Within a month, the Mississippi River odyssey was over and we were back in Vermont. Curt was convinced he would be able to refine and extend the adaptation of Excalibur Pacific so that one day soon, he or we would be able to make a solar electric crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.
With an increasingly strong sense of detachment and trepidation, I watched the modifications take shape. The sinuous lines of Excalibur Pacific’s hull that Ed Montesi had designed so beautifully in 1980 were being badly distorted by the added piping and batteries, and soon she looked like a dejected workhorse weighted down with an ugly metal harness. Now, instead of using a donated electric engine, Curt began to build his own solar motor.
One evening in the late fall of 1990, when Curt and I had been skirting for weeks around who was going on the Atlantic solar boat trip, Curt decided to push me to say whether I was going or not. He walked up to the U-shaped counter in the kitchen.
“What do you think? This solar trip needs two people to run the boat.”
My stomach clenched, as it always did whenever this discussion began. He wanted me to go; in fact, he needed me with him. This I knew and feared.
“Do you think there’s enough space for all of us? We’ve got more equipment on the boat this trip, Curt. And little Christopher.”
Curt’s eyes narrowed and he said, “You know how much there is on the boat. Chris will sleep between us. The boat will actually be more stable with the amas. You know that.”
“I still think there’s more stuff on Excalibur Pacific than before, and, really, it’s going to be hard to get around the deck and in and out of the bow cabin with three of us.” I looked up and waited for his reply. He was getting annoyed.
His soft voice notched up and hardened as he spoke slowly. “Are you coming or not? Are you going to let me go out there in a boat, fully laden with a hundred pounds of batteries, a full display of solar panels, and God knows what else, while you sit on shore and watch? Is that what you want?”
He was almost yelling now, and I was feeling threatened. I left the security of the U-shaped counter and stood in front of him. He leaned in close, and I took a step back. “Don’t threaten me like that! I don’t want to go on the boat with Christopher, and you know it!”
My courage failed me at this point, and I ran into the master bedroom and locked the door. Over on the other side of the living room, four-year-old Christopher stood in the doorway of his bedroom, watching in puzzlement.
With each new change to the boat, we drove to a body of water on the East Coast for trials. On a placid New Hampshire lake one evening after two hours of preparation and an equal amount of time driving from Vermont, we motored its quiet, calm waters for one mile to a campsite. With a bit of extra power, the bow of the boat was nudged onto a remote sandy beach. I jumped into the shallow waters to pull Excalibur Pacific up while Christopher ran off to explore the beach. I set up camp while Curt checked out the battery consumption for our thirty-minute trip. I couldn’t help but think the boat was overkill for this kind of experience.
In May of 1990, Curt received a grant from the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Fund that would largely finance a solar crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. He had to go now.
CHAPTER 42
In Casablanca Again
1991
IN LATE JUNE 1991, CURT, Christopher, and I arrived in Casablanca on board MV Jean Lykes, whose parent company had sponsored our free Lykes Lines freighter trip with Solar Eagle as deck cargo. The plan was to set off from Casablanca as a family and solar-power our boat across the Atlantic Ocean. That was the official plan. It was the scenario Curt wanted, but I continued to vacillate over it every day. I knew Excalibur Pacific—formerly Excalibur, now Solar Eagle—very well, but the idea of the three of us living on her for an ocean crossing worried me enormously. Over the past year, Curt and I had continued to have huge fights about the expedition. He didn’t want to go alone, while I didn’t think it was prudent for three of us to go. It was one thing for us to take chances on the boat, but it was another to place the life of our child in such potential danger. The Baja California trip had made this clear to me.
Curt continued to push for the family plan. After he contacted National Geographic for support and they had agreed to supply cameras and film, I consented to rethink my position. After all, the people at National Geo had examined the boat in Annapolis and knew what we were proposing to do. Perhaps there was something I wasn’t seeing.
Solar Eagle was lowered slowly over the side of Jean Lykes and placed into the oily waters of Casablanca harbor. Curt climbed down, I climbed down, and when we both looked up at Christopher with our arms upraised, he continued to hold on to Sparky, the ship’s radio officer, who had become five-year-old Chris’s best friend. I can imagine what he thought when he looked down at the deck of Solar Eagle, cluttered with last-minute supplies and a huge battery box that took up a quarter of the nine-foot deck. When he finally climbed down the rope ladder like a true sailor, I put him into the front cabin, which he protested mightily.
At the invitation of a friend’s friend, Curt and I rowed Solar Eagle to the Casablanca Yacht Club, the very same place we had left from in 1981 at the beginning of the Atlantic row. Instead of being feted with fine meals at the club and being given a safe and clean berth for the boat as in 1981, we were told to tie up to the outside of several decaying sailboats. It was only for a day or so, we were told, but it wasn’t easy climbing over the sailboats to get to the boat club’s facilities.
From the deck of our boat, we watched the harbor goings-on: fishermen arriving at 4 a.m. to go out to sea, their deep-rumbling diesel motors starting up in the silence of the early lavender dawn. The harbor would be quiet after they left until 8:30 a.m., when the rest of the little fishing fleet would get going, with many Moroccans leaving for a day’s fishing trip. The boat repair yards were busy, with their work laid out in front of them: sailboats, large fishing boats, military gunboats, and even a motor yacht complete with a white-capped crew and an impressive array of canvas-covered bollards lined up on their deck like a set of pins at a bowling alley. All of these boats would arrive before the tide went out and wait for the rope from shore to pull them up the tracks to the boat cradles that the falling tide would reveal.
It became apparent after a few days that the harbor was not a safe place for a young child. Diapers and garbage floated around the boat for hours. The boat club dogs defecated on the docks. A derelict who liked to sniff gasoline fumes wandered back and forth all day and part of the night. Rats scurried up the pilings that were exposed twice a day when the tide went down. Each morning brought a false air of cleanliness as quaint little wooden fishing boats and big, gaily-painted fantailed fishing liners set off. Everything was sharp and in focus. And then by 8:00 a.m., a white haze of phosphate from the nearby loading facility settled over the harbor, and the illusion was gone.
By July 7, Curt was preparing, albeit unhappily, to depart Casablanca solo on July 9. It had become increasingly obvious to me that the boat was terribly overweight and couldn’t safely carry the three of us. Chris and I would stay at a US consulate member’s home in Casablanca and act as Curt’s communication team; I’d been invited to house-sit while the family went on their summer holiday. When Curt’s sponsors wanted news of the expedition, I’d pass along his location and whatever else he wished to share.
On July 9, when Curt left, his radio wasn’t working, and until he found the time to repair it, he wouldn’t be in touch with anyone. Several of us begged him to stay until it was fixed, but he refused. The 9th was the date he had set for leaving, and he wouldn’t deviate from that. In retrospect, Curt’s departure was a farce. July 9, 1991, the King’s Day, was a national holiday; he had hoped there would be fireworks and other celebrations for King Hassan II at the harbor, but there were none. It was just another miserable day in the filthy port of Casablanca. Though the weather was the calmest and the water the flattest they had been in a while, I knew that would soon
change, which it did in the form of a thunderstorm two days later. Prior to his departure, a low-pressure system had dominated the weather in Casablanca and was creating heavy seas and strong winds. It would have been better to postpone leaving until a week or a week and a half later.
As the days wore on and we didn’t hear from Curt, Christopher and I alternated between fear, anger, and great sadness. My moods varied with the time of day. After breakfast, when the security of the night was over, I pondered where Chris and I should go from there and when. When should we leave the country, and with what? I thought, because I had less than a couple hundred dollars in cash and no credit card.
What a fool I would sound like if I voiced the truth: “Why yes, I’m waiting to hear from my husband, who is at sea—in the Atlantic during hurricane season—in a small, overloaded, solar-powered boat with a broken radio microphone. Yes, we heard news of him, last Friday in fact: a ham operator heard a call sign in Morse code that sounded like his. Nothing else is known.”
That our lives had come to this point made me increasingly upset. I knew Curt lived to take chances, but why, I asked myself, did it have to be like this? Close to tears, I pushed back on the emotions and tried to achieve some degree of detachment. Now was really the same as living on Excalibur Pacific at sea, I told myself, where we simply couldn’t afford to sustain a state of constant fear. I would have to remove myself from the immediacy of the situation by imposing a bit of reserve. Then things would be manageable.
One day, after Curt had been gone more than a week, five-year-old Christopher showed his creative side by making a paper collage of Curt’s face so we could look at it and think of Papa. We talked about it over dinner when Chris stated there were three things he was: mad, sad, and glad.
Mad—about the garbage floating in the harbor waters.
Sad—because Papa was gone.
Glad—because he had Nate, his new friend, to play with and his pool to swim in.
I was pleased I had called Curt’s bluff, but, because he was out there alone, dealing with all his inventions with no one to help and cajole him though the difficulties, I did feel guilty for letting him go by himself in such a specialized craft. Yet, while he was refitting it, each time he had added some new feature, I felt he was pushing me further and further away. When he first talked about a solar voyage across the Atlantic, I thought, “Okay, you’ve pushed me off the boat, whether you know it or not. You’ve taken over a boat that’s mine, too, and committed it to a project I cannot support.”
Curt certainly hadn’t looked happy going out to sea by himself, but when I’d surveyed the impossibly crowded deck of Solar Eagle as it floated in the garbage of Casablanca harbor, I couldn’t help but think, “This is insane. I made the correct decision for Christopher and me.”
As the days passed and we still heard nothing from Curt, people began to tell me what they thought of the situation. In response to my question, “Any ideas of what to do?” Mohamed, a Moroccan acquaintance, said, “I think your husband should not have left you and your son without his radio working.”
After my conversation with Mohamed, I realized how absurd my position as official spokesperson of the Solar Voyage was from the outset, when there could be no messages to report to anyone because Curt had left with the radio broken. Being on the other side of an expedition for the first time, I was hearing things that I might not have otherwise.
One night I had odd dreams. In one, Curt told me he had been blown south to Senegal. In another, Christopher told me his father had gone quite a ways south and had almost made it to the coast of Brazil before having trouble. Both these routes, Curt’s and Christopher’s, I could see clearly drawn out on the chart in my dreams. The next evening, I heard Curt’s voice saying, “Kathleen.” I felt so sad afterward. Was it a bad day for him too? Was he trying to reach me somehow?
On July 29, to our great happiness, Christopher and I heard that Curt had contacted the US consulate to say he planned to go to the Canaries and his ETA was July 31. Later the same day, a new position report placed him south of the Canaries. The message received from a ship was: “We have heard from Mr. Curtis Saville of Solar Eagle, the experimental American boat by VHF. He has damages to the boat and plans to go into Villa Cisneros.”
I looked up Villa Cisneros and found it was no longer called that since the Green March in 1981, the year we began the Atlantic row from Casablanca, when Morocco had seized it from Spain and renamed it Al Dakhla. It appeared Curt had not, in fact, escaped Moroccan coastal waters in the three weeks he had been gone. At 5:30 p.m., I received a phone call from him.
“Things are bad with the boat,” he told me. The hull was badly damaged and the batteries and other equipment were lost. He went on to tell me that in the beginning, the boat motored well, then a storm hit with the wind blowing very hard, and he had to jettison the one ama and batteries.
I asked if he was okay. He said he was, but his voice was shaky. I said, “You had a bad time,” and he answered, “Yes, I had a bad time.”
Fleeing Morocco, July 1991
The hot and airless plastic tunnel was crammed full of hundreds of North Africans and Europeans waiting to get the ferry to cross the Straits of Gibraltar to Algeciras, Spain. The two of us stood shoulder to shoulder with little Chris between us among the crowd. My old cloth backpack was stuffed with a few food items, clothes, journals, and a couple of Chris’s stuffed animals that he had left to keep his father company and that Curt salvaged from the boat before he left it in Al Dakhla, Western Sahara. The salt-stained duffle bag in my hand had a few well-folded navigation charts and boat ropes. Another duffle hanging off of Curt’s shoulder held the metal sextant from the Pacific row, log books, and a couple of water bottles. Even five-year-old Christopher carried a backpack. The rest of his stuffed animals—moosie, seal, and his hand puppet, “the wolf”—filled his pack, along with a change of clothing. The only things Curt recovered from the boat, after three eventful months in Morocco, were in those bags.
The mob moved again toward the gangplank going up to a boat deck. Since our tickets had been checked before the tunnel, all we had to do was get on the ferry and find a place to sit with all our gear for five hours.
Like every crowd scene in Morocco I had been through, it was push and shove. But after three months in Casablanca, I was not above shoving a couple of men aside so I could secure the only two remaining seats in the saloon. I didn’t care anymore, because we were leaving a country that was filled with bad memories and experiences. Curt looked as surprised as the Moroccans at my behavior, but he didn’t apologize to them, and he followed me with Christopher. We sat down and staked our claim by fanning our bags around us like an American-style stockade. At a nearby table was a European family with two small children whose mother looked shell-shocked as the kids wailed. All around us was the usual mayhem: children screaming, men and women shouting in rapid-fire Arabic as mountains of bags from their relatives who were still on deck filled the bar room. If anyone was here for a drink, they were going to have a hell of a time making their way to the bar.
Curt stared out the porthole, undoubtedly occupied with thoughts of his recently aborted solo boat voyage along the Moroccan coast. Was he as upset and disturbed as I was by his abandoning Solar Eagle, aka Excalibur Pacific, our ocean rowboat, the boat we had built by hand ten years earlier to row across the Atlantic Ocean? How did he feel about fleeing Morocco because it appeared the government would detain us indefinitely on trumped-up gun charges? Did he feel a rising emptiness that came with every step we took away from Excalibur Pacific? Was he thinking of how we were going to get back to the States when we had only five hundred dollars and a handful of useless Moroccan dirham between us?
I looked up and saw people moving around, fussing with their plastic bags and luggage. We must be arriving soon. My stomach tightened as we struggled toward the door.
Like a stream of unstoppable floodwaters, the mob surged down the gangplank and broke into a run t
oward immigration booths; Christopher’s legs pumped madly to keep up with us. Across the wet docks we rushed and then, strangely, past the closed customs booths into the steamy night air of Algeciras. No one stamped our passports or even stopped us to ask where we were going, so like all the other ferry passengers, we disappeared into the city and the Algeciras night.
CHAPTER 43
New Beginnings
1991–1997
ABANDONING EXCALIBUR PACIFIC IN MOROCCO badly depressed me, though I didn’t share all my feelings with Curt. Undoubtedly, he was upset about the failure of his solar expedition, an expedition that had been a couple of years in planning. But losing our ocean rowboat meant a final change of identity, to boatlessness. For ten years, friends had called us “the boat people.” In my mind, Excalibur Pacific was my identity. I had built her from scratch and lived a lifetime on her deck and in her cabins with Curt. Our son had been conceived on her deck. Not only had she been rowed thousands of miles on oceans, rivers, lakes, and coastlines, she had been driven back and forth across the United States twice and through hundreds of miles in Canada and up and down the East Coast.
There would never again be anything like that boat and what she represented in my life. But it was time to get going with the rest of my life, I decided, and I was finally going to take control of it. I would wrest my life away from the uncertainty of the expeditions Curt was still committed to and go in a direction I felt was right for us.
Rowing for My Life Page 30