end. I looked at Curt and realized he felt the same. It was then that we became aware of how well we’d gotten along over the past week and how much we’d been able to count on each other during the times when the weather turned foul and the boating conditions rough. Working together had come naturally for both of us.