by Roz Savage
Even though I tried to rationalize it away, there was a sense that in some way this disaster had been a moral judgment. Had I been too proud? Too arrogant? Had I tempted fate? I questioned my motives—had they been pure enough? Had the greater good of people and planet really been my primary goal, or had there been too much ego in the mix?
One night I was browsing through my hosts’ extensive DVD collection. I found a documentary about the Dixie Chicks and put it on the player. Shut Up and Sing tells the story of the outcry that ensued when Natalie Maines, the lead singer of the Texas band, made a political remark during a concert in London just days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all,” she said. “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”
Republicans were outraged. Dixie Chicks CDs were burned in the streets. Natalie Maines received hate mail and death threats. She could easily have caved in and done what so many in her position would have done—backtracked on her comments, claiming they had been taken out of context. But she didn’t. While she made a brief statement a few days after the concert, saying that the office of the President deserved respect, she had meant what she said at the time, and she still meant it afterwards. She was not going to back down. She stood tall, strong, and defiant, and took it like a woman. In fact, she said it again. Her only regret was that the two other women in the band were also affected, emotionally and financially. But they stayed loyal and stood by her side throughout.
I was moved and impressed by her courage. I thought of the huge amount of public criticism that she had taken and survived, and my own recent troubles paled into insignificance. It’s true that the higher you climb, the harder you fall. But that’s no reason not to try and climb in the first place. When you finally got there, the view from the top would be amazing. I reminded myself of the Chinese saying, “Fall down nine times, get up ten.” I had only fallen down once so far. It didn’t matter whether I fell down once, or 9 times, or 99. The most important thing was to keep getting up again.
And so, eventually, I did. The pain of disappointment started to pass, and I began to look again to the future instead of dwelling on the past. I put the 2007 episode down to experience, that invaluable thing that you get just after you need it. I have ever since retained the notion of ultimate flexibility as a guiding principle in my life, acknowledging that we rarely have access to all the necessary information when we have to make a decision. It pays to keep the options open for as long as possible.
IN A HEARTWARMING POSTSCRIPT TO MY ENCOUNTER with the Coast Guard, I later exchanged messages with the base commander, the pilot of the aeroplane, and the pilot of the helicopter.
This message was posted using the contact form on my website:
Hello everyone.
I am Paul, who was the person leading the rescue and assistance effort at CG Group Humboldt Bay. I was also the person who spoke with Roz on the satellite phone, suggesting to her that a decision was needed because of deteriorating factors.
My concern, and those of my Command and the Coast Guard, is and was the safety, health, and well-being of this lady. We all have nothing but praise and admiration for her and her efforts. I am quite honored to have been able to speak with Roz, even considering the situation. I wish her best of luck and health. She can certainly call or write me any time she wishes.
Regards,
Paul Hofbauer, GS-11,
USCG Search and Rescue Specialist
From: Kenny Crall
I was on the Coast Guard C-130 airplane that went out to help Roz today … We’re glad you made it ashore safely and I hope your next attempt is successful. I will continue to watch the website for news. You gained another supporter in me. What you are doing is amazing and I have the utmost respect for you. I hope we don’t meet again under the same circumstances on the mighty Pacific. As we say in the Coast Guard, Roz, Fair Winds and Following Seas.
Ken Crall
From the pilot of the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter:
Roz–
You are very welcome.
I have been tracking your website now and probably will until you get to [the other side of the Pacific]. You have touched many people here in the Northern California area. What you are doing sounds absolutely crazy at first, but once I met you it seemed more than worth it as your true being is embellished with every word you speak.
Good Luck on the journey to come and we will keep you in our prayers!
Stephen
LT Stephen T. Baxter
Asst. Aviation Operations
Public Affairs Officer
Group/Air Station Humboldt Bay
I took their respect and good wishes with me as I once again prepared to embark upon the Pacific. The next time there would be no false start. My credibility depended on it.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE UNIVERSE WILL PROVIDE
“Everything works out in the end.
If it hasn’t worked out yet, then it’s not the end.”
— UNKNOWN
There was never any doubt in my mind that I would carry on with my bid to row the Pacific Ocean. But first of all there was that awkward little problem—that my boat seemed unable to stay the right way up—and it had to be addressed.
The Brocade was now back in San Francisco, considerably the worse for wear. It wouldn’t be too difficult to replace the broken electronics and the sea anchor, but I needed to come up with a strategy for preventing future capsizes. I found myself discussing this vexing question with the skipper and first mate of the Cheyenne, a record-breaking catamaran belonging to the late Steve Fossett, the legendary American adventurer. Except at that stage nobody knew yet if he was indeed late, or just … late. He had been on a solo flight in Nevada when he and his plane had failed to return. Nobody knew what had happened to him, and a huge search operation was underway.
Before his fateful flight, and while my boat was still drifting abandoned offshore, my shore team had been investigating options for retrieving the Brocade. The Cheyenne had been one of the few vessels traversing that part of the ocean between San Francisco and Hawai’i, so my team had made contact. Steve Fossett had given permission for the Cheyenne to divert from her course to pick up my rowboat. However, at that point I still hoped to resume my row from the spot at which I’d been airlifted, so I had overruled the suggestion. Very shortly after that, Steve Fossett had gone missing.
NOW THAT THE CHEYENNE CREW AND I both found ourselves in San Francisco with unexpected amounts of time on our hands, we met up for a drink. The skipper was a Brit called Mark Featherstone, originally from the Wirral in Cheshire, my home county, but more recently of Salcombe, Devon. With him was Nancy Scurka, a pretty and robust young woman with long blonde hair, whom Mark introduced as one of the best fibreglass craftspeople in the business.
We brainstormed ideas on how we could stabilize the Brocade. My theory was that I had inadvertently made her top-heavy by adding too much equipment up high. I’d been keen to gather all kinds of data that might be of interest to the at-home adventurer, and to this end I had cluttered the superstructure with an array of data-gathering devices—a Davis weather station, two anemometers, a video camera, and a digital SLR stills camera in a large metal drum. This had all joined the existing barrage of technology: a Sea-me radar target enhancer, the GPS antenna, the Iridium satphone antenna, the VHF radio mast, a navigation light, and a rail light from Eric’s solar gadget company, Simply Brilliant. Also stowed up high were my new oars. After all four of my carbon-fibre oars had broken on the Atlantic, I had chosen solid ash oars made in Oregon, which weighed 13 pounds apiece versus the 3 pounds of their predecessors. I had four of them on board, adding another 50-plus pounds above the boat’s centre of gravity.
All this weight alone, I was able to see, could have been enough to make my boat turn turtle. In fact, it now seemed a miracle that it had been able to self-right with all the extra po
undage. No single item seemed excessive, but in combination they had been enough to disastrously alter the Brocade’s equilibrium in high seas.
I was more than happy to strip away a lot of this superfluous weight. The oars would stay, but much of the rest could go. I wanted to take no chances, so I would also increase the weight down low, just to make sure. I knew that it would slow me down, but reasoned that I would rather lose a fraction of a knot from my average speed in favour of staying the right way up.
We mooted various possibilities, including the addition of a daggerboard, a removable fin that would protrude from the bottom of the hull to provide extra weight and improve the boat’s directional stability. But this would have required major reconstruction of the hull, and I didn’t have the budget for such extensive work.
Phil Morrison, the British designer of my boat, became an invaluable part of this process over the weeks that followed, as Mark, Nancy, and I consulted him on our proposed changes. E-mails, sketches, and photographs flew back and forth across the Atlantic as we discussed options.
Eventually we settled on a workable and relatively low-budget solution. We would install 200 pounds of lead shot in the bottom of the hull, creating false floors in the footwell and one of the lockers and using resin to seal the small lead balls in place. We would also add an extra five inches of depth to the chine, the rib that runs longitudinally along the lowest point of the hull, again to add extra weight but also to mimic the stabilizing effect that a daggerboard would have given.
IT WAS A STRANGE TIME FOR Mark and Nancy. Their boss was missing in action, and until he was either found or declared officially dead by the authorities, their future was uncertain. Pending an outcome, they pushed on with business as usual. That beautiful speed machine, the Cheyenne, was to be dismasted and reincarnated as a submersible launch vessel, and this work took up most of their day. Nancy would then stay after hours, working long into the evening to make the modifications to my boat. I dropped in from time to time at the boatyard in Alameda, and I was profoundly grateful for, and impressed by, the high standard of her work.
One day I turned up to find the Brocade slung from Cheyenne’s underbelly, beneath the vast netting trampoline that stretched between the two bladelike racing hulls of the giant catamaran.
“We needed a hoist to get your boat off her trailer while we fitted the new chine,” Nancy explained, “and Cheyenne was the nearest convenient thing. And your boat is about the same size and weight as the submersible, so this doubles up as a test for the modifications we’ve made to Cheyenne.”
The contrast between the two vessels could not have been greater. My little Brocade, top speed about 5 knots for a few seconds while surfing down a wave, swinging beneath the Cheyenne, top speed about 40 knots. The only things they had in common were that they both floated, and both would appear in the Guinness book of records.
AFTER A COUPLE OF MONTHS OF WORK, my boat was ready, and I bided my time waiting for spring to bring more clement weather and the opportunity to try again. Over those months, I often thought back to the events of that fateful day and wondered how it might have played out differently. I considered the various points in time at which I could have taken a different path. What would have happened if I had been less attached to leaving from San Francisco, and so could have gone earlier in the year from a different location? What if I hadn’t mentioned my predicament in a blog post, if I had decided not to make contact with the Coast Guard plane, if my weatherman had picked up his phone, or if I had continued in my refusal to accept a rescue?
A friend tried to console me by telling me, “Everything happens for a reason.” I pondered this. I was not convinced, although I could see why it would be a comforting belief. Many people may find it disquieting to imagine that the world could be a random place in which bad things can happen to good people while the unscrupulous prosper. There is a desire, either innate or engendered by myths and fairy tales and Hollywood, for justice and harmony to prevail. We want to believe that our immediate tribulations will eventually lead to some reward, or that we have subconsciously invited this adversity into our lives because it will teach us a valuable lesson.
After long reflection, I found that I could not believe that there is any guiding force, either external or internal, that puts these obstacles in our way. We don’t “deserve” it, or subconsciously “want” it—some stuff simply happens, be it good, bad, or indifferent.
I had first considered this possibility on the Atlantic. For much of that crossing, I took it terribly personally that the ocean was being so mean to me. Winds blew me backwards. Waves tipped my boat this way and that, and occasionally right over. Currents whisked me off course. These things happened so often that I couldn’t believe it was just bad luck; there seemed to be a malevolent will at work. A wave would come along at precisely the wrong moment and slosh into my dinner mug, swamping my meal in cold, salty water, or one would soak me just as I was about to retire to my cabin for the night.
I tried to figure out what the ocean was trying to teach me. According to the traditional hero’s tale, the hero is made to suffer so that he can learn an important lesson. When he has this breakthrough, he is rewarded with the removal of obstacles and unimpeded progress towards his goal. For a long time I thought that if only I could work out what lesson I was supposed to draw from my sufferings, the ocean would relent and let me pass.
Eventually I realized that the ocean was not rearranging the laws of physics purely for my edification. It is not a sentient being. The ocean was completely and utterly indifferent. It wasn’t trying to teach me anything. It was simply doing what oceans do.
Instead, it’s how we respond to adversity that makes it meaningful. The trouble itself doesn’t mean anything, but it does present us with an opportunity for growth and learning, if that’s how we choose to receive it. It doesn’t “happen for a reason” in the sense that the reason arrives externally, conveniently packaged up in the adverse event. But we can choose to find positives in the hardship, to glean something productive from a tough experience. We don’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we choose to respond to it. This is where our true power lies.
How, I asked myself, will I respond to this? As I moved forward, I learned that some people love to carp and criticize, and that it says more about them and their inadequacies than it does about me. I would learn to keep problems to myself and my core team until they were resolved. And most of all, I would continue. The best way that I could answer my critics was to go out again the next year, wiser, better prepared, and do it right this time.
And so, eventually, I stopped reliving the past. I decided that while it is good to analyse mistakes in order to learn from them and not repeat them, beyond a certain point there is nothing more to be gained. I would accept what had happened and move on. With the passage of time, the pain and humiliation subsided. Everything passes, eventually.
I HADN’T HAD A PERMANENT HOME since 2002, when I moved out of the one I had shared with my ex-husband in London, so while I waited for spring 2008 to come round, I travelled to a variety of places, governed by whim, inclination, and free rent. By the time I returned to the UK to hike the West Highland Way in Scotland with my younger sister in late September 2007, hopes of finding Steve Fossett alive were fading. By late November I had visited New York, Hawai’i, San Francisco, Seattle, and Montana, and Fossett’s wife was petitioning to have her husband declared dead. By February 2008, I had been dogsledding in Minnesota, spent time with friends in Oregon, done a speaking tour of New Zealand, and settled into a guest cottage back in the Bay Area, and only then was Steve Fossett finally declared dead by a Chicago court. I was sad the world had lost such a great adventurer, but quietly appreciated that those tied to him could begin to seek closure and move on. By spring 2008 Mark, Nancy, and I were all free to pursue our respective paths.
IN MAY, MY DREAM CAME TRUE, and I was able to leave from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, as I had hoped to d
o in 2007. All the media attention of the previous year had backfired when my bid ended prematurely, so this time around, my sponsors and I decided to take a low-key approach. It helped that circumstances dictated a midnight departure, which might have looked like I was skulking out under cover of darkness, but in fact was timed to coincide with the slack water at high tide. These conditions would put me in the right place at the right time to derive maximum benefit from the outgoing tide, which can rip through the narrow channel under the Golden Gate Bridge at a rate of up to five knots, a helpful slingshot out into the Pacific.
I had been offered use of the ramp and facilities at the Presidio Yacht Club, on the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Just a couple of hundred yards away from the yacht club is Coast Guard Station Golden Gate. In an ironic twist to the previous year’s tale, the Coasties came over, uninvited, to inspect my boat just a couple of hours before I departed. The previous year I had tried every avenue to obtain an inspection, and this time, here they were without my even having to ask. As far as I could ascertain, they were unaware of 2007’s drama, and I didn’t want to revive the subject. Their inspection could have been due to concern for my safety, while a cynic might suggest that it was inspired by the presence of a TV camera crew making a documentary about them—but out of respect, I would say no such thing.
In the pool of brightness cast into the night by the camera spotlights, they inspected my Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), my “ejector button” in case of dire emergency; VHF radio; satphone; and fire extinguisher. My boat and safety equipment having been deemed seaworthy, I put the oars in the oarlocks, and to a smattering of applause and cries of “Good luck, Roz!” from my small group of supporters, I once again set forth across the Pacific.
I rowed carefully out of Horseshoe Cove, emerging from the sheltered bay into the main harbour. The orange lights of the Golden Gate Bridge glittered on the ruffled water. I tried to paddle out under the bridge, but it felt as if the tide were still coming in, preventing me from making headway. Tides couldn’t run late, as far as I knew, so this shouldn’t be happening, but the undeniable fact was that I had to row hard just to stay in one place.
