Rowing for My Life

by Kathleen Saville

  In the summer of 1998, when we flew home to Vermont, Curt shared his progress on his latest solar voyage with twelve-year-old Chris because I wouldn’t discuss it with him. It was wrong, I thought, for him to be planning yet another trip that would put his life in danger. It wasn’t fair of him to put us through it again, and I refused to be part of a journey that would undoubtedly be an emotional rollercoaster for all three of us. Nothing, however, could persuade him to do otherwise. Some might think it was admirable that he refused to give up, but surely there had to be other ways to approach a solar voyage that didn’t involve motoring a twenty-three-foot, untested, homemade electric boat, solo, across the Atlantic Ocean. The one time I had agreed to get on it was when we trailered it out to Holland Pond for a so-called boat trial of a couple of miles. With Chris in the center cabin, his head poking out of the square hatch, I sat on the deck and worried the boat might tip over, it was so tender.

  In June 1999, after a year of a dedicated effort building the new Solar Eagle in our yard in Vermont, Curt launched it with the assistance of old friend Peter Wilhelm from the docks of Chatham on Cape Cod.

  Less than a week later, he had to be rescued by a US Coast Guard helicopter a couple of hundred miles east of Cape Cod. The narrow and tippy Solar Eagle had begun taking on water in a storm that had blown up quickly. To save his life before the boat sank under him, he had set off the EPRIB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), hoping the Coast Guard would catch his signal in time. He was in luck because his position was at the outer limits of how far a Coast Guard helicopter could travel on a rescue mission.

  When Curt sent me an email on the evening of his rescue, Chris and I were still in Cairo. I could tell he was still flying high with the adrenaline rush of his near encounter with death. The rescuer, he wrote, had been lowered to Solar Eagle to pluck him off the deck of his sinking solar electric boat. A couple of years of planning and limited sponsorship sank beneath them. As they were winched back up to the helicopter, the line rocked violently back and forth in the high winds and waves. Clutching the only two waterproof bags he’d been able to save as he held on to the rescuer, Curt involuntarily dropped the one with his passport, money, and logbooks, and they fell into the sea. He arrived at the Coast Guard station on Cape Cod and called Peter Wilhelm, who came and brought him back to Rhode Island; from there he made his way back to Vermont.

  During the whole of his latest adventure, Christopher and I had only the slightest idea of what had been going on until we flew back to Vermont in the summer. We found out that he had set off from Chatham only when Peter Wilhelm notified us of his departure. I knew Peter had been working with Curt on the solar expedition. Curt had spent time with him and his mother, whom I had known since 1980 when Peter, Curt, and I had begun building our ocean-rowing boat in my parents’ garage in Rhode Island. Though Mrs. Wilhelm didn’t approve of Peter’s involvement with our ocean rowing at the time, she came to like us, and we felt lucky to be befriended by such kind people when others we knew from the Narragansett Boat Club thought we were crazy to believe we could row a boat across the Atlantic.

  When Curt eventually returned to Cairo, he saw that we had built a good life and had a reliable network of friends there. Despite what had happened to him, he had a place with us, and we lived together as a family for the next two years. He found a job teaching music history at a new private university, and, when semester ended, signed up to substitute teach at the Cairo American College where Chris went to school. When he wasn’t working, Curt packed up his old Peace Corps backpack and went on overnight camping trips in Wadi Digla, a remote, dried riverbed that was close to Maadi, where we lived. After every hike or holiday trip we took together to places like Malta and the Greek islands, Curt would process the exposed rolls of black-and-white film himself in the makeshift darkroom he had created in the back bathroom of the apartment, while sending his exposed color film out for developing. Our lives were coming together slowly as a complete family.

  As parents, our goal had always been to give Chris a more anchored life than he’d had before we came to Cairo. I wanted him to have the stability of long-term friendships and a small but international community to grow up in. Before he left the Modern English School in Heliopolis to attend the Cairo American College in Maadi, we sent him for a couple of years in a row on the yearly school trip to the White Desert of Egypt, and then later to Verbier, Switzerland, on a ski trip. Chris’s schooling was turning out to be a highlight in our lives in Cairo.

  CHAPTER 45

  A Call from the Desert

  April 2001

  THE METAL BLEACHERS WERE HOT in the Cairo mid-spring temperatures as I sat watching Christopher flying down the red asphalt running track, his arms pumping as he easily ran the 500-meter sprint. Where was Curt? I wondered, wiping a soggy tissue over my perspiring forehead. He should have been back from his hiking trip over a day ago. He had gone to the Galala Mountains of the Eastern Desert, at the edge of Egypt’s Red Sea coast, but he had promised Christopher to be in Maadi on Wednesday or Thursday at the latest for the track meet. It was now Friday, April 25, and we hadn’t heard from him in a week. I walked over to where the track runners milled around, joking and laughing with each other. I smiled at Chris when he came over to me, lanky and sweaty in nearly ninety-degree heat. He looked happy and carefree.

  The day had been a good one despite Curt’s absence. It seemed his hiking trip must have taken longer than expected. Maybe he couldn’t find a minibus back to Cairo from Zafarana on the Red Sea, where he planned to go when he finished. Or maybe the hike from St. Anthony’s Monastery to St. Paul’s, a distance of approximately twenty rugged, mountainous miles, was a lot harder than he expected.

  The Call

  The phone rang, and I put down my glass of ice water to run down the hall. Maybe it was Curt and he was delayed in Zafarana.

  “Hello, I am looking for Katzleen Sabille.”

  I frowned and answered, “Yes, this is Kathleen Saville. Who is this?”

  “I have a message from your husband.” I held my breath and waited. “He has a accident in Wadi ——…. His leg is injured.” I didn’t catch the name of the dried riverbed. “He wants you to help. He says to send a helicopter.”

  “What? Excuse me? What did you say?” What he had just said was incredible. Curt had fallen down somewhere near the monastery and he needed a rescue? A helicopter? It was unbelievable.

  “What? He needs me to get him a helicopter? Where is he? How serious are his injuries?”

  “Your husband give me this message for you.” He simply responded and repeated his original message. This man’s English was limited. “I will call again. Thank you. Goodbye.”

  I sat very still on the edge of the bed in Chris’s room, staring at the receiver in disbelief. Based on what this man had just told me, I imagined Curt lying in pain somewhere amid the rocks and sand of the desert floor, parched and unable to move in the 100-degree Fahrenheit temperatures. My notes of the conversation were a bizarre web of single words and question marks and exclamations.

  The phone rang again a few minutes later. This time it was a Frenchman who was at St. Anthony’s, where he had just encountered the Bedouin.

  “Yes, yes. I met this Bedouin, his name is Gamel Mowad. He is right; your husband is in great danger. You must come down right away. We can hike into the mountains to find him.”

  “But where is he? How does this Gamel know Curt is injured?”

  “The Bedouin says he saw him last Friday when your husband left the monastery. He says he saw him again on Wednesday on the plateau. He must have been lost. Then the Bedouin saw him today on the plateau and he came down here, to report a dying American on the plateau above the monastery.”

  I stared at the phone, anxiety building in my gut by the moment as I struggled to figure out what was going on with Curt.

  “You have to come down here now,” he repeated.

  I thought about it for a second, but I realized it wa
s impossible to drop everything as the Frenchman suggested and hire a driver to take me three hours south to the monastery. I needed to put my thoughts together and then plan for a rescue of Curt, who was apparently stuck on a plateau, dehydrated, injured, and unable to hike back to the monastery. Mowad said Curt wanted a helicopter. Where would I get a helicopter? I wondered.

  I thought some more about it and wondered why Mowad went back to Curt a second and then a third time on the plateau. What was he doing there? It seemed obvious to me that Curt had gotten lost and had climbed to the plateau to look for the trail. Or maybe he had been trying to get away from something or someone. I got up to find my book of numbers at the university.

  The door to the apartment banged shut. At the sound of his sneakers trudging down the hall to his room, I looked over to see Christopher, who was glaring at me for being in his room.

  “It’s Pop.”

  His face changed instantly to a look of uncertainty. I hated to burden him, but the words came tumbling out. “He seems to be lost somewhere between St. Anthony’s and St. Paul’s. He wants me to get a helicopter to rescue him.”

  His frown deepened, and he said in some alarm, “What? What’s going on?” I told him about Gamel Mowad and the Frenchman and left the room with shaking hands to find my phone book.

  Waiting and Hoping

  It was nighttime, and Chris and I were in the darkened living room talking about Curt and the impending rescue I had arranged through my university’s security office. We were both upset that Curt’s expedition had gone wrong. Christopher sat at the small desk that was pushed up against the wall, writing the things we would say to Curt once we saw him again. I lay on the old couch, a product of the university’s storeroom, and rested, though neither of us could really relax.

  I looked over to Chris, who was intently writing his notes. He looked tired. I reminded him that it was time to go to bed because the last day of the track meet was an early one. He needed to be rested for his last two races. We both got up and went out to the balcony off the living room. In the distance across the Nile River, garish multicolored lights flickered over the pyramids of Chefren and Kufu from the Sound and Light show that ran every night of the year. We thought of Curt lying out there, in the cold empty desert.

  Early the next morning, the Frenchman, his friends, and a couple of monks from St. Anthony’s planned to hike to the plateau where Curt lay. The helicopter that I had arranged was going to the same spot. A doctor from my university’s clinic was on standby.

  The Frenchman had pushed hard for me to go down to the monastery right away and climb with them. I balked, because we didn’t have cell phones and I needed to be able to call people for this rescue attempt. From what I perceived of the situation, hiking to where Curt was and rehydrating him was not going to be enough. What about a hospital and proper medical care for someone with severe dehydration? If rehydration was all Curt needed, why hadn’t he come down to the monastery with Gamel Mowad in the first place?

  And what about an ambulance and doctors? This was a developing country we lived in; nothing good happened without a lot of effort in planning. I had been on the telephone continuously since the previous afternoon trying to arrange the helicopter, an ambulance, a doctor, a hospital, and then the financing for everything because none of it would be done without guarantees. I called people at the university, the US embassy, my insurance company, and my father in the States, who helped me in reaching other representatives of my uninterested insurance company. I even talked to the monks who were planning to hike with the Frenchman. One of them, an older man, was a physician. The list went on. The nerves in my right elbow were completely numb from resting it on the table with the phone in one hand so I could write with the other. I barely had any feeling in the wrist and fingers of my writing hand as I talked to person after person.

  It was more important to be with Christopher and support him in his competition. While I made the calls, my resentment toward Curt was building—for getting himself into another screwed-up situation and leaving his son so he could go off and live the hero’s saga again. I was also afraid of losing Curt for myself.

  The next morning, we were up early so Chris could be at school for his remaining races. The sun shone hotly once again in the deep sapphire of the Egyptian sky while the air pulsed in the humidity of ninety-degree-plus heat of the early dawn. I thought of Curt in this heat, and my whole body clenched in tension. Apart from the rescue plan I had put in place for today, there was nothing more I could do for the time being. My job now was to support Chris as he ran his races. He had already won a third-place medal in the 500-meter sprint.

  I left him with his track team, huddled under the shade of the red flame tree, drinking water to keep hydrated before their races, an irony that I was sure was not lost on Christopher. I walked over to the PTA office and found the mother I had been in touch with about my promise of a cookie contribution. She nodded in understanding, her eyes widening as I explained our situation: we were waiting to hear about Chris’s father’s desert rescue. I would not be able to make cookies for the post-meet party.

  Between something so banal as cookie making and the sickening reality of Curt’s rescue in the desert, the contrast couldn’t have been any starker. The coolness of the office, the air conditioning pumping away belied the fact that something was terribly amiss in our world. Everywhere I walked on the school campus, I felt as if I radiated fear, but no one looked at me differently. Cairo American College was an exclusive international school for grades kindergarten to twelve, set in a five-acre campus that was a green, flowering oasis in a suburban area south of Cairo in Maadi. Students, parents, and staff entered through an impressive security portal and walked into gardens of tropical foliage, filled with exotic flowers like birds of paradise and shaded by expansive palm trees. CAC’s long white modern buildings framed a full-sized running track, and a cool, inviting swimming pool was located beside the arts building. In contrast, Egyptian public schools less than a mile away had broken glass windows and dirt schoolyards.

  In the grassy center of the track with the other parents proudly waiting for our sons and daughters to be called up for their medals, I stood watching Chris get up on the winner’s pedestal with the other students, hoping with all my heart that we would be sharing the results of the day’s events with Curt.

  The Waiting Game Continues

  I turned the key in the door and walked into the cool, welcoming darkness of the apartment later that afternoon. As I was throwing down my baseball cap and heading for a chair by the air conditioner to cool off, the telephone rang.

  It was the university security officer. He was calling to say that Curt had been picked up by the helicopter in the early morning and was now being taken to El Salaam Hospital in Hurghada, which was south of where he had been found. I was surprised to hear that he was being taken there, because the monks had told me he would go to their monastery for initial treatment. Maybe the hospital would be better. Whatever the reason, an enormous feeling of relief washed over me.

  The phone rang again, and it was the police in Hurghada. They were upbeat when I asked for news about Curt’s whereabouts and pooh-poohed my concerns. I had to fight down an impulse to scream, “Shut up! Stop laughing and just tell me how he is,” but I didn’t, because they held his passport, and I would need their help once I got down to Hurghada. I thanked them for the information and told them I would be flying down right away to bring Curt back to Cairo.

  “Yes,” the policeman said with a giggle. “You can come down and get him tomorrow.” Maybe his condition wasn’t that serious, I thought as I hung up the phone. I grabbed my new credit card, went downstairs and around the corner to the travel agency, and booked our flight for the next day because there was nothing available that evening from Cairo. Things were beginning to feel almost normal now. He would be back with us soon. Chris and I would fly to Hurghada and check Curt out of the hospital. I made sure to pack my international insurance
card and went to the bank for cash. Egyptian hospitals charged much higher rates to foreigners than to locals and most wanted cash.

  When I walked back into the apartment an hour later, the phone was ringing. It was the university doctor, who told me there was a problem. Though the El Salaam hospital in Hurghada claimed to handle renal disorders, they had refused to treat Curt. The doctor said we needed to know if Curt had already been moved, and if both of us called the numbers at the hospital, one of us would reach someone who could say what was happening. Would I pay for the ambulance to Cairo if he had to be moved? Yes, I practically shouted into the telephone. Curt’s condition was far worse than those idiot policemen had told me. Clearly, they had known nothing except that there had been a sick American brought into their local hospital.

  With shaking hands, I dialed the numbers the doctor had given me, and eventually an Egyptian doctor in the emergency room answered, in English. “He’s gone in an ambulance to Cairo.” The doctor sounded annoyed. I couldn’t tell whether his annoyance was with me, because I’d pulled him out of the emergency room, or because he was disgusted at Curt’s being brought to the wrong hospital in such a dangerously dehydrated state.

  Later I learned that the elderly monk had flown with Curt in the helicopter to Hurghada, though the monk had requested they be put down at the monastery. The monks wanted to take care of him and then send him in an ambulance to Cairo. But the governor of the region had ordered by radio that Curt be taken to Hurghada for treatment, regardless of the inadequate facilities. The monk doctor said that when he left Curt in Hurghada, Curt was joking with them and looked as though he would recover. The monks speculated that the Egyptian government had wanted positive publicity from their “rescue of an American.”

  I put down the phone, my elbow tingling in its numbness, and searched the desk for my list of phone numbers. Where was Chris? I wondered as I sorted through the papers. All he knew was that Curt was going to be picked up by helicopter today and brought to a hospital. He had no idea of the severity of his father’s condition.