For now, in 1991, the days of wondering how and where we would explore seemed frivolous, especially with the boat gone. I might never forgive Curt for losing Excalibur, but I could be grateful to him for unknowingly pushing me off my self-appointed throne of heroic adventure. I remembered reading a book years ago by Chay Blyth, who had rowed across the Atlantic Ocean with John Ridgeway from Cape Cod to Ireland in the mid-1960s. They received a lot of publicity for their row, and Ridgeway was eventually knighted. Though Blyth was not knighted, the accolades were profuse enough that he took them to heart. But this hadn’t been a good thing, he later said, because he let all the praise of his great abilities go to his head. In his self-inflicted conceit, he spent too much time lapping up the praise before he was finally able to recognize how rich the quality of his inner life had become as the result of the Atlantic row. He had gone to the edge, as I had, looked over, and pulled back in time to value what the experience had taught him.
I was worried that if I didn’t pull back from that edge now, I would never get to value what each experience had taught me.
No Longer Famous for Five Minutes
In early fall 1991 we had arrived back in the United States from the fiasco of losing Excalibur Pacific. We were in Durham, North Carolina, at Curt’s mother’s house. My head was still spinning from the series of events that had brought us back from Morocco without it, and I continued to feel as though I had lost a part of myself, as I’m sure that Curt did. It was as if a gaping hole had been torn out of my heart and my identity was no longer Kathleen Saville—Woman Rower of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Builder of an Ocean Rowboat. Everything that defined who I had become since 1981 was gone.
It was time to come up with Plan B. Curt was under the impression that National Geographic and ETAP boats, a Swedish sailboat manufacturer we had visited at a boat show in La Rochelle, France, on our way from Morocco to England before returning home, were still interested in sponsoring us for a solar crossing, but he was wrong about that. National Geographic was upset because we had said that all three of us were going on the solar crossing of the ocean and only Curt did. They had given the expedition cameras and film. While Curt had filmed the entire trip from Casablanca to the Spanish Sahara and brought back the tapes to show them, he hadn’t succeeded in completing the crossing and had lost the cameras. We spent a couple of months making many phone calls to our contacts at National Geo, and though they watched the salvaged films and one of the editors told us how eloquent Curt had been in describing his fear of traveling the ocean alone, they finally dropped us entirely. It was a miserable and humiliating period.
ETAP was also not interested in our proposal that they provide us with a sailboat to cross the Atlantic Ocean while showcasing solar energy. Perhaps we hadn’t written a convincing proposal, or our lack of ocean sailing experience concerned them despite our ocean rowing and navigational skills.
We spent another month in Durham before heading to our home in northern Vermont. When we arrived, we found that while we had been in North Carolina, the US State Department had left a message on the answering machine, requesting that we contact them about a boat we had left in Morocco. We talked it over and decided to do nothing. There was no money to fly back to Morocco, and there was no money to ship the boat home. Basically, we had shot our credibility by abandoning the boat.
On an earlier visit to Durham in late 1989, I was watching television at my mother-in- law’s home when I saw a program about teaching English as a foreign language. I asked Curt if TEFL was what Beth Ruze, our friend from the South Pacific row, was still doing for a living. He said yes, and I began to think about it. We needed to make a living somehow, and I had always wanted to do graduate work. When we got back to Vermont, I enrolled in a graduate TEFL certificate program at St. Michael’s College in Colchester which I completed in the summer of 1990 before we left for Curt’s unsuccessful solar expedition. I loved going back to school and the feeling I was taking control of my life while providing us with the possibility of foreign travel again. When we returned from North Carolina this time, I applied to and was accepted into a master’s program in TEFL at St. Michael’s.
In late spring 1993, after I had completed my master’s, I was waiting to hear about an English teaching fellowship to Pakistan from the United States Information Service (USIS). The job would pay a relatively measly amount for a family, but the benefits were great. USIS and the sponsoring Pakistani college would employ me as a US State Department English teaching fellow and Curt as an English teacher. We would be provided with a house and Christopher’s schooling at Aitcheson College, the most prestigious boys’ school in Pakistan, which educated old-money and nouveau-riche boys from ages four to eighteen. Round-trip airfare for all three of us and a small insurance policy were also provided.
When the call came, I was offered the job. It was one of the most satisfying moments of my life. I had won a competitive fellowship to teach and do teacher training at two colleges in Lahore, Pakistan.
I worked for two years in Pakistan. The first year was spent learning how to teach and teacher-train. When the English language officer asked me to travel for workshops in Islamabad, Peshawar, Karachi, and Multan, I said yes. I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to travel as much as possible. Curt did well in his job as an English teacher in the Upper School at Aitchison. The faculty and students respected his ability to express himself well, and the older Pakistani staff admired his abilities as a classically trained musician. The problem was with Christopher’s schooling. Unbeknownst to us, Aitchison College, where we would live on campus and Chris would attend second grade, was in the second half of its academic year when we arrived. No one had thought to tell us that Chris had missed the entire first half of second grade. Even with the help of a sympathetic teacher, it became apparent that Aitcheson’s competitive, memorize-or-be-shamed curriculum was not going to work for us. We took Chris out of school and home-schooled him for the rest of the 1993–1994 academic year.
In the second year, I was offered a renewal of my fellowship and was moved to Islamabad, where I worked as a materials writer and teacher trainer at Allama Iqbal Open University. The TEFL work I did was enjoyable, but my personal life was not. Curt and I had decided that Chris needed to be schooled in Vermont for the next year because the first year in Pakistan had been such a wash for him academically. For a brief time, we had considered sending him to the Lahore American School, but my fellowship salary and the small stipends we received from Aitcheson had not been enough to cover LAS’s tuition.
Saying goodbye to Christopher when I left for Islamabad was horrible. He didn’t cry and make me feel guilty, but he looked so sad that I felt like the worst mother in the world. I said goodbye to Curt, who was going to take care of Christopher in Vermont and probably practice the horn. I didn’t know what he was going to do to make money on his end; this was something we never talked about. He had worked a year in Pakistan and that was it. My fellowship salary was paid partly in dollars, which I had deposited in our Vermont bank account, and the other part in Pakistani rupees, which I lived on in Islamabad.
During the second half of my year in Islamabad, I began looking around for another job overseas that would pay well and bring us together. Living and working in our small town in Vermont was not an option, since I had a master’s in teaching English but not certification for public-school teaching. One day, while thumbing through a listing of TEFL jobs in the Middle East, I saw an ad for teaching at Kuwait University’s business college. I applied and didn’t think anything of it until I had been home in Vermont for a couple of months in 1995. The call came in late fall inviting me to join the faculty of Kuwait University beginning in January 1996. Would I be able to sponsor my family? I asked. Kuwait’s education office at their embassy in Washington, DC, told me that I probably would after a couple of months. I took the job and once again felt terrible saying goodbye to Christopher as I left to fly to Kuwait City, the capital of a Gulf country where expatriat
es from all over the world came to make their tax-free salaries and live lives very separate from the host country nationals, the Kuwaitis. The expatriates’ salaries at the university were less than half that of the Kuwaitis’, though they taught an equal number of hours and students.
One night after work in early September of my second semester, I lay on the living room couch in my solitary, two-bedroom apartment reading the Kuwait Times with its graphic color photographs of the daily bombings in Tel Aviv, the television going in the background for noise. I was depressed at being away from my family and feeling restless and trapped. I had yet another four months in Kuwait before completing a contract I had no intention to renew. The entire time I was in Kuwait, I had tried to find a job for Curt, but it turned out that, unlike a man, a woman couldn’t sponsor her spouse and son for a job or even visitors’ visas. I missed my son with a fierceness that never went away. I sighed and continued reading the newspaper until the On-going Activities section caught my eye: “Meeting of the X Sailing Association. All sailors and beginners welcome. Monday at 7 p.m. in El Sabahiyah.”
When Monday came along, after a day of teaching at the university, I called the local taxi service in nearby Shuwaikh. Within a half hour I was sitting in a meeting room filled with other expats listening to the club captain extol the virtues of sailing and racing. It seemed the real purpose of the meeting was to recruit members for the weekly competitive sailing races. An intense-looking man glanced over at me and said, “I’ve got you on my team.” There was no request or introduction. I stared at him aghast. There was a bit too much testosterone in the room, and I got up to leave.
But in order to leave, I needed to call a taxi. That was when I met Joe and Emma. They were looking for people to join their weekly happy-hour sails from the yacht club on the Kuwait City waterfront. They were definitely not interested in racing.
All the way back to my apartment, in Joe’s four-wheel-drive Pajero, we chatted about sailing and recipes for making twenty-gallon trash containers of the best red wine from Kuwait Dairy products’ red grape juice. Joe promised to bring a couple of bottles of his wine, and I promised to bring cheese and crackers for the boat. Things were looking up for my time in Kuwait.
For the rest of the semester, every Thursday’s sail became a lifeline I grabbed hold of tightly, and I suspect my fellow sailors did as well. For those few short hours that we sailed on a straight line, away from the Kuwaiti coast toward the calm waters of the upper Persian Gulf, it was like being on a different planet. I could turn my head with the wind in my hair and watch with pleasure as the sun went down in a soft, luminous, reddish glow behind the mosques of Kuwait City. At times like that, I appreciated the beauty of the call to prayer as each note floated in melodious harmony over the blue waters of the Gulf. The tensions of being a bad mother far away from family, and of being an expatriate in a strange culture, dissolved in the blaze of the setting sun and the gentle motion of the breaking waves.
The nine months I spent in Kuwait, with a paid summer ticket home in between, gave me the teaching experience I needed to apply for better jobs. When I got on the plane heading home in January 1997, having sent my last paycheck ahead to Curt via Kuwait’s very efficient banking system, I was certain that I would never want return to any country in the Gulf.
CHAPTER 44
Egyptian Lives
IN MARCH 1997, I WAS in Orlando, Florida, for the national convention for teachers of ESL/EFL to interview for jobs in the Middle East, where I thought the highest salaries were being paid. After two years in Pakistan and one in Kuwait, my chances were excellent for scoring a well-paying job that would have family benefits as well.
As I thought, there was no problem getting interviews with Gulf universities, but the only ones in the wider Middle East and North Africa region that I would consider were Sultan Qaboos University in Oman and the American University in Cairo, Egypt. Both interviews went well, but the job application I was given after being interviewed by two young Omanis, in dark suits like myself, was decidedly odd. Halfway through the question list was an item inquiring about my job habits. The questionnaire had been building to this question, but when I came to it I was appalled nonetheless, and because of it I dismissed the thought of going to work in Oman. It asked: “How long is your period and has it ever prevented you from going to work?”
The job description for a USAID (United States Agency for International Development) education project hosted by the American University in Cairo was more positive. I liked the people I interviewed with and the benefits even better, because they included housing, airfare for all of us, health insurance, a savings plan, and most importantly, educational benefits for Christopher at an American international school. I hoped our family would be on our way to Cairo by the summer’s end.
When the offer arrived in late May for the AUC job, there was no question whether I would take it. We didn’t have jobs or any particular direction in our lives, though Curt had been making noises about returning to the Atlantic Ocean for another solar voyage attempt. I chose to ignore them because I had finally found a position that covered the whole family and was in an exotic location. I knew that living in Cairo, a city of sixteen million in 1997, would be a tremendous contrast with any place we had ever been, including Lahore, Pakistan. I also knew that Curt, who was always happiest living in nature, might feel stifled within the confines of a big, third-world metropolis, but he had gone to the Juilliard School in New York City and lived in Bolivia and El Salvador in the Peace Corps, so he had a feel for life in the big city and in the developing world.
After having worked jobs that paid decent salaries, I wasn’t willing to continue living in the economically depressed Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with a small child and without steady work, while waiting for another expedition eureka-moment to strike. I didn’t want to continue buying our food from the “dented can” stores, places that sold out-of-date canned goods and damaged cereal products that Curt enjoyed visiting because of their down-and-out ambiance. Our few dollars left over from building a barn with wood from our land, financed by my profitable Kuwait year, were going into maintaining another used car and buying huge piles of wood cores from the local plywood factory to heat our tiny, leaky Casa Grande. During the days, I substitute-taught in the local public schools while Chris, who was now eleven years old, attended the Holland Elementary School and Curt hung out at the family summer camp in Morgan. It had become obvious to me that our lifestyle was not about choice; we were buying dented cans for food and driving a perpetually broken-down car because we couldn’t afford anything better. I was not willing to stay in the North Country living poor anymore, and I was not willing to go back overseas without Christopher.
In late August 1997, an eighteen-wheeler arrived at the end of our one-mile dirt road to take trunks full of our clothes, books, and Curt’s darkroom supplies for shipment to Cairo.
Though we had worked together as a family to prepare for our new lives in Cairo, Curt and I hadn’t really been communicating well for months. Curt knew that living overseas had always been a stimulating experience for me, but the circumstances of how I had happened to be in Pakistan, Kuwait, and now Egypt were my own doing. Yes, he had agreed to go to Cairo, but this new life, like the other foreign stays, had come about through my, and not our, instigation.
Living on my own in Islamabad had reawakened the excitement I’d felt at the end of the Atlantic and Pacific rows. It was as though my inner being knew I was once again on the path of personal discovery. Where did he fit in all of this? I am sure he wondered, as we prepared to leave for an indefinite period of time in Egypt, perhaps through all of Christopher’s secondary-school years.
Egypt
“Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness…. Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes dow
n.”—From On Walking, by Henry David Thoreau
It was February 9, 1998, and a strange blue-white light flickered unevenly from all the light bulbs in our Cairo apartment. A faint crackling sound accompanied each flicker. When I had made my emergency maintenance request to the university’s housing department the morning after Curt’s departure to Vermont for a few months, an electrician came armed with only a bag of new light bulbs to replace the ones that he figured had burnt out or were in the process of burning out. The housing office hadn’t believed me when I said all the lights in the apartment had been flickering oddly like this for a couple of days.
But when the electrician came out of the kitchen after checking out the fuse box, he was very pale. He walked up to my desk and said, “Doctor, the fuse box needs replacing. Can I use your phone to call the gama [university]?”
I nodded. After his call, he showed me the large fuse box by the kitchen door that led to a landing in the middle of our multistoried building in Maadi, a southern suburb of Cairo. Shockingly, most of the wires were melted. Why? I asked. He explained there had been a surge in the electricity and because the box had not been properly wired, the wires melted when the power jumped from 220 to 280 volts. He and a colleague would have to rewire the box immediately, before a fire broke out. I looked at him, not sure of what I was hearing and understanding. Our fancy seventh-floor apartment on the Nile River Corniche was so badly wired that we could be victims of a fire any day if it wasn’t repaired now? He nodded unhappily. I didn’t know what to say in response.
The flickering and crackling of the lights in the living room gave Curt’s departure a strange aura. He hated the city from the moment of our arrival, and within a short time had begun making plans for the next solar electric voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. He would be motoring his way across the Atlantic in spring 1999 if all went according to plan.
Rowing for My Life Page 31