The first day we would tour St. Paul’s and on the following day, St. Anthony’s. Though a hiking trail of twenty-some miles, best traveled with a Bedouin guide, connects the two in a north–south direction, the drive to reach each one is far from the Suez–Hurghada coastal road, circuitous and stretching for long, desolate miles through the rugged terrain of the Eastern Desert.
November 24, 2011: Eastern Desert, Egypt
The bus winds its way slowly along the narrow paved road to St. Paul the Anchorite’s Monastery in the Eastern Desert. I look out my window and see a landscape of brown ochre rubble-strewn hills and limestone cliffs that mark the western edge of the South Galala Mountains. Except for an occasional acacia or tamarisk tree, the land is starkly barren and devoid of greenery. As we drive closer to the foot of the South Galala Mountains where the buildings of the monastery nestle, the bus passes a couple of young Egyptian Copts walking along the road’s edge, pulling their rolling suitcases. Someone says they have probably just spent a few days at St. Paul’s in retreat. Now, they are walking the seven-and-a-half-mile road to the Suez-Hurghada highway, where they will catch a minibus back to Cairo.
I wonder what the Copts found in their days of spiritual contemplation. Did they renew their energies to go back into the hectic world of Cairo, currently at the center of Egypt’s latest version of revolution? The Coptic Christians were finding Egypt an increasingly stressful place to live, as Islamist factions vied for political dominance. Perhaps the quiet and spiritual vitality of the area would reinvigorate them and give them hope for a peaceful resolution to the country’s problems.
Once we pass through the steel gates that close off the compound to outsiders, the tour guide points out two recently built churches with barrel-shaped roofs. I glance over at the churches, but my real interest is in picking out the hiking trail that I know traverses the Galala Mountain range behind St. Paul’s and goes north for twenty miles to St. Anthony’s. The two are the oldest working monasteries in the world, linked by the trail that passes over precipitous rock cliffs and navigates huge open desert wadis.
In April 2001, Curt set off to hike this trail, leaving from St. Anthony’s to go south to St. Paul’s. His motives were not much different from those of the two young men I saw this day. By taking on the challenge of a desert hike on his own and perhaps confronting the devil, as the desert fathers originally intended when they first retreated here in AD 300, he probably hoped to chance upon the same sort of renewal as the Egyptian Copts, and that he and I had found on our rowing voyages in the 1980s.
Each time we had gone out on a rowing trip, either on the ocean, a river, lake, or coastline, we came back happier than when we left. It seemed that rowing Excalibur, Guinevere, or the sleek racing shells took us to new landscapes that continually forced us to look at our surroundings with new eyes. It was about focusing on one thing without the distraction of other people or excessive environmental interference. The process led us each to personal renewal, like a cleansing of the mind and spirit. Every time Curt stepped into a natural landscape, I’m sure the tensions in his body went away as he moved forward to find again that essence of who he really was.
After a tour of the Cave Church, where Paul may have lived as early as the fifth century AD, and having admired the recently restored fourteenth-century frescos, our university group sits in an outdoor picnic area to enjoy lunch overlooking the mountains. Others kick back and suntan in the lingering warmth of the late fall afternoon. I wander over to a black-robed monk sitting in a chair by the parking lot. I hope he can speak English, because my Arabic is limited. “Excuse me,” I say. “Where is the hiking trail to Mari Antonios?”
“Antonios?” he counters, his gray hair poking out the edges of his embroidered cap.
“Aiwa,” I nod and repeat, “yes, a trail”—I make a walking gesture with my fingers—“to Mari Antonios from Mari Bula.”
He nods and stretches out his left arm toward where I had seen a white sandy path behind the buildings. Then he curves his arm back and up to show me that the trail goes behind and then sharply up to the plateau that spans the distance between the two monasteries. He points to a towering flat-topped rock mountain in the distance and repeats, “Antonios.”
I smile and thank him in Arabic, “Shokran,” and walk back to the bus. In my mind’s eye, I imagine hiking the trail myself, like Curt, going off solo to find my way between the two monasteries.
The Red Sea
The setting sun casts shadows of soft gray over the garden filled with magenta bougainvillea and hibiscus bushes at the resort. I stare at the Red Sea, in the solitariness of my balcony, a glass of bad Egyptian red wine in hand, my open journal on the bamboo table. A strong, cool, northerly wind ripples through the palms and sends the sapphire-blue waves tumbling down the length of the Red Sea and onto the beach of the resort. The sound of the waves breaking one after another accompanied by wind gusts sets off a flood of memories and I’m back on the rowboat, huddling with Curt in the bow cabin, listening to the ocean waves breaking hard outside the thin walls of the boat’s hull.
The next day we will continue the bus tour to St. Anthony’s. Maybe there will be the chance to see the trail that Curt took on his hike, though time is limited because of the tour group. Over the past weeks before the trip, I fantasized about quietly detaching from the group, a simple rucksack on my back with plenty of water and bread, unlike Curt, and walking in his footsteps. In my fantasy, I go along the monastery walls until I encounter the trail that goes freely into the desert wadi, and eventually climbs to the plateau in the direction of St. Paul’s. My fantasy, though, seems to always end at some point between the edge of the walls and the open desert. I always return to the group.
I close my journal with barely a sentence added to the morning’s notes and take one last look at the Red Sea before going to bed. The next day I’ll be visiting St. Anthony’s.
November 25, 2011: St. Anthony’s Monastery
It is with some trepidation that I climb onto the bus with my fellow passengers this morning for the forty-minute ride to the monastery. It’s another brilliantly sunny but fiercely windy day on the Red Sea; huge whitecaps break with the regularity of a metronome, gathering themselves up to crash down a second later, pyramid-shaped wave after wave.
The bus travels south along the narrow coastal road, the arid South Galala Mountains rising sharply on one side and the blue sea on the other. Supertankers, vaguely outlined in a white veil of sea fog, motor south from the Suez Canal. Small green wooden fishing boats with masts fore and aft bob up and down in the protected waters of marinas, their bows and sterns secured with heavy lines to cement quay walls. Their captains wait for the sea to calm itself.
Around a sharp curve and ahead in the distance, I catch sight of an enormous plume of blue-gray smoke swelling ominously into the blue sky. We continue and by now everyone on the bus has seen the smoke. A feeling of excitement comes over me; I feel like an accidental voyeur. Maybe it’s an ocean-going tanker on fire or a building on land, because the smoke plume is thick and heavy as it extends high over the leading edges of the mountains.
The next curve in the road brings us to the shocking sight of a fuel truck lying across the road engulfed in thick, black billowing smoke. There is a sudden burst of orange-red flames as fuel ignites. The entire roadway in front of our bus is burning furiously, fanned by the wind from the Red Sea. Our bus screeches to a halt as cars, one by one in front of us, jam on their brakes at the sight of the flames. The bus driver flings open the door and one of the faculty jumps off to see if people need help. The rest of us wait, peering through the front windows. He returns to say that there has been a collision of two fuel trucks and the drivers were pulled out in time, though that seems doubtful from the apparent violence of the crash. Both fuel tankers, blackened and lying on their sides, are entirely swallowed up in deep orange flames.
As the flames burn, I realize that we will not get to the monastery this day, because there
is only one road to St. Anthony’s from here and it is blocked. It will be hours until rescue trucks with the proper equipment arrive from Cairo, three hours away. We all climb out of the bus and gawk with occupants of other buses and cars until our driver honks his horn madly, realizing the traffic is steadily building up behind us and that, in a short time, we will be locked into a traffic grid for hours. The bus turns around and we head back to the resort for the rest of the weekend.
The sea air is chilly in the evening. I meander along the resort beach, my bare feet shuffling through the cool sand as I look for shells and think about the day. The sun has set, and a yellow-pink glow outlines the sharp, jagged ridges of the Galala Mountains. I wonder how many secrets they hold of the people who came to renew themselves, like the two Copts we saw leaving St. Paul’s or the desert monks who never leave or the hikers like Curt who seek renewal in a trek and then plan to go back the way they came. Is there a way to enter the desert of the mind and a way to leave?
Desert Islands: Beginning Anew
In 2014, I returned to the Red Sea with my university on its yearly trip to the Red Sea monasteries. This time we were successful in reaching St. Anthony’s, where I had the chance to walk briefly outside the walls of the monastery. The forty minutes I spent in quiet contemplation on a small rocky hill, building a cairn from the sandstone rocks and pebbles that were scattered about as the light desert wind blew, reminded me of the hours I’d spent on Excalibur’s deck watching the hypnotic action of the waves forming and reforming around our boat. Like those times knowing Curt was in the cabin nearby, on that day at St. Anthony’s Monastery, I felt him nearby again.
I thought of my conviction at the end of the South Pacific row that I would always be driven to explore anywhere and everywhere in the world, as Thoreau put it, “the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of being alone.” Now, more than thirty years later, I had done a lot of traveling in my life through working and living overseas, and what had driven me in 1980 to propose rowing across the Atlantic Ocean and in 1984 to commit to another ocean row almost three times longer than the Atlantic was still inside of me. I wondered, is there ever an end to the desire to explore life on another island and experience the pleasure of rowing to its shore as the Other?
Is it like what Giles Deleuze says in Desert Islands and Other Texts, his philosophical treatise on desert islands: “Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter—is it dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone—or is it dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew?”
I resolved as I got up and left the tiny rock cairn I had built for Curt on that sandy hill outside of St. Anthony’s that I would never stop looking for the answer.
Epilogue
THIS IS HOW I BEGAN the talk I gave at the Extreme Women Conference at American University in Cairo, Tahrir Square, on March 22, 2016. It seems a fitting conclusion to this book.
Today’s my birthday, but I’m not telling you this so you can wish me a happy birthday. It’s the way I’ve decided to begin my talk for this Extreme Women’s event at AUC because it’s the starting point for the story I’m going to tell you today.
It was thirty-five years ago, to the day, that I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday on the ocean rowboat Excalibur. Five days earlier, my husband, Curt Saville, and I had rowed out of the port of Casablanca, Morocco in our red homemade ocean rowboat to row over 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Within hours of rowing into the choppy waters of coastal Morocco, I was hanging over the side of the boat throwing up everything I had in my stomach and wishing like hell that I could get off this miserable boat.
For five long, frightening days, we attempted to row south toward the Canary Islands, where we planned to turn right and row due west for the Caribbean island of Antigua. This is a distance of 3,600 miles according to the present-day GPS route, but in 1981, with our navigation instruments, which included a sextant, a compass, and the latest air navigation tables, the distance was more like 3,800 miles. Our route was not in a straight line because we were vulnerable to the current, wind, and waves.
In those first five days on the Moroccan coast we encountered gale-like conditions, a steady stream of shipping traffic, and southwest winds that kept blowing us back over the ground we had rowed so hard to gain. It wasn’t until March 22, five days after waving goodbye to our new friends at the Casablanca Yacht Club and rowing our boat fully stocked with a hundred gallons of fresh water and eighty days of food, that the weather finally improved and the wind blew from the northeast. Finally, we were heading south toward the Canary Islands.
And it was my twenty-fifth birthday. I cooked up a fine meal of macaroni and cheese, and for dessert, we shared a soggy and salty slice of birthday cake given to us days earlier by Clementine Polizzi, whose husband was our host at the Casablanca Yacht Club. After dinner, Curt and I sat on deck eating my birthday cake slice, enjoying the warm air while the boat drifted south.
That twenty-fifth birthday in 1981 was the beginning of a voyage that was to change my life forever. It was a voyage that opened my eyes to how I could live my life while exploring what Henry David Thoreau called “the Atlantic and Pacific of our being.” It was this unique form of travel, by water via a rowing boat over long distances, that I would come to crave the years that followed. During those years after the Atlantic row, we continued rowing long distances in the sub-Canadian Arctic, down the entire Mississippi River, along the east and west coasts of the United States, and across the South Pacific Ocean.
I feel fortunate to have this opportunity to share with you the story of these rowing expeditions. I have to say that I gained the impetus to be the Other, the adventurer and seeker of other cultures, from those ocean-rowing days. I would have to acknowledge, though, that I believe my own families’ origins, as immigrants from England and Ireland on my father’s side and from the Portuguese Azores Islands on my mother’s side, also contributed to my impulse to be a lifelong seeker of new opportunities and ways to interact with the world. After all, how can we learn about who we are and what we are capable of without taking a chance and going outside our zone of comfort?
It has been my personal philosophy, brought about by the ocean rowing, that we have to take a certain amount of risk in life to bring about change and that change can be something we really need, perhaps without even knowing. Today I’d like to tell you the story of my ocean-rowing voyages from the days when I started rowing in college to the day, six years later, in July 1985, when we landed on a remote beach on the northeast coast of Australia after rowing ten thousand miles across the South Pacific Ocean. It’s a story of how I jump-started my life by doing something that most people thought was crazy and impossible, though they knew nothing about ocean rowing themselves.
But happily, I didn’t listen to them.
We built our ocean rowboat Excalibur in an old barn in Rhode Island throughout the summer and fall and into the winter of 1980–81. Here Curt is placing batters on the boat frame.
After the hull was completed, Ed Montesi, the boat’s designer, recommended an ocean trial on Mount Hope Bay with a hundred gallons of water to simulate the boat fully laden. She passed with flying colors. Shown: Ed Montesi, me, and Peter Wilhelm.
Peter Wilhelm, Ed Montesi, and me rowing during the ocean trial.
Following Excalibur’s successful bare hull ocean trial, we began to work on the rest of the boat through the summer and into the winter of 1981.
As an unpaid rowing coach for my alma mater’s women’s crew team in the fall of 1980, I had the team rowing practices at 6 a.m. Curt drove the launch for me every morning.
In early February 1981, the boat was complete and ready to be driven to Baltimore, Maryland, where we would travel with her onboard the Yugoslavian passenger freighter Zvir to Casablanca, Morocco.
Several shots of Excalibur leaving Casablanca harbor at the start of our Atlantic row, on March 18, 1981.
Tuning the ham radio so we can listen for the maritime ham operators we checked in with on a daily basis.
Curt working out his stars sights in the cramped bow cabin.
Excerpt from Curt’s Atlantic row navigation log.
An excerpt from Curt’s Atlantic row logbook with comments by me, together with the logbook’s cover, below.
Making a pot of macaroni and cheese with local Moroccan ingredients. See the plastic water pump with the red handle beside my knee that we used to pump fresh water from below deck.
Curt being a good sport while I cut his hair on the windy deck of Excalibur.
Curt developing film on the deck of the rowboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Making ham radio contact with the Wilhelms in Morse code.
Melting rope ends for the sea anchors.
Rowing on the Atlantic in a photograph that Curt took with his remote camera device, which included a plastic box housing the Nikon. He tied a rope to the box and pulled it to the top of the radar reflector. With a quick flick of his wrist, he took the photo by pulling off a clothespin he had somehow attached to the shutter release.
Finishing the Atlantic row. Photograph by Lynn Saville
Rowing into English Harbor, Antigua, to end the Atlantic Ocean row on June 10, 1981. Photograph by Lynn Saville
Curt working on the deck of Excalibur in Vermont as we prepared for the South Pacific row. We would rebaptize the refitted boat Excalibur Pacific.
Repacking Excalibur Pacific while on board the Callao, Peru–bound commercial ship Strider Fearless, in June 1984.
Rowing for My Life Page 34