Viktor IV with Ena and Janneke, 1971

When I was very young, just eighteen, I lived on a Dutch canal boat named the Henry David Thoreau on the Amstel river in the heart of Amsterdam. The boat was a seventy-foot tjalk – a rugged, cold-riveted steel hulled, flat-bottomed, gaff-and-boom rigged sloop built to carry cargo through Europe’s inland waterways. That’s a mouthful, especially if you’re not a sailor.  The easiest way to describe a tjalk to someone who hasn’t seen one is to say it’s the boat one imagines in fairy tales. Rounded and raised at both ends with leeboards instead of a deep keel and with a huge mainsail, tjalks have a magical, mythical quality.

The Henry David Thoreau was built in 1889 and owned by the artist Viktor IV, who acquired it in 1961 and made it into his home and studio. When the glassed-in tour boats that wander around Amsterdam’s canals passed by, we could hear the guides describe Viktor as “The King of the Hippies”. Probably true. Most mornings, Viktor would rise before the sun, made a drawing on a mimeograph blank, run off fifty or so copies on his hand-cranked mimeo machine, and set off on his bicycle wearing a worn-out postal uniform and wooden shoes, his wild, long grey hair and grey beard matching his steel-grey eyes, to plaster the drawings up on walls and on the back of stop signs all over the city. He would scoop up hatch covers lost from other boats that came floating down the river, wash them off, dry them out, and use them as canvases for his large paintings. His art was fanciful, humorous, and at time absurd. I was often reminded of Saul Steinberg but Viktor’s work was uniquely his; not derivative.

The Henry David Thoreau

A few years later, Viktor renamed the boat the Berendina Fennegina. That’s what it was called when Cheech and Chong filmed an LSD trip on board for one of their movies. In 1986, while Viktor was diving underneath the boat to plug a leak, he drowned. It was a testament to his popularity in his adopted city that hundreds of boats followed his flower-covered funeral barge as it made its way slowly up the Amstel and out of town to the cemetery where he was to be interred while thousands of people lined the river banks to pay their last respects. The procession was broadcast live on Dutch television.

I liked Viktor very much, and I adored Janneke, the girl I first came to Amsterdam to be with, but I was absolutely in love with the boat. Every canal in the cities and towns of the Netherlands is lined with houseboats that had begun life a century or more earlier as cargo vessels. A great many others have been converted to traditionally-rigged sailing yachts. They require tremendous knowledge and skill to sail, and endless hours of hard labor and expert craftsmanship to maintain. There are many museums across the Netherlands devoted to traditional sailing craft and the boats are treated as national treasures.

If you haven’t listened to or read my earlier stories, then you will not know that I have sailed all my life and that I studied marine archaeology and the history of seafaring. After a few months living aboard the Henry David Thoreau I crossed the channel to Bristol, England to attend a marine archaeology symposium where I met Peter Throckmorton, a founding father of modern marine archaeology. After hearing his lecture I decided to try for a spot on his crew. When he asked for my address I gave him the name of the boat and her location next to the Blauwbrug on the right bank of the river. He said, “Oh, I know the Henry David Thoreau. It was built in 1889 in Groningen”, and proceeded to give me details of the boat’s history, design, and construction that I didn’t know even though I was living aboard. Such was the breadth and depth of Throckmorton’s knowledge.

I convinced Throckmorton to take me on and I had a few months before I had to set off for Greece, so after I returned to Amsterdam I sought out boatyards working on tjalk conversions and begged for work. On weekends I stood on the banks of the larger canals and rivers and stuck out my thumb. While other young Americans were hitchhiking the highways I was hitching rides on the waterways. The captains of cargo boats, often with their families onboard, were glad for a little company and were quick to invite me to motor along with them for a while.

I dreamed of one day owning a tjalk of my own. For a quarter century I held onto that dream.

In the spring of 1997 I was living in a townhouse on the riverfront of Alexandria, Virginia. For eleven years I had been working under contract to the Australian Department of Defense out of the Australian embassy in Washington, but a new Prime Minister decided my work should be done by an Aussie, not a Yank, and I was wondering what I should do next. I was walking to a restaurant with a girlfriend when I saw an issue of Soundings, a national boats-for-sale magazine, and bought it. I was exceedingly rude to my date as I leafed through the pages while we waited for our food, and my eye caught a listing for a, “52 foot 1903 steel-hulled flat-bottomed traditional Dutch sailboat, $25K”, and a telephone number. I recognized the area code as Baltimore. Could it be true? Was there really an authentic tjalk for sale in Baltimore? It was too late that day to call. The evening was a disaster as far as my girlfriend was concerned. In fact, I have a hard time remembering if I ever saw her again. It was a shame, that, but then, there was the possibility a tjalk was for sale a mere fifty miles away! I was pretty sure there wasn’t another anywhere in North America.

I figured eight the next morning wasn’t too early to call, but I’d been up since five. Couldn’t sleep. The phone was answered on the sixth ring by a broker. Yes, the boat, named Encore, was in Baltimore and was up on blocks in a boatyard next to the Domino Sugar Factory near the inner harbor. The broker didn’t know a tjalk from a smelt (sorry, couldn’t rhyme with tjalk) but his description sounded about right. Encore had sat neglected in a remote part of Baltimore harbor for nine years, and was in bad shape.

I was on the road to Baltimore as soon as I was off the phone. The Gods were kind and I didn’t get a speeding ticket for zooming up I-95, though I more than deserved one. I turned into the boatyard’s entrance and as I passed a building shielding my view of the yard, Encore revealed herself. She was all I had hoped for! A tjalk that had been converted to a yacht in a style I particularly admired, and her rigging was purely traditional. Right away I was certain the conversion had been done at a boatyard in Muiden in the Netherlands where I had worked on a similar project in 1971. I couldn’t believe my eyes, even as I registered the most glaring details of her decayed condition.

I found the broker and got the back story. Dan Rowan, of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in fame, bought the old boat around 1982 and had her converted to a yacht at the de Leeuw boatyard in Muiden. I had nailed it. Rowan named her Encore and he and his third wife Joanna cruised the canals of Europe until the summer of ’87, when he had her shipped to the United States as deck cargo, port of entry: Baltimore. Sadly, Dan died of lymphoma while the boat was in transit.

Encore changed hands a few times over the next decade, but she hadn’t been maintained or sailed. She had deteriorated, her brightwork had faded and pealed, her mast and booms had rotted, her lines had decayed in the sun.

On that day of discovery, I worked through the long list of Encore’s known deficiencies to get an idea of what it was going to take to restore her to glory. The $25K asking price was salvage value, nothing more. I knew a boat surveyor in Baltimore and had him come over straight away. To my surprise and delight, he had already surveyed Encore for another buyer who had given his permission to share the results of an ultrasonic survey of the steel hull’s thickness. There were a few thin spots but for the most part, the news was pretty good. Surprisingly, all the through-hull fittings and the hoses attached to them were in good shape. Rowan has installed a bow thruster and the transverse tube was of a different steel alloy than the steel used to make the hull in 1903. The difference in metals was enough to encourage the corrosion of the tube over the hull. The tube had ruptured and the boat had nearly sunk at its mooring, which was why it was on dry land now. The tube would have to be replaced or the entire bow thruster scrapped and new steel welded over the holes on the bow quarters. The hull, decks, and superstructure would have to be sand-blasted down to bare metal, the weak and thin spots repaired, and then all the steel would need to be protected with modern marine coatings and an impressive number of zinc sacrificials.

The oak leeboards and rudder, as well as all the topside teak, were badly weathered but could be saved with an enormous commitment to sanding and varnish. The gaff, boom, and bowsprit were salvageable, but the mast had considerable rot and would have to be replaced. So too would all the standing and running gear. The hot water heater for the sinks and shower was serviceable but the boiler in the engine room that provided hot water for the radiators in all the interior compartments was like many of the older installations on yachts in the Netherlands. They worked but they were large and burned a lot of oil and were better suited for the basement of a small home. The boiler would not meet ABYC safety standards. It would have to be replaced if I hoped to get the boat insured. Since Rowan had never had a chance to sail Encore on the Chesapeake he had not tumbled to just how hot and humid Mid-Atlantic summers could be. I would need to find hidden spaces for air conditioner compressors and ducting.

A bright spot was that the deep-red Dacron sails were well-used but in good shape! So were the compass, top side engine gauges, jib sheet and halyard winches, and anchors. The 95 horsepower Ford diesel engine was in great condition, and even though the batteries and the big Onan generator were kaput, using shore power I discovered that the rest of the electrical system and navigating lights, though old, were operational, as were the radar and radios. The interior, though dirty, was in very good condition and would be truly beautiful after a good cleaning.

The boatyard would allow me to do the restoration there, and they had the expertise for the heavy work that only a yard could do and gave me some estimates. I did some back-of-the-napkin math and came up with $175K, on top of the purchase price, to fully restore the boat. I wrote the check for the boat and drove back to Alexandria, all the while asking myself, “My God! What have I done?” I was now the owner of 35 tons of rusted steel.

I thought I knew a lot about tjalks. The next day, as I sat at my desk, looking out across the Potomac, trying to piece together a project plan for the restoration of what was now my tjalk, I had an epiphany! I didn’t know shit. I needed to get smart. I booked a flight to Amsterdam the next day and went through my rolodex (hey, it was the cusp of the Internet age), putting together a list of people I had known in the Dutch boating world and wondering how many were still alive or would even remember me. I realized I needed one crucial piece of information I had failed to obtain while I was surveying the boat and it wasn’t in the broker’s papers. I needed the hull number. Nearly all boats larger than a skiff have a hull number carved or etched in a prominent place and registered with the country in which the boat was built. Not that I needed much of an excuse to drive back to Baltimore to see my boat, but I hit the road and was back in the yard with a few hours of daylight left. I needed it all, and the low angle of the setting sun finally revealed the numbers hammered into the starboard gunnel. With luck, I would be able to find the boat’s builder and first owner in the Dutch registry in Rotterdam.

It was no sure thing. I had heard many stories of records being destroyed and boats being sunk in the Ijsselmeer, Rhine, and deeper canals to keep them out of the hands of the invading Germans during WW II. After the war those that had been undiscovered were raised and restored, but the records were still spotty in places.

I checked into my hotel in Amsterdam and looked up my old girlfriend. From hippy fashion model to highly respected judge in a quarter century. Cool. Janneke, her husband, and two sons made me welcome, and it was Janneke who told me the story of Viktor’s death and his incredible funeral.

The next day I visited Berendina Fennegina, still tied up in the same place on the Amstel. She had been cleaned up and gentrified. After Viktor’s death, ownership of the boat transferred to a Danish architect who applied his Danish architectural sensibility and swept the decks clear of all the boat’s original rigging and character. Everything was extraordinarily neat and clean. The owner was aboard and invited me below. Gone were Viktor’s workshop and the bulkhead on which he had laminated $56,000 in U.S. currency. (When I asked why, Viktor said, “I really didn’t really need it, and I thought would look better there.”) The heavy, dark timbers and bulkheads that had once partitioned the interior had been replaced with open birch-paneled spaces and poplar decking. The kerosene lanterns were gone and the interior was bright with modern electric lighting. There was a scattering of sleek, minimalist Scandinavian furnishings. Norwegian wood, isn’t it good. My apologies to the Beatles.

I missed the gritty, pitch-covered, lantern-lit chaos of Viktor’s primitive lifestyle. In fact, I kind of miss the diesel, kerosene, coal-tar, dead fish, and raw sewerage stench that typified all the major harbor cities of my youth. While I acknowledge that today’s cleaner, eco-friendly harbors are better in nearly every way, I miss the filth and odors that hinted at intrigue, mystery, and voyages to far away exotic places, the kind of harbors where a man could walk down to the docks and sign aboard a tramp steamer as a deck hand and be hundreds of miles away by sunrise. I never did that. But I imagined I had!

I rented a car and drove to Muiden, not too far from Amsterdam. The de Leeuw boatyard had gone out of business but had been reopened under the same name by new owners wanting to capitalize on the yard’s reputation. Still doing repairs and restorations of traditional boats, there were a few old-timers there who had worked on Encore’s conversion, but no one who had been there in 1971 when I had done drudge work just to be around the yard and learn. I was hoping they would have plans for Encore’s conversion but all the documents of the original de Leeuw boatyard disappeared when it went out of business. I didn’t learn a great deal about Encore but was able to get sources for parts to repair and replace locally made electrical components, winches, lamps, pully blocks, and other pieces of traditional rigging.

Next I went to the Fries Scheepvaart Museum in Sneek, where I had been told by one of the restorers in Muiden that the director, Jelmer Kuipers, was probably the world’s leading expert in traditional Dutch shipbuilding techniques. Jelmer didn’t disappoint. Over the next two days he gave me a graduate level education in tjalk types, design, construction, repairs and restoration, and traditions. I was greatly encouraged when I showed him photographs of Encore’s mast and he said it was traditionally accurate and that I should duplicate its design and fittings. He also sent off my boat’s hull number to the registry in Rotterdam, asking a friend of his there to expedite the request.

I spent the next week buying bits of rigging and repair parts and was lucky enough to be invited aboard a skûtsje, a slightly smaller, faster version of a tjalk, for an annual race on the Ijsselmeer out of Lemmer. I was surprised, because the race is fiercely competitive and the crews train as a team year-round, but they were short a guy on the high-side, the intended crewman was too drunk I think, and I could be of some real use. I just tried my best to stay out of the way and to crank like crazy on the leeboard winches when told. We finished third out of a pack of a dozen. I bowed out early from the after-race party that spread across all the boats, bars, and cafes in the harbor. A new bottle of beer would magically appear in my hand as I finished the last one, and I simply can’t drink that much!

Over the next several days I drove to all the traditional boating centers in the Netherlands, photographing tjalks and the finer details of their rigging, paint schemes, and unique features. By the time I flew out of Schiphol for home, I felt I was ready to tackle Encore’s restoration.

My first good surprise was a letter waiting for me from the boat registry in Rotterdam. Jelmer Kuipers’ friend had come through! He had found the hull in the registry and sent me a photocopy of the quill-and-ink handwritten page. My boat’s original name was Neeltje, or ‘Little Nell’, and she had been built in Waddinxveen near Gouda in 1903 by a shipwright named Smitt for Johan de Jong of Vlissingen. Later, Jelmer Kuipers would put me in touch with de Jong’s descendants, who had photographs of Neeltje when she was new and many stories of her long career carrying grain and other cargo across Europe’s inland waterways.

I immediately changed Encore’s name back to Neeltje and registered her in Maryland. It’s not that I wanted to abandon Alexandria, but Neeltje’s bowsprit and rudder added another ten feet to her fifty-two feet of waterline, making her too long for any slip or mooring in Alexandria or anywhere else along the Potomac near D.C.

And then I got to work. I had promised myself I would devote a full year to the effort, and freed myself of all other obligations. Without wife, kids, or pets, it’s easier. It would also be the last year of my life without wife, kids, or pets, so I’m pretty sure I’m right about this.

At first I commuted every day from Alexandria to Baltimore and back. As soon as I had the interior cleaned up I slept aboard during the week and used the boatyard’s showers and toilets. It was a sweltering summer but I was exhausted at the end of the day and all I needed was an electric fan to make it cool enough to sleep through the night. Neeltje’s cabins were very comfortable. My diet wasn’t very good. I ate everything the convenience store around the corner form the boatyard had to offer. Hot dogs, fried chicken, pizza, sodas and juices. Yum. But the work was hard and I was shedding pounds like I hadn’t since I started fishing for lobster when I was in college.

The boatyard sandblasted the hull and I had a welder replace the thin plate and weld new plate over the thruster’s ports. Then the yard’s crew started work on applying marine coatings to the hull, installing a modern electrical panel, air-conditioning, a new 10KW Northern Lights genset, and a Webasto diesel-fueled water boiler. While that was going on I sent the bronze prop off to get polished and balanced, then got busy repairing, sanding, and varnishing the leeboards, boom, bowsprit, and rudder. I needed new bushings for the rudder pins and I asked my father, then seventy-six and showing the first clear symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, to machine them for me. It was a small task but I was happy to have found something he could do to help with Neeltje’s restoration. He wanted to do more, but the bushings were the last thing he made in his workshop before his Parkinson’s made it too difficult.

I hired the USS Constellation’s master shipwright Bruce Mackenzie to make a copy of the mast. We made trips up and down the Mid-Atlantic to find the right piece of lumber, finally striking gold in Pennsylvania with an Amish farmer who was selling salvaged timbers from a tobacco warehouse built in 1887. We found a fifty-foot by two-foot by two-foot white pine floor beam that was perfect. I thought it was fitting that the wood for Neeltje’s new mast was even older than the boat. I provided a great deal of the labor to shape the mast while Bruce made the critical measurements and cuts and guided me in my efforts. A tjalk’s mast is mounted on a pivot so it can be lowered to the deck to pass under low bridges. I was nervous as hell when Bruce started drilling the pivot pin’s two-inch diameter hole, aligning a giant handheld electric drill by eye and drilling only half-way through, then flipping the mast and doing the same from the other side. Damn if the two holes didn’t meet perfectly on center. There would have been no second chance if he had got it wrong. I couldn’t have done it. But then, that’s why I hired a master shipwright. With another two weeks of hand sanding, deep sealing with anti-rot solution, a long wait for that brew to dry, and eight coats of Epifanes varnish, (The best in the world. From the Netherlands, of course.) the mast was done.

I had chosen a traditional color scheme of green hull with black trim and a cream-colored deck. While I relied on the boatyard crew for the two-part primer and base coats on the hull and superstructure, the color top coats were one-part paint and I applied them myself. Thank you, whoever invented the paint roller.

All the mattresses and cushions below decks were in excellent condition. Absolute proof the boat had been Dan Rowan’s were the colorful paisley fabrics on the throw pillows. With new bed linens and towels, Neeltje was a showcase of comfortable living. Her Galley was equipped with a four-burner propane cooktop, a bar-sized refrigerator, microwave oven, and a large sink with plenty of surrounding countertop. The saloon was huge and the boat had a minimum of six feet six inches headroom throughout, rising to eight feet over the aft galley. She had two staterooms, one midships with two over-under bunks and a master stateroom forward. Opposite the companionway from the midships stateroom was a head with a sink and aft of the head was a shower compartment, both spacious and comfortable. Forward of the master stateroom was a workshop that also held a clothes washer and dryer, sail and gear storage, and the chain locker. The engine room was beneath the aft cockpit and a lazarette held the propane tank for the cooktop.

Five months into the project and with the propeller, leeboards, rudder, and bowsprit back on, a big moment had arrived. It was time to float the boat. The yard’s Travel Lift lowered her gently into the water. I don’t know what I was expecting. Anything dramatic would be bad. Calm, quiet, and without any gurgling sounds would be good. What I did enjoy were the applause and cheers from the entire boatyard crew, who after all these months and so much of their time and labor put into the boat, were heartened to see a beautiful old lady back in her element.

We left her floating just above the lift’s slings and it would stay there overnight in case there were problems with through-hull fittings or, God forbid, the hull itself. But I wasn’t going to sit idle! It was time to find out what worked and what didn’t. I fired up the generator. The breaker panel lit right up and the electrical systems came alive. I switched on the A/C and heard all the right pumps humming and saw the harbor water surging through the filters in the engine room, then felt the cool air fill the saloon and cabins. It was still Indian Summer hot, but I started the Webasto boiler anyway and heard the ignition, then the turbine spin up and more pumps in the engine room start turning. After ten minutes the radiators in every compartment were pleasantly warm to the touch. Bilge pumps, new VacuFlush head, shower sump pump, freshwater pump, hot water heater, navigation lights, radio, radar, refrigerator, washer, dryer, interior lights, fans, microwave oven, electric propane cut-off valve – I tested everything that needed electricity. It all checked out. I shut everything down and slept aboard that night, getting up every few hours to check for water in the bilges and to visually inspect all the accessible through hull fittings. The boat was bone dry and it stayed that way. The blasters, welders, fitters, painters, and riggers had done a good job.

Neeltje under sail

The yard crew arrived to remove the travel lift slings. With all new batteries, the engine fired right up. Never in the seven years I had Neeltje did her engine misbehave or even complain. With the slings cleared away, I motored Neeltje to the fuel pier where I filled both her 250-gallon diesel tanks and her 200-gallon potable water tank. The boat could cruise for two months on the fuel in her tanks.

I moved her to a spot alongside the pier where the yard’s crane lowered the mast in place and the great stick dropped smoothly into her pivot socket and the pin was driven home. The mast rested in its lowered position while the standing rigging – the shrouds and stays – were attached and the running rigging – the halyards, topping lift, downhaul, running backstays, and sheets – were rigged. All told, the boat had about five hundred feet of new running rigging. It took half a day. Then, Using the boat’s own purpose-built lever, we rotated the mast vertical and secured her forestay. With the help of friends, we bent the sails. There was still a punch list a mile long, but Neeltje was ready to go!

The yard gave me a prime mooring spot alongside the pier. On the next pier over, with a clearance of about fifteen feet between us, was the former Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa, made famous by her role in the real-life events behind the book and film The Perfect Storm. Forward of me was the yard’s floating office barge and then the battleship-grey Badtz Maru, a 125 foot former British navy coastal patrol boat converted into a yacht by a dot-com millionaire, given the name of an Anime character adored by the millionaire’s wife. Badtz Maru was captained by Tom Waite, an able and knowledgeable sailor and Maryland native who had been an invaluable source of knowledge, advice, and connections during Neeltje’s restoration. Ahead of Badtz Maru on the adjacent pier was the traditionally-built Baltimore Clipper topsail schooner Pride of Baltimore II, undergoing a major refit.

The yard was no yacht club. Any lady (or guy, given the people who hung out there) wearing high heels would break a leg before making it ten feet out the pier (Yeah, that happened). Tidewater was a working commercial boatyard with a few dozen slips on floating docks and space for half a dozen larger boats along the pier. Next to the Domino Sugar factory and bathed at night by its giant red neon sign’s glow, you had to swab down your decks every few days just to wash away the fine burnt sugar crystals that drifted over from the factory’s evaporators. Parking in the boatyard was anywhere you could fit in between the dozens of boats resting in their cradles. Heavy equipment was constantly rolling through the gravel and cracked concrete-covered grounds. The private boats in their slips were an assemblage of all the run-down and unpresentable boats and struggling-to-get-by liveaboards in Baltimore harbor whose owners either couldn’t afford the posh marinas and yacht clubs or had been turned away as unpresentable to finer company. I loved it. Just my kind of people. We had our share of drunks and addicts, but that wasn’t too bad, at least not until they fell in the harbor and had to be fished out. Then it was bad. Nothing put me in a foul mood faster than wrestling with a combative stoner while trying to save his life. True story. Happened more than once.

I still had a lot of work to do on Neeltje and wasn’t thinking of finding another berth anytime soon, but I knew she’d be welcome in the better marinas. I was seriously thinking of living aboard full-time; putting all my furnishings in storage and giving up the townhouse in Alexandria. Right about this time Bob Brandon, the boatyard owner, put the office barge up for sale.

Neeltje and the barge

Brandon had erected a two-story steel pre-fab building on a 100-foot by 30-foot steel-hulled spud barge, giving the barge three decks total, or about 8,000 square feet of usable space. The lower deck, beneath the barge’s own top deck, was utilitarian and held the waste processing system and heavy-duty electrical transformers. The rest of the space below decks was storage. The main deck was nicely fitted out as office space and store with an exterior, wide, awning-covered walkway wrapped around three sides. Access to the upper deck was via exterior stairs at either end, and there were hinged ramps to the pier at both ends, allowing them to adjust to the tides. Three massive air conditioning units were bolted to the deck underneath the stairs. The upper deck was one expansive space with a fifteen-foot overhead that was being used as a sail-making loft. Both decks had an ample number of windows that let in an abundance of natural light. The barge was connected to city power, water, and sewerage. With a view straight down into Baltimore’s inner harbor and across to Fells Point, it was a magically beautiful location and a crazy idea sprang to my head that I couldn’t shake. Why not buy the barge, convert it into my home and office, and dock Neeltje to the outboard side of the barge? My long slog to go sailing would be to step outside the door of my house and step down onto my boat. 

A few weeks later I was the proud owner of another large steel thing floating on water. I moved all my townhouse furnishings onto the main deck of the barge, build a workshop in one half of the upper deck, left the other half of the upper deck open, stored everything else I owned below decks, and hired a visioinary designer, Brian Voss, to convert the barge into a comfortable home and office. I was a pretty self-satisfied guy. 

I made several short sails to learn Neeltje’s ways before setting out on a long cruise. It took a minimum of six good crew or four exceptionally good crew to sail the boat. One didn’t just adjust jib sheets from the cockpit while the helmsman trimmed the main like on a modern Marconi sloop. Neeltje was gaff and boom rigged, with a massive main, which meant it took three sets of strong arms to haul on the head and peak halyards to raise the sail. The jib needed to be walked across the foredeck when tacking, something that was unnecessary on a modern boat with a clear foredeck. And then the leeboards had to be lowered and raised on opposite sides on every tack using dedicated winches on the stern quarters. There was much to do. It took a lot of muscle to sail 35 tons of steel. 

I never had a shortage of crew. Every sailor on the Chesapeake wanted to sail aboard Neeltje. Rafael Alvarez, then a writer on HBO’s The Wire, wrote a magazine article about the restoration. It was widely read and yielded quite a few volunteers, and every time I sailed a loop through Baltimore’s inner harbor my cell would start ringing from all the 9-to-5 guys in the office towers telling me how magnificent Neeltje looked from their glassed-in perches and asking when it would be their turn to come sailing.

Windy’s dog Sadie, who loved to sail

Through the rest of that autumn we had some wonderful cruises around the Chesapeake. My favorite day trip was to Rock Hall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. With a sun-up start and a fair wind we could make it by two in the afternoon. Because of Neeltje’s shallow draft we could go over the two-mile-long sand bar that others couldn’t clear to make the harbor entrance. I don’t know why, but having had steamed crabs at almost every crab shack up and down the Chesapeake, I think the crabs served up at Waterman’s Crab House in Rock Hall are the sweetest, tastiest of all. It may influence my opinion that they have a slip big enough for Neeltje right in front of the restaurant and they always made sure it was available when I radioed ahead. With bellies full of crab and corn, we wouldn’t make it back to Baltimore before sunset, but the trip into the brightly lit harbor at night was ever beautiful. 

It was always gratifying late in the day to pull into a bay or creek, or gunk hole as they’re called on the Chesapeake, and anchor for the night. Drawing only three and a half feet, Neeltje could go places no other large sailboat could. But our mere presence could cause problems. Too many times we would see another large boat poke its nose into the spot where we were anchored. They would look at the chart, look at us, and I imagined them saying, “I don’t give a damn what the chart says. If that gigantic boat can make it in there, then so can we!” Then they’d turn towards us. We would wave them off and try to raise them on Channel 16, never with success. Then we’d just sit back, open another beer, and take bets on where they’d run aground. Never made a friend of one of those guys. They usually had a long list of things they thought we ‘coulda, shoulda’ done to warn them. My response was always, “Hey, all you had to do was look at your freakin’ chart, yeah?” 

I had many long cruises planned in my mind. The entire Intracoastal Waterway. The Hudson river to the Champlain canal and on up to the St. Lawrence and Montreal. The Chesapeake Bay alone had countless destinations. 

But the days grew shorter and the weather grew colder and the sailing season on the Chesapeake came to a close. I focused on sail repairs, plumbing improvements, replacing the steering gearbox, redesigning the diesel fuel manifold in the engine room, and the thousand-and-one small details on a never-shrinking list of things to be done. Neeltje was well equipped to endure harsh winter weather while remaining in the water. Her diesel-powered radiator heating system kept her interior at a comfortable 70 degrees on the coldest winter days, and her steel construction made her impervious to the elements. Likewise, the barge was well insulated and had a massive heating and cooling system. All it took was paying the equally massive utility bills. The barge’s fresh-water-in and sewerage-out hoses were electrically heated to prevent freezing. Even in the urban and industrial heart of Baltimore, the slow pace of the boatyard in winter was one of the most peaceful and quiet settings imaginable. 

Shortly after the new year Bruce Davis, an old school chum of my youngest brother, got in touch with me. He was the COO of Sylvan Prometric, a very successful company that delivers computer-based tests in thousands of testing centers in more than one hundred countries. They had grown very quickly and their computer technology staff was in disarray, not uncommon for a growing tech company at the height of the dot-com era, when people would jump jobs every few months for higher pay or more stock options and when management practices hadn’t evolved as fast as companies were growing. Bruce asked if I would come on as chief technologist to get things sorted out. The offer was good and Prometric’s headquarters were just across the harbor in Fells Point. Another big plus for me was that my base of European operations would be in the Netherlands, which would make my restoration work on Neeltje a little easier. I took the job in April and over the next several years made a trip to the Netherlands every other month, always returning with a suitcase filled with bits of brass, rigging, and odds and sods to maintain the traditional character of the boat. 

In my first week at Prometric I was asked to host a meeting of technical service leads from our various regions of operations around the globe. They had all come to Baltimore and I was particularly interested in meeting the pair from the Netherlands for obvious reasons. When I walked into the meeting and the meeting’s coordinator began introductions I stopped her when she came to a young red-headed beauty I was certain was one of the Dutch team. I introduced myself in Dutch and was rewarded with a bemused expression from the poor woman, who clearly had no idea what I was saying. The coordinator jumped in to explain that the woman on the Dutch team had been delayed in another meeting and that the confused lady I had addressed was actually the coordinator’s assistant, Windy Hackett, who was a native Marylander and had never been to the Netherlands, let alone learned the language. The other half of the Dutch team, Jan Blok, stepped forward and introduced himself and that was the beginning of a long professional friendship that has survived our time together at Prometric. Jan is now director of the Dutch law-enforcement forensic college and he hosted my oldest son Skylar and me when we were in the Netherlands a few years ago. A true friend is a friend for life. 

We were having a warm spring and at the end of the meeting I invited the entire contingent for an evening harbor cruise aboard Neeltje. It was a great success in spite of the German guy who drank too much beer and ended up regurgitatively feeding the fishes over the leeward rail (I made sure of that). He was a good technician but I never let him live it down. I also never had any technical issues with German operations. But all through the cruise I couldn’t help noticing Windy (who I initially called Wendy as everyone does when they meet her but I was corrected enough times that I finally got it). She seemed right at home on the boat and was clearly experiencing a different level of pleasure from everyone else on board. I’m glad I noticed. We have been married for nineteen years and Windy is not only my steadfast anchor in every storm, she and our two sons are the joys of my life. 

By late June I had decided to take Neeltje to St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore for the last day of the annual Wooden and Classic Boat Festival. It was a spur of the moment decision, and I hadn’t reserved a spot on a dock as many of the larger boats had done. I also wanted to reward the boatyard crew who has worked so hard on restoring Neeltje to glory, and we set off for St. Michaels early on a Friday, myself and a half dozen of the best sailors from the yard. We had a fair wind and made for the inside of Kent Island, through the Narrows under power, and up the Miles river into St. Mikes, arriving early afternoon. The harbor was crowded but I managed to snug in and anchor just opposite the maritime museum and the center of the festivities. Well, not without incident. I did manage to cut the anchor rode of a small powerboat with my prop as I was maneuvering in the tight harbor. They must have had a 20-to-1 aspect on that line! Still, my bad, and it was an embarrassing way to arrive with my sixty-two feet of classic boat. But that was nothing compared to the embarrassment to come. 

The rest of the day and evening were good fun and I was proud of Neeltje and the attention she received. By late evening half my crew had met up with friends and were staying ashore for the night. I retired to my cabin around eleven with Neeltje resting easy at anchor surrounded by glassy smooth water and still air. 

Ha. 

One thing every boat owner learns is the feel and motion of their boat. It becomes part of your body rhythm. Anything unusual triggers a primordial response to danger. It was nothing more than a gentle nudge. Neeltje has bummed up against something. Not hard. Just a touch. It was enough. My eyes were wide open in an instant. It was dark out my porthole. My ears heard the wind and the sound of driven rain against the steel superstructure. I was up in a flash and ran down the companionway, through the saloon, and up the hatch steps topside, shouting, “Everyone on deck! NOW!” 

I was blinded by the heavy rain that struck my face and body like BBs. It was howling. Neeltje had drifted. In a heartbeat I knew why. I had been distracted by cutting the runabout’s anchor rode that afternoon and hadn’t backed down on Neeltje’s anchor when I dropped it. Its flukes weren’t dug into the bottom muck. Neeltje’s stern had bummed up against a 35-foot piece of floating Tupperware, and her owner was on deck shouting a long and well-crafted string of obscenities in my general direction. I deserved it, and he was obviously practiced in the art. I gave the guy an appropriately low bow of contrition and only then did I realize I was stark naked. Well, I’ve slept in the buff since I was seven. My body runs hot and I like things cool. I fired up Neeltje’s engine and sent two guys forward to raise the anchor off the bottom so I could reposition the boat. The problem was, it was raining so hard I couldn’t see the bow of my boat, let alone the other boats in the densely-packed harbor. 

By then the commotion had brought people on all the nearby boats up on deck. Spreader floodlights came to life on Sixpence, the boat closest to us, an elegant fifty-five foot wooden ketch tied up to maritime museum’s dock. The utter contempt on the faces of the man, woman, and young girl who stared back at me were enough to transform the chill I was already feeling into an arctic freeze deep in my bones. 

I shouted for the guys on the bow to tell me if I was about to hit anything but I couldn’t make out their reply in the wind. I used my memory of where all the boats had been earlier in the evening and strained to hear voices warning me of danger as I guided Neeltje to where I thought I could safely drop the hook again. It is only a large gift of good fortune that night that allowed me to get to the right spot, drop anchor, SET it this time, and watch the swing to make sure we were clear of other boats. After I was finished with the engines my guys kind of averted their eyes for a minute before one of them reminded me I was standing on top of the pilot house without a stitch of clothing. Embarrassed yet again, I ducked below to cover my nakedness. When I came back on deck appropriately attired in foul weather gear the spectators on the other boats realized the show was over and returned to their bunks. I spent the rest of the night on deck, drinking coffee and making damn sure Neeltje didn’t drift an inch. 

By morning it was calm with clear skies and I went below for a few hours of sleep. By the time I came topside again most of the other boats had left the harbor, including the ketch that had been tied up to the quay. The festival was over. We were able to depart St. Michaels without inflicting any more damage, my reputation on the Chesapeake permanently sullied. 

With our late start, we didn’t tie up to my barge in Baltimore until after midnight, my maneuvering made a little more difficult by the addition of a new boat alongside the adjacent pier, nestled in between the Tamaroa and the Pride, an elegant fifty-five foot wooden ketch with Sixpence painted across her stern. I wasn’t looking forward to morning. 

Nor was I given any time for reflection. Dmitri Bernhardt, Sixpence’s owner, and his wife Ros were knocking on the barge door before I was awake. I was still clearing the sleep from my eyes when I opened up and invited them in. Though their smiles were genuine their words were harsh, further admonishing me for my poor seamanship in St. Mikes. Dmitri and Ros were part of a rare breed of world-cruising super-sailors. I’ve known many, even considered myself one of them at times. Not in the past twenty-four hours. At other times. Definitely other times. But not at that moment. 

We drank coffee and talked about boats. Dmitri, like me, considered himself a steward of a great boat. Sixpence was a sturdy, heavily planked motor-sailor designed by noted New England naval architect William Hand and built in New York in 1934. Dmitri acquired the boat in 1981, seven years earlier, and was bringing her into Tidewater for a major refit while he, Ros, and their six-year old daughter AnnaRuth lived aboard. We would be neighbors for the next year, and one of the saddest days of my life on the barge was when Sixpence set sail from Baltimore for the last time. Truth: as close as we became, Dmitri and Ros never forgave me for St. Michaels. 

I did gain back a little credibility when the Bernhardts were with us on a day trip to Rock Hall (We had a need for crabs!) and Windy’s hat blew overboard on a broad reach home. I treated it like a man overboard drill, having Windy point at the hat continuously while I threw the man overboard buoy off the stern (no EPIRB – not that necessary for an inland boat), brought Neeltje around to a run, and took the wind out of her sails at the perfect moment to recover the hat on the leeward side of the boat. Ros was as close to a Coast Guard rescue swimmer anyone could be without being in the Coast Guard. She has a long list of letters after her name testifying to her offshore rescue and first-aid capabilities. Her approval of my recovery technique for Windy’s soggy hat took away just a smidgeon of my St. Michaels stigma. At least in my mind. Maybe in my mind only, but I’ll take it. 

Yet that day had its own less-than-perfect ending. Sadie, Windy’s lovable collie-and-something mutt, loved sailing. She liked it even more when we tied up to a dock, where she could jump ashore and relieve herself. When we reached Baltimore, I headed for Tidewater’s fuel dock at the end of the pier to top up my tanks. As soon as Sadie felt the boat press up against the bumpers she launched herself over the railing, onto the dock, and took off at full speed down the pier for her favorite patch of grass. Problem was, it was late twilight and Sadie didn’t see the attendant coming around the corner of the shack on the pier. Sadie veered to avoid the young man and ran right off the planks into the harbor, landing with a great splash and a loud yelp. 

Look, much has been said over the years about the terrific and ongoing effort to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and Baltimore Harbor. Great stuff, but I don’t care how much progress has been made, Baltimore harbor is still a cesspool of septic filth. I used the dead rats that floated by for target practice, confident the heavy industrial noises of the sugar factory, the boatyard, and the adjacent shipyard and drydock would mask the sound of my 9mm pistol. I wanted to put a few holes in the rats’ bloated bodies so they would sink. At least they’d be feeding the crabs and worms and not stinking up the air around the barge until the snapping turtles got around to them. Gigantic snapping turtles! Hurricane Isabel flooded the harbor in 2003 and I grabbed a forty-pounder swimming by as I waded through the boatyard. Grabbed him the wrong way around, too. Nearly modified my gender. I ramble. 

For the second time that day something went overboard that wasn’t a man that nevertheless needed rescuing. Sadie swam under the pier and I could hear her whimpering but couldn’t hear her moving. There was nothing else for it. I jumped in, already anticipating the wide range of antibiotics, anti-fungal agents, gamma globulin, and treatments for amoebic and other parasitic organisms I would require. I found Sadie wedged between two crossed pilings, terrified and trembling. It took a while to get her free, but when I did she hopped onto my back and dug in with her claws, pushing my head underwater. Holding my breath, I swam over to one of the powerboats with a swim platform at the stern, where Dmitri and Windy were waiting to haul Sadie off my back. Both Sadie and I sloshed onto the barge and took long, hot showers. I don’t know about her, but I didn’t feel clean for a week. 

Burt Davies and his wife Becky watched all this from their catamaran Pendragon. Living from hand to mouth but loving life, they barely kept Pendragon afloat with the stingy wages Becky earned cleaning the boatyard’s offices, the odd varnishing job, and their seventeen-year-old son Pip’s wages as an able-bodied seaman aboard the Constellation. Burt’s full-time occupation was raging against the British Government for denying him his pension and freezing his assets in the UK. 

As Burt told it, he was the proto-James Bond, part of a bold experiment by John Major long before he was Prime Minister to insert uneducated working-class blokes into MI-6, which had hitherto fore been an exclusive club of the Etonian-Oxbridge class. During his years of service, Burt claimed he had secreted millions of pounds of slush fund money in hidden bank accounts and had purchased several major London hotels, the beginning of his post-retirement business empire, he said. But Major grew tired of the whole scheme; it hadn’t worked out. It seemed, Burt quoted Major, that “You just can’t take a barrow boy and turn him into a gentleman.” Well, it’s an old story, idnit? The whole experiment was canceled and Burt was turned out without so much as a “by your leave,” while the government froze his assets and seized control of his hotels. He said he festered over his shoddy treatment for years until Major became PM, then, one night, he snuck into Major’s bedroom at 10 Downing Street and demanded Major return his assets and that if the government tried to harm him or his family in any way, he would return and slit Major’s throat. Major’s response was to declare him persona non grata, forcing him into his current life as an expat, unable to return home. 

It was all very entertaining and well worth the price of a six pack to sit in Pendragon’s cabin and listen to Burt’s tales. I never did figure out whether he believed all he said or if he was just an entertaining weaver of fantasies. 

It was heartbreaking when I was sitting out reading one afternoon and heard agonizing cries coming from Pendragon’s cabin just before a paramedic truck came into the yard and stopped at the foot of the pier. It seemed Burt had rolled over in bed and broken his arm and it was causing him excruciating pain. We learned later that it was no simple break. Burt had bone cancer and his entire skeleton was becoming brittle. The next three months were hell for him. He suffered one break after another until he passed away in a codeine induced stupor. 

Becky told me Burt had left me one of his London hotels. It was a nice, if fanciful, gesture. 

July 4^th was approaching and by then Windy was living with me on the barge. Baltimore puts on a fantastic firework display for the nation’s birthday and the barge from which the pyrotechnics are launched is always moored about a hundred yards straight out from our pier. There was no better place to watch them than from my barge. We decided to have big bash. We ended up with about two hundred guests and the barge still didn’t feel crowded. It was such a success that our 4^th parties became a regular event that grew and was better each time. We had one for the millennial New Year as well. Windy and I were married by then and our first son Skylar was not quite four months old. The explosions were so close and so loud you could feel each one shake your body. To this day Skylar avoids fireworks. 

I had been traveling more than half the time while Windy was pregnant with Skylar. I traveled twice around the world and I enjoyed the life, but I was pretty sure Sylvan was looking for a buyer for the Prometric business unit and I knew I couldn’t maintain the same intensity of travel with a newborn child at home. I made a tough decision and resigned from Prometric, effective the day Skylar was born. 

Life changed in every way imaginable. There were, of course, all the changes in a couple’s life that parenthood brings. I delighted in all that, especially once we were getting a full night’s sleep again. But other things were happening too. Prometric was sold to the Pearson family business group and taken private. I’m glad I left when I did because the entrepreneurial atmosphere vanished overnight. Within six months eighty percent of the leadership was gone. While most of the upper management and leadership had been required to sign non-compete agreements at the time of the sale, at my request, I was not. I was approached by a consortium of European businessmen with whom I had worked during my time with Prometric who asked me to be the Director, the European equivalent of CEO, of a startup computer-based testing company to compete head-to-head with Prometric. There was a feeling Prometric wasn’t in tune with the European market and that there was a better way to deliver the same services that would provide a competitive advantage. As one of many perks they would pay to have Neeltje transported back to the Netherlands. Windy and I had talked seriously about the possibility of raising our family in Europe and we decided to accept the offer. 

In June, we sadly put a halt on Brian Voss’s design work for converting the barge into a home, left Skylar in his grandparents’ care, and headed for the Netherlands to deal with a mountain of paperwork and to hunt for a house. Two things of tremendous significance happened while we were there. The first is that the dot-com bubble burst and its effects were immediate. Investors in the new testing business pulled out overnight and the whole enterprise collapsed. The second is that the driver’s window sill in the Audi A6 they had given me to drive was higher than the sill of my car back home, just high enough so that when I rested my elbow on the open window’s sill I was forcing my left long-head biceps tendon up into a knife-like bone spur on my clavicle I didn’t know existed, severing the tendon completely and grinding my rotator cuff into hamburger. By the time we flew home my left arm was in searing pain and paralyzed. I had surgery immediately but the damage was extensive and I lost use of the arm for nearly a year. 

Just as I was getting my arm back in shape I doubled over with chest pain during a dinner party we were hosting on the barge. I like providing guests with entertainment, but this was a little extreme, even for me. I was in deep denial that the problem was anything but extreme heartburn, so rather than calling 911, I had Windy drive me to a hospital I trusted north of the city, about a half hour away. Oops. Turned out I was having a heart attack at the tender age of forty-nine. All I could think of was that I had a young wife, a toddler son, and Windy was pregnant with our second child. This was no time to die! Luckily, angioplasty and a stent put me right. Follow-up studies revealed I did not have coronary heart disease, but that I had damaged a coronary artery in a terrible car crash eleven years earlier, a crash in which I had broken my hip, ankle, several ribs, and suffered a severe concussion. The soft tissue damage remained hidden until my heart attack. 

The responsibilities of parenthood, my long period of ill health, the paper loss of a great deal of wealth from the dot-com bust, a mountain of medical bills, a very expensive lifestyle, and the increasing challenge of knowing where Skylar and our new son Luke were every second of every day, because one lapse could mean they were in the water and lost, gave us pause to reassess our priorities. Finally, in 2004, we parted ways with Neeltje and the barge for a more traditional life on land, better suited to our children and family. It was the right choice, but I miss that great hunk of steel with sails. I never traveled the length of the Intracoastal Waterway. I never sailed up the Hudson and through the connected canals and lakes all the way to Montreal. I would have liked to have done so, but my family is everything and a boat is insignificant in comparison. Who knows. Skylar just graduated high school and Luke isn’t far behind. Maybe one day.

Earl Saxon – pardon me – Doctor Earl Saxon, as he insists on being called, was an acquaintance of mine before he earned his PhD in archaeology from Cambridge university. He was my high school girlfriend’s older brother. It was Earl who invited me to Bristol where I met Peter Throckmorton and got my first job in archaeology. And it was Earl who came to visit me in Boston in 1972 to ask if I wanted to come with him to Algeria the following year. He wanted to excavate an epi-paleolithic cave dwelling site on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast as part of his doctoral thesis research. There were some problems with his plan. He was a U.S. citizen and the United States didn’t have diplomatic relations with Algeria at that time. Another was that Algeria hadn’t allowed foreign archaeologists into the country since their revolution against French colonial rule that ended in 1962. And finally, there was the matter of his being Jewish, something he had neglected to mention when he had applied for a permit to Algeria’s CRAPE – the Centre de Researches Anthropologiques, Prehistoriques, and Ethnographiques, just as he had failed to mention he was on the teaching staff of the University of Haifa and had recently married a Sabra. He wanted me along as his sole assistant not only because I was an archaeology student, but because he said he had confidence I wouldn’t blow his cover. As for his visa? No problem, he said. He had a fake British passport that would do the trick. That should have been my first warning. But always up for an adventure, I said yes, and there have been many times since I wish I hadn’t.

Earl wrote to me from Cambridge that he had managed to get the dig permit. He said I should apply for a visa when I got to Marseille and that I should arrive at CRAPE in Algiers the first of June. He included a letter of introduction from a M. Mammary, the director of CRAPE, stating I was authorized to enter the country to conduct archaeological research. So, in the spring of ’73 I finished up exams and arrived in Marseille the last week of May. That’s when things started to go bad. I had hoped to find a letter from Earl at the Post Restante window in Marseille with last-minute instructions. Instead I found a telegram from a friend who was handling my mail in my absence telling me a grant check I had deposited just before leaving Boston had bounced, which meant that my Master Card payment had bounced and I was now not only maxed out but way over my credit limit. There was no ATM network back then but it wouldn’t have mattered – there was no money in my back account anyway. I only had a hundred dollars or so in my pocket and I still had to pay for my Algerian visa. I already had an open-dated airplane ticket to Algiers, so at least that wasn’t a worry. I figured I’d get the visa, get to Algiers, and sort the rest out later.

Ha!

The line outside the Algerian consulate stretched around the block. No matter your reason, there was one line and you had to wait on it. It took me three hours to get in the door. I was directed to a counter where I explained why I was there, was given a visa application, and was shown into a small windowless room with two chairs on opposite sides of a plain wooden table and a single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I sat and completed the application.

Half an hour later a thin, haggard-looking man with short-cropped hair, a big bushy mustache, and a wrinkled suit several sizes too large came in and took the chair opposite me without saying a word of greeting. I slid my completed application across the table and he opened a manila file folder that was easily two inches thick with papers, put the application at the front, and spent a minute leafing through the pile, pausing now and then to read from a page.

How could they possibly have a two-inch thick file on me? I was only just now applying for a visa! Was their intelligence operation so good they had already devoted enormous resources to investigating me based on Earl’s request for the letter of introduction from M. Mammary? I didn’t think so. I would have been surprised if the file held anything more than the consulate’s grocery lists for the past year and was simply an attempt to intimidate me. Not many Americans applied for visas to come to Algeria.

Then he started asking questions. The ones you would expect at first. Why did I want to come to Algeria? I explained and showed him M. Mammary’s letter. How long did I intend to stay? Where would I be staying? How much money did I have? (None.) But then the nature of the questions changed. Was I Jewish? Were any members of my family Jewish? Did I know any Jews? Did any of my family, friends, or acquaintances know any Jews? Did I think I might ever want to know a Jew? (No, really?) Do I harbor any Zionist or pro Jewish sentiments? Was I a member of any pro-Zionist organizations? Did I subscribe to any Pro-Zionist publications? And so it went. For two solid hours. I lied through my teeth.

When he was finished, he told me to return tomorrow for a decision on my visa application, whereupon he stood and left the room.

Crap. Now I had to spend money on a hotel room and food for another day in Marseille. The consulate was in a poor section of the old town that was full of struggling immigrants and appeared to be the heart of the city’s red light district. I found the cheapest room I could, three bucks a night, paid in advance, in what I think was probably the seediest hotel in town. The only good thing was that it was Marseille. A bowl of incredible bouillabaisse cost only fifty cents. I made it through the night but was repeatedly awakened by the sounds of the oldest profession through paper-thin walls and by the constant flushing of toilets echoing through the ancient plumbing.

I got to the consulate at six the next morning, figuring to beat the line. So did every other Algerian with business at the consulate, and the line was just as long as the day before. The consulate opened at eight. It was five hours before I was shown, again, into the same small interview room. A different man, obese and straining at the seams of his suit, and who clearly believed one bath a week was enough, came in and sat across from me.

I asked if my visa had been approved and he didn’t answer, but started asking me questions. The same questions I had been asked before; all of them. Two hours later I was again told to return the next day.

And so it went. Every day for two weeks. My little bit of cash was running out and my temperament was nearing resignation to the futility of my effort. And though I was now an expert in who made the best bouillabaisse in Marseille, I never wanted to taste bouillabaisse again.

Then, without any explanation, on the 12^th of June, I made it through the line, got to the counter, was asked for my passport, and ten minutes later left with the visa stamped, signed, and sealed on a page of its own.

I was out of money. I had about a dollar left. I collected my gear from the hotel, walked to the bus depot, and boarded a bus for the airport. I didn’t even have enough for the full fare, so the driver left me off along the highway half way there, as far as my money would take me. I had to hitch-hike the rest of the way.

There was a seat on the next flight for Algiers, and it was leaving almost immediately, so I handed over my ticket, checked my duffel, grabbed my camera case, and rushed to the gate. I sank into my window seat in the last row of the plane and heaved a great sigh of relief. I was hoping my troubles were over. It was only then I realized I had left my tripod leaning against the counter at the check-in desk.

The flight was still boarding so I headed back down the stairs over the protests of the stewardesses. I said I had forgotten something and would be right back but I was anxious and I think I said it in English and doubt I was understood. I rushed across the tarmac – remember, this was years before airport security was even an issue – ran back through the gate, up to the check-in counter, where I found the tripod just where I had left it, grabbed it, and ran back to the gate, only to find my way blocked by the gate agent and the aircraft just starting to taxi away. I wasn’t going to be left behind. I pushed my way past the shouting agent and ran out onto the tarmac, chasing the plane and waving the tripod around in the air.

I don’t know if I thought I was going to make the plane stop or not, but I was desperate. My luggage and cameras were on that plane. I had no money. I did what I had to do.

And you know what? The plane stopped. The stairs lowered from the tail of the aircraft and I ran out to the plane and climbed aboard. No one said anything. The stewardess just smiled and said I should buckle my seatbelt. We were off for Algiers.

Old Chinese proverb: be careful what you wish for.

I’ve never lost my fascination of flying. I’ve never lost my appreciation for the sheer magic of looking down upon the world from a very, very high place. I was enthralled by my first glimpse of Africa as we descended to 10,000 feet on our approach to Algiers. I was especially curious about the Algerian Mirage fighter that took up station about a hundred yards off our wing on my side of the plane. Was it an escort of some kind? Was it normal?

The fighter banked away from us about a mile and fell back, then turned and sped directly towards us and open fire with its cannons. I barely heard the gunfire but I did see small holes appear in the forward part of the cabin on my side and larger holes ripped open on the far side. Blood spray filled the air up front and there was a loud noise from the wind rushing past the holes in the fuselage. People began screaming and shouting and soon the smell of urine, feces, vomit, and blood drifted back to the rear of the cabin. I just sat still and quiet, thinking, “Is this really happening?” No point in screaming. The situation was completely out of my control.

The fighter made only the one pass, then turned and sped off east, along the coast. Our plane didn’t appear to be on fire or out of control. We slowed down quite a bit but otherwise made what seemed like a normal approach and landing.

Taxiing up to the gate, I saw a long line of ambulances displaying the red crescent and a cordon of soldiers with automatic weapons. The plane came to a stop on the tarmac and the soldiers formed a ring around it with a corridor into the arrivals hall. I was one of the first off as we exited down the rear stairs and we were all directed into the building; medics and soldiers rushed back up the stairs behind us.  We waited for two hours in the stench and heat before customs and immigrations started processing us. The interviews were detailed and the luggage searches were thorough. It took another three hours to process the seventy or so uninjured passengers. After I made it through I heard people talking in the terminal who said six had died. There were others injured, but I don’t know how many. I could only make out so much; the French was heavily accented and I had no Arabic.

I never saw anything about the incident in the French-language newspapers in Algiers and I have never been able to find out anything more about the incident after all these years. It’s as if it never happened. But it did. I know, because I was there.

I took a shuttle from the airport to a large public square in the center of Algiers, then went into a hotel on the square and asked the concierge for directions to the address I had for CRAPE. He said to just follow the street in front of the hotel up the hill for two kilometers and I would arrive at the People’s Palace, and that CRAPE was on the palace grounds. With no money for a taxi, I shouldered my duffel, picket up my camera case, hooked the tripod onto the duffel, and started walking.

It was a steep hill and a winding road and it took an hour before I was standing in front of an arched wooden gate that looked like a service entrance in the tall masonry wall that surrounded the people’s palace. A polished brass plaque identified the gate as the portal to CRAPE.

I pulled on the bell rope that hung beside the door and looked around while I waited. There were two French colonial buildings directly across the street, the kind that had once had a shop on the ground floor and apartments or offices on the upper floors. But now one was the Algerian headquarters for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or the PLO. The other was the occupied by Black September, the terrorist organization that had murdered the entire Israeli Olympic team in Munich the year before. The buildings were hung with banners proudly declaring their identity. This was Algeria, where these terrorist organizations were celebrated as heroes of the Palestinian struggle. There was no need to hide here.

Militants sat on the front steps of Black September’s building, bandoliers across their chests, cleaning their weapons. I thought it was all for show. If they were so open about who they were, surely the didn’t fear an attack, so why all the weapons on display? Of course, I didn’t know the Israelis had been hunting down and killing everyone involved in planning and carrying out the Munich massacre. They had good cause to be afraid. They would all be dead soon.

A small window opened in the wooden door and an old face with a long, drooping mustache beneath a corn-flower blue turban filled the frame, and a toothless mouth asked me what I was doing ringing the bell. Pushing aside childhood images of Dorothy ringing the bell at the gates of the Emerald City, I stated who I was, and that I was to meet archaeologist Earl Saxon from England here on the first of June but that I had been delayed, and that I was sorry I was late, but would he please let Mr. Saxon know I had arrived? He informed me that Mr. Saxon was not there, that he had not been there for six months, and would I please now go away. He slammed the window shut and no further attempts to summon him with the bell succeeded.

I had a very bad feeling. I heard a loud and long blast from a ship’s whistle and looked down to the harbor and saw a large ferry headed out to sea. No doubt the ferry to Marseille. Hungry, penniless, no place to sleep, and standing with my back to a group of murdering terrorists who were probably by now wondering what I was about, I wished I was on that ferry and conceded to myself that I was in a dangerous situation.

Just then someone blew a horn behind me and I moved aside to get out of the way. The horn blew again and I turned around to see a Volkswagen beetle in front of the gate. It took a moment for me to realize Earl was behind the wheel. He waved and stood up through the sunroof and with a big smile said, “Hello Brad! I just came in on the Marseille ferry! Sorry I’m late. How long have you been here?”

The gate keeper appeared and opened the gate to allow Earl, his car, and finally and without apology, me, to enter the sanctuary of the People’s Palace and CRAPE.

That, I swear to you, is just how the entire day happened.

Earl had a hamper of food and we sat on camp cots in one of the warehouse rooms of CRAPE eating baguette, salami, and fruit while he tried to calm me down. Yeah, I needed calming down. The horrible absurdity of the day had caught up with me. I whined that the fighter pilot had tried to kill me! Earl said I shouldn’t take it personally. He was probably trying to kill someone else on the plane, and what did I have to complain about? I was alive, wasn’t I? He wasn’t very good at the comforting thing.

We slept among the bones of Paleolithic men, their femurs and tibia sticking out of crates, their skulls lined up on shelves above us. I thought that one day I would be no more than a nameless pile of bones like them. At least it wasn’t going to be today.

It took a few days scouring the Kasbah to buy the cheap things we would need for the dig: stakes and twine, buckets and brushes and such. The rest Earl had arranged to borrow from CRAPE: sifting screens, a transit, shovels, hatchets, pick-axes, and jerry cans for fuel and water. Every archaeologist and student carries his own Marshalltown #2 trowel and set of dental picks. I sold a spare camera lens in a photography store for about $135 in Algerian dinar, so I had some emergency funds. It was just amusing that every time we left CRAPE or returned, Earl would pull his collar up over his face and instruct me to “look inconspicuous” as we walked past the PLO and Black September offices. I tried to tell him that what he was doing was the opposite of inconspicuous, but he was the boss and always knew better.

Algiers was a beautiful and fascinating city, cosmopolitan and tolerant of its large secular population. Young women with uncovered heads, bare arms, and knee-length skirts walked down the streets holding their boyfriends’ hands. There was a night life with jazz, pop music, and dancing. It was Algiers, and I would learn it was not at all like the rest of the country. And the Algiers of today is vastly different that the Algiers of 1973.

We were ready to go. The Beetle was crammed full of gear, and what didn’t fit inside was tied to the outside. There was so much stuff tied to the car it no longer looked like a car at all.

A landslide had cut the coast road between Algiers and the town of Béjaïa, so we had to head south from Algiers, cross the Atlas Mountains, head east through the Sahara, and then turn north, crossing the Atlas range a second time and descending to the coast. It was during our drive through the Sahara in a Volkswagen beetle that I realized I shared not a speck of DNA with T.E. Lawrence. The thermometer I carried pegged out at 120 degrees. I had to make myself take every breath, each feeling like I was inhaling a hot, dry soup. I had to drink a liter of water an hour to stay minimally hydrated. My mind turned to mush. I hated it. The Beetle has an air-cooled engine in the rear of the car that tends to burst into flames when overheated. I’d seen it happen in more temperate climates. This was really all I could think about the entire time we were driving across the desert. I have never felt more relieved than when we turned north and started climbing out of the heat and into the mountains. Well, except maybe when the plane was shot up and landed safely, or when I landed on Westward’s deck instead of in the ocean when I was whacked by the boom, or when I made it back to shore two and a half hours after being swept out to sea by a rip tide off Acapulco and surrounded by sharks – but I digress.

The village nearest the cave we were there to excavate was several hours east of Béjaïa, past Souk El Tennine. The village was named Garage, because the French army had stationed a truck there before the revolution.

We arrived in Garage late in the afternoon and walked into a road-side tavern at the edge of the village. It was a one room affair with a dirt floor and half a dozen wooden tables with rickety chairs. Two of them were occupied by old men playing dominoes, each with several onlookers and supporters offering advice. I assume. They spoke Arabic. Everything stopped when we came through the door. There was a bar along the back wall with the proprietor standing behind it washing tea glasses. In French, Earl asked where we might find the mayor of the village, and it turned out the proprietor was the mayor. Earl presented him with a letter of introduction from M. Mammary that also asked the mayor to provide us with every kind of assistance.

The Mayor wasn’t exactly hostile, but he didn’t seem very pleased to see us either. I had the distinct impression he felt obliged to help us and would do so, but would be glad if we weren’t there at all. He offered us coffee, which was a sign of hospitality, but not so much as if he had offered us tea.

He had a place in mind for us to stay, and there were other issues to discuss, like how to get water to fill our jerry cans when we, infidel men, would not be allowed to enter the village proper to draw water from the well. Those sorts of issues. While Earl and the mayor hashed out these details, I noticed a refrigerator in the corner and asked if there were any cold drinks. The mayor gurumphed, and said it hadn’t worked for years. I looked it over and saw it was a propane refrigerator, very similar to the one I had had in Piraeus. It made sense. The village had no electricity. The most common problem with propane was a gummed-up regulator. I went out to the car and found my traveling tool kit, came back and took the regulator off the propane tank, dismantled it, and sure enough, it was all gummed up and the diaphragm was stiff. I cleaned it with alcohol from my med kit and oiled the diaphragm with silicone grease from my camera case, put it all together, and got a steady flame in the burner after I fired it up. It takes time for a propane fridge to get cold, so when Earl said we were leaving, I didn’t know if I had really succeeded or not.

The mayor told one of the men with nothing better to do to show us the building where we could stay and off we went, Earl and I in the VW and the man on his bicycle. The shed was several miles farther east, and we were a slow convoy making our way along the coast. At a point where the road made a sharp turn with a cliff of about a hundred feet down to the water on one side and on the other side a short rise before levelling out for a hundred yards and them jumping up again into the Atlas range, a small stone cottage stood on the level field with glassless windows but wooden shutters and a tile roof. The walls of the cottage were pockmarked and in some places penetrated by bullet holes ranging from small arms fire up to what must have been fifty caliber rounds. I could picture in my mind the jeep-mounted heavy machine guns the French used blasting away at Algerian revolutionaries taking cover inside. I had seen them in Peter Throckmorton’s photographs. He had covered the Algerian revolution for Paris Match. His images were so powerful they are often credited with helping sway French public opinion towards liberation. The French government had reacted by declaring Throckmorton persona non grata.

There were two other things of immediate interest about the cottage. The first was that there was a power line coming to it from the direction of a larger and well maintained house about a hundred yards farther along the coast road. There were no other buildings between Garage and where we were, and we would learn there were none for a long distance beyond either. Our guide told us that a team of Russian geologists lived there, and as the mayor had known we were coming for weeks, (it seems M. Mammary had sent him a letter) he had arranged for the Russians to run the power line to our cottage. It turned out the Russian’s house had a generator and they kept it running until about ten o’clock every evening, even when they were away doing survey work. Just what kind of survey work required a large short-wave antennae and a small satellite dish, I didn’t know, but who was I to argue? Electricity was good.

The other thing of interest was the cow in the cottage who appeared to be very happy to be there because it took the better part of an hour of pulling, pushing, shoving, and coaxing to get it out of the cottage. It seemed the cow had spent a fair amount of time there, because there was a foot of cow manure covering the floor.

But hey, we were archaeologists, and we had shovels! It was long past sundown by the time we had mucked out the one room, used half our water to scrub down the floor (the mayor had send village children to fill our jerry cans from the well), tacked mosquito netting over the two windows, and hauled our gear up the slope and into the cottage. The single bare electric lightbulb cast a harsh light and the odor was horrible, but it was home. Dinner that first night was just a chocolate bar and an apple, but I was too tired to care. I set up my camp cot and slept like the dead.

In the morning we drove back nearly as far as Souk El Tennine and bought a few basics at a roadside market. We would have to wait five more days until the weekly souk for fresh food. We had used most of our fresh water scrubbing down the concrete floor of our cottage so we stopped by the taverna in Garage on our way back to have our jerry cans re-filled. I was surprise when we were greeted like returning heroes. We were offered tea, not coffee. It seemed my repair of the refrigerator had worked, and the people of Garage had cold drinks for the first time in a very long while. For the rest of my stay the villagers did everything they could to make us feel welcome, with genuine warmth instead of obligation.

That afternoon we got to work carrying our tools, screens, and supplies up to the cave. And so began the slow and painstaking work of archaeology. By the fourth day we had cleared off vegetation and the overburden, established a prime datum, laid out a grid, and photographed our baseline. Each of us begun excavating our own 1-meter square, and by the end of the day we had recovered an abundance of micro-lithic tools. They needed to be cleaned off, so we dropped off our heavy gear at the cottage and drove east along the coast to a beautiful stretch of white sand beach. There was about a quarter mile between the road and the water, and a large, white linen multi-room Bedouin tent had been erected under a stand of palm trees. There were camels tied to stakes and smoke rising from a fire. We carried our buckets of artifacts down to the water far enough from the tent so as not to disturb, and were washing the lithics in sea water, when a very tall Berber in flowing robes left the tent and walked over to us. In almost good French he introduced himself as a Sheik to his tribe and asked who we were. Earl made our introductions and said we were archaeologists, and this seemed to delight the Sheik. He invited us to his tent for dinner, and we three men ate from a large platter of couscous, goat meat, and vegetables. The women stayed hidden in the shadows, and took the platter into their part of the tent when we were done. The Sheik told us of his days as a student in Paris, and he was hungry for conversation about the far away world.

His own land was up in the mountains, and the dates he harvested there were the finest in the world. He was quite sure! His people crated them up and carted them to Béjaïa, where they were sold and shipped all over. His dates got to go to all the places he could not. He brought his family down to this beach, which he said he also owned, every summer to enjoy the pleasant weather and the peace of the seashore. He also complained about the terrorist training camps up in the mountains, and he wished the Russians would stop supplying them with arms and training, then they would go away. So the other shoe dropped.

It was kind of a magic moment, that. Sitting in a Berber tent, our side open to the beach at sunset, eating dates and figs and drinking sweet tea. I had a vision of the Sheik’s entire family making their way down from the mountains on camelback, a long caravan of camels carrying their tents and clothing and cushions and cooking things. I think the smoke from the Sheik’s hookah might have had a little more in it than just tobacco.

The next day was the souk. The weekly traveling market. For two thousand years, there had been a souk where the Tennine river empties into the Mediterranean Sea. It was about an hour’s drive to Souk el Tennine, and we were about half way there along the pot-hole ridden dusty road when a shiny Mercedes limousine honked at us to move over and sped by, the Sheik and his wives sitting in the back seat, smiling and waving as they flew away in air-conditioned comfort. Fantasy and reality seldom converge.

Electricity had not yet made it to the small permanent village of Souk El Tennine, but there was a post, telephone, and telegraph office. There was only one set of utility poles coming into the town, and all one had to do to find the PTT was to follow the wires. I wanted to get my money situation sorted out. I had to be able to pay my way home and my grant check had bounced, so I needed to ask my father to foot me the cost of a ticket. I hated asking him for anything, but I was in a tight spot. I told the PTT clerk I wanted to make a trunk call and wrote down the telephone number along with Baltimore, Maryland, and USA. He took the paper into a back room and I could hear him talking briefly to a woman and then he came back and told me to take a seat, it would be awhile. After half an hour I heard the woman’s voice call out in French, “What country is this?” and the clerk shouted, “Oohsaw, Oohsaw.” The woman called back “Oohsaw?” The clerk replied, “Yes, Oohsaw, you know, the country of President Nixon!”

I had found it. A place where someone had never heard of the USA. After another fifteen minutes the woman called out something in Arabic and the clerk informed me that he was sorry, but the line to Algiers was down and it was not possible to make trunk calls at the moment. Given that the only phone in Souk el Tennine was in that office, and that all calls were therefore trunk calls, one had to wonder about the commitment of the PTT operators along the line, starting with the one ten feet away behind a door, but that was how it was. I never was successful placing a call out of Algeria. I was, however, able to retrieve some mail from poste restante that had been forwarded from CRAPE. My girlfriend of the time has sent me a picture of herself and a nice homey letter, just the kind a guy wants to get in the mail when he is far away from home. The interesting part was the wide, brown paper tape with the words, in French, “Algerian Bureau of Censorship” print along its length that had been used to re-seal the envelope after the Algerian security services had censored about a third of the letter with black marker. I wondered what in the world Janie could have said that had been considered inappropriate to the extend it warranted censoring. Sometimes one just has to laugh.

The souk was a feast for the eyes, nose, and ears. There were no tourists for hundreds of miles in any direction. This was simply life in coastal North Africa. There were very few powered vehicles at the edges of the souk. Mostly camels, donkeys, carts, and one shiney Mercedes limo. Sheep and goats had been herded in on the hoof, and the abattoirs were busy slaughtering animals and throwing the entrails into a communal pit. A new pit was dug every week, and my archaeologist’s eye could see the signs on the ground of hundreds, no doubt thousands, of pits from souks past. Chickens, too, were falling under the ax. Grains, vegetables, fruits, and root crops were being sold, as well as clothing, pots, pans, pails, fabrics, needles, thread, and everything else.

One woman had spread out a large home-spun woolen ground cloth and had made cone-shaped piles of spices and other things. She spoke only Arabic and I spoke French and English, but the meals I cooked in the cottage were boring as hell and I wanted spices. So I made an eating sign of putting my pinched fingers in my mouth and pointing at a pile. If she shook her head yes, I would take a little and taste it. If she shook her head no, or sometimes vigorously No, I wouldn’t. I wonder what was in those piles I couldn’t taste? Laundry detergent? Lye? Rat poison? Whatever, I only tasted those she said I should. The thing is, I had no labels to put to the flavors, just a color. I developed an inventory of tastes without names. I was just learning to cook. My elderly neighbor in Piraeus had started to teach me to cook towards the end of my year there, so I learned to cook with lamb before beef and I still make some of the things she taught me, but the flavors I was experiencing in the souk were nearly all new, and exciting. It has taken me years to identify the spices I learned there, and I think the experience has made me a better cook.

The souk was the high point of life for everyone. There were minstrels, a trio with an oud, flute, and tabor drum. The oud player would alternate between bowing his instrument and making up ribald verses about members of his audience, while the flute and tabor maintained a constant refrain. At least I think they were ribald verses. He was singing in Arabic and after each verse there was a lot of laughter and back slapping, and the target of the verse would throw a small copper or aluminum coin into the large, tambourine-like tabor. The drummer was skilled in flipping the coin out of the tabor and into his pouch without breaking his beat.

And then there were the snake charmers and medicine men. I thought they had been made up in Hollywood. But there they were, mesmerizing cobras with their flutes while their partners were selling elixirs and pills for what ails ya’.

I was buying a kilo of dates, which the vendor was hacking off a compressed block, when I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned to find the Sheik smiling at me and saying, “Those dates are from my trees. They are the best. You will enjoy them!” Then he turned and was gone.

The days went by and our excavations went deeper. Work was going well. We had an unexpected visitor one afternoon, a French oil executive who lived in Béjaïa had heard we were there and claimed an interest in prehistoric archaeology. We gave him a tour of the site and he reciprocated with a tin of Canadian bacon.

Meat! We hadn’t had any for a while. Earl balked at buying meat in the souk when he saw the bloody and fly infested abattoirs.

We saved it for the next day’s lunch, and at the appointed hour I reached into my backpack for the tin and it slipped through my fingers and started rolling down the hill towards the edge of a three-meter-deep trench that ran through the center of the site. I dove for it but missed, instead I stumbled and fell into the trench.

I landed on my left shoulder and head, knocking myself unconscious for the second time in two years. When I came to, Earl was standing over me with an angry expression. He was pissed off that I had been so inconsiderate of him that I had fallen and put his expedition at risk. He never once asked if I was injured or okay. I wasn’t okay. I was pretty sure I had cracked my scapula and I was certain I had cracked a rib. I had experience with that one and there was no doubt. I was also dizzy and had double vision, so I was knew I had a concussion. All Earl wanted to know was when I could get back to work.

Sorry Earl, I’m injured and you’re screwed. Deal with it. It took a few days for him to accept the truth of the matter but he eventually drove me back to Algiers. The coast road had been re-opened so it was a shorter and easier journey.

Earl said no real doctor would see me because I was an American and they would fear reprisals. I asked what he meant by “real” doctor and he took me to an acquaintance of his; an alcoholic French dentist who had been a surgeon in Paris but had had his license revoked for malpractice and fled to Algiers. I was never clear on exactly how Earl knew this guy. After a thorough examination he declared my injuries to be psychosomatic, and could you please pass the bottle. This pissed off Earl even more so he left me with the dentist and headed back to the site.

I had to get out of the country, to somewhere I could get some real medical care! Tickets out of Algeria had to be purchased with hard currency, not Algerian dinar. I kept trying to reach someone in the U.S. who could buy me a ticket with dollars but it was futile. I would awaken each morning to the beautiful and peaceful sound of muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, only to face the throbbing pain of my “imaginary” injuries when fully alert. One day I walked down to the Air Algérie office and noticed a placard on the counter that had a graphic that sort of looked like a Master Card symbol. I convinced the agent that my Master Card and that European credit card were one and the same, and halleluiah, she sold me a ticket to Paris leaving that afternoon. Just like that! I was grateful they had no way of checking the available credit on my card.

I rushed to the airport and was again relieved when I sank into my seat and the plane took off for France. We made a brief stop in Nice to clear customs and took off again for Paris. There was a solid cloud cover over all northern Europe, and the ride was bumpy as we approached Orly airport. We broke through the clouds into clear sky at about two thousand feet and dropped into the downwind leg of our approach. I again had a left-side window seat, and I could see a 707 ahead of us on its final approach. Something was clearly wrong. It was far too low and smoke was coming from the wrong places.

The plane clipped some trees and crashed on the runway. I saw a fireball erupt from the fuselage just behind the cockpit and sweep down the body of the plane and then we were past it and I lost my view. I shouted “No!” and looked around to see how other people on my plane were reacting, because I hadn’t heard anything from anyone else. No one appeared to have seen anything. The stews were all still in their jump seats for the landing and couldn’t have seen. They had missed it all.

Our pilot aborted his landing and we climbed back up into the clouds. The stew announced that, due to a problem on the ground, we had been put in a holding pattern until we were cleared to land. We circled Paris in very turbulent air for another two hours before being diverted to Charles de Gaulle. I tried to find out what had happened once I was in the terminal, but couldn’t find out anything. I had an open ticket for a return to Boston and was lucky enough to get on a flight leaving right away. Traveling with the sun, it was still the 11^th of July when I touched down at Logan airport. By then the newspapers had the story of the crash at Orly. One hundred twenty-three had died in the crash of Varig Flight 820 from Rio de Janeiro. Amazingly, ten crew and one passenger survived. An investigation later determined the plane had crashed after a fire broke out in one of the lavatories and had swept through the plane, but the cause of the fire remains unknown.

I spent the night at a friend’s house in Boston and saw a Harvard Health Plan doc the next morning. He took X-rays that confirmed that a rib and left scapula had been fractured but were not displaced, so he advised taking it easy and letting them heal. There were no MRIs in those days to show soft tissue details, but based on symptoms and examination, the doc concluded I had torn tendons that attached muscles I had never heard of to my scapula. Surgery might be possible but again, the best thing would be to wait and see how it healed.

Before leaving for Algeria I has written Dr. Michael Katsev to ask if I could come to Cyprus and talk about the future of his work and my studies. Katsev was finishing up seven years of excavating and reconstructing a 4^th century BC Greek merchant vessel that had sunk off the Cypriot coast near Kyrenia. He wrote back saying I was welcome anytime.

I straightened out my banking affairs, took a train down to Baltimore to visit my father and to get a second medical opinion from a Johns Hopkins doc, then I flew to Amsterdam, picked up my car, and set off for Athens. I was healing nicely and grew stronger each day of the drive. In Athens, I put my car in a bonded lot, bought an airline ticket for Cyprus, had dinner with Throckmorton, and checked in for my flight in the morning.

My Olympic flight departed from the international terminal, and the next gate over was being used by an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to New York with a stopover in Athens. A large crowd was waiting to board the El Al flight and a much smaller group was waiting for my flight. The El Al flight started boarding, and as had become standard El Al practice, the entrance to the jetway was flanked by two Uzi-toting security guards. With nothing better to do, I watched passengers file through the El Al gate. One of the security guards stopped a man who was about to pass through the gate and asked him something. The man and another next to him backed away suddenly, took hand grenades from their coat pockets, pulled the pins, and tossed them into the middle of the crown waiting to board. They were pulling machine guns from under their coats as I dove behind one of the large concrete planters that separated the gates. I heard gun fire before the grenades exploded with gut-wrenching, deafening blasts. Some other people in my lounge had made it to the safety of the planters, but most had been exposed. I looked over the planter and saw a bloody mess. I didn’t see the El Al security guards. The two gunmen were still firing, one into the crowd and the other through the glass at the El Al plane. I ducked back down and waited. The shooting eventually stopped but and I have no memory of how long I waited before Greek police arrived and took the shooters into custody. News accounts said two hours. I don’t remember it that way, but I’ve learned that memory is funny stuff, and the details I remember often conflict with the official version of some of the terrible things I’ve witnessed. What I do remember from the news reports is that five died and fifty-five were wounded that day. I was untouched.

I hung-out in Piraeus for another two weeks before I felt like returning to the airport and getting aboard another plane. I made it to Cyprus, was given a courtesy dive on the wreck site by Robin Pearcy, Katsev’s assistant, and marveled at the reconstructed ship in the museum gallery. I gather the dive on the wreck site was an audition, because Katsev encouraged me to apply for the dig at Yassi Ada the next year, where he would be deputy director to George Bass. I did, and I’ve already told you about the summer of ’74.

I made it back to Boston without any further incident and decided I didn’t want to fly ever again. I changed my mind when my father invited me to join the entire family in the Caribbean for Christmas and my birthday, which happen to be the same day, my gift being the full cost of the trip. Well, of course I said yes. The day before Christmas I met up with my father, his wife, and my brothers in Baltimore and we flew first-class to Puerto Rico on the upper-deck of a 747 back in the days when Pan Am advertised the plane had a piano bar up there. I never saw a piano bar. In Puerto Rico, we transferred to a twelve-seat LIAT flight for Barbuda. I was seated next to my brother Steve directly behind the pilot’s seat, there being no partition separating passengers from cockpit on such a small plane, and we sat on the tarmac in the tropical heat for a long time waiting for the flight crew to arrive. Steve knew a little about what I had been through the past summer, and he saw my white knuckles as I held on to the armrests with a death grip. He was doing his best to get me to relax and lighten my mood, sadly, I’ll admit, without much success.

Finally, we saw the pilot walking across the tarmac. He was a short, thin Latino with mirrored aviator glasses; his peaked pilot’s had at a jaunty angle and he sported French cuffs showing out of the sleeves of his tailored uniform. his strutted more than he walked, and he had a big smile with a row of white teeth that sparkled in the sunshine. At least, that’s how I remember him. Steve saw me grip my armrest even tighter. The pilot boarded at the rear of the plane and made his way forward. As he passed us Steve jokingly asked, “Hey man, we just got off a 747 and it was nice. So tell me, where’s the piano bar on this crate?” The pilot turned back to us and pulled off his sunglasses. He had two of the reddest bloodshot eyes I’ve ever seen. In a thick Puerto Rican accent, he said, “Piano Bar? Hell man, you’re lucky we got wings!”

Even I had to laugh. It broke my tension and I was able to relax. I ended up having a wonderful Christmas and a peaceful end to a very difficult year.

I met an amazing woman in the summer of 1995. I’ll call her Carol. Carol was an English professor at a prestigious college. She was beautiful, smart, funny, curious about everything, and on my wavelength. We dated for about six months and I was beginning to think we could build a life together. We planned a Caribbean vacation for the Christmas break and while we were organizing that, Carol suggested we look at renting a villa in Tuscany the following summer.

It sounded like a great idea, and I mentioned it to a friend in Washington, who told me friends of hers, Nizar and Ellen Jawdat, had a villa in Orte, about fifty miles north of Rome. Villa Manni was built on Etruscan foundations in the middle of two hundred fifty acres of fields, vineyards, and forest.

Nizar and Ellen had met at Harvard during World War II, while both were studying architecture after the college admitted women and foreign nationals to fill the lecture halls left empty by all the young American men who had gone to war. Nizar was born in Iraq.

Nizar’s father, Ali Jawdat, rode with T.E. Lawrence’s Arab army and was the inspiration for Omar Sharif’s character Ali in the film Lawrence of Arabia. After the state of Iraq was created in 1921, Nizar’s father served as Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, Minister of the Interior, Foreign Minister and Iraqi Ambassador to Britain, France and Washington under King Faisal and his Hashemite successors until the 1958 Ba’athist coup. His son Nizar originally bought Villa Manni as a base for his efforts to get his extended family out of Iraq.

Over the years the estate became Ellen and Nizar’s peaceful retreat from the heat and bustle of Washington summers. They worked together to make Villa Manni an aesthetic showpiece; a balance of old and new, comfort and the Italianesque ideal, and they liked to share it with their friends. Villa Manni could be rented by those whom the Jawdat’s knew and trusted. My friend arranged for Carol and me to meet them at St. Luke’s, their D.C. art gallery, after we returned from the Caribbean.

On the eve or our departure for Anguilla, Carol announced she had decided she didn’t love me after all and was breaking up with me, but she really liked the sex so we should still go the islands for two weeks and break up after. It was a gut-punch. Why should I go off to an island paradise with a woman who had declared her intent to dump me? But then, why not? I looked at it the same way I watched a movie – it wasn’t real, yet I was prepared to suspend my disbelief so I could enjoy the story. It was a surreal, lustful vacation, but eventually the credits rolled across the screen, sad music filled the movie theater of my mind, our aircraft landed at BWI, I headed south for Alexandria and Carol traveled north. We never saw each other again.

But I had this appointment to meet Ellen and Nizar Jawdat, and they were expecting to meet me and the woman who would accompany me to Italy. I had become excited about the idea of a villa in Italy for the summer. I still wanted to do it, and what I had heard about Villa Manni made me think I couldn’t find a better place. I also didn’t want to go alone.

There was a woman with whom I had taken many trips over the years to places like Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. Patricia Forrester was an accomplished artist. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Smith and her master’s from Yale. Her work hangs in many museums and on the walls of knowing collectors, and she was represented by galleries in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and London. We saw the world in the same light, enjoyed sharing our views on everything, shared the same politics, liked the same music and theater, liked travel to the same tropical places, loved dancing together, made each other laugh, and I was enriched by being included in her world of art and artists. Funniest thing she ever said to me: we were walking past Olsson’s bookstore on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown and their display window was full of Richard Brautigan books. I smiled to myself remembering how much fun I had had reading Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur when I was a teenager. I asked Patricia if she had read Richard Brautigan. She said, “Read him? No. Fuck him? Yes.” She had, when she was living in San Francisco many years before. Cracked me up. I had to stop walking I was laughing so hard. It was all in the delivery.

When we traveled together, she would spend her days painting and I would spend mine diving, sailing, or just laying back in a hammock reading paperback novels, then we would have our evenings together, exploring towns, restaurants and live music.

We had tried being lovers in the early years of our friendship. Absolute disaster. Patricia was the most fiercely independent person I’ve ever known. The more intense a shared moment of intimacy, the more extreme her determination to run away afterwards. But after cooling off, sometimes for years, we would find each other again, and the cycle would start over. We finally accepted we couldn’t be lovers but still needed each other and invented a relationship that worked; worked so well that a few years later, when I married Windy, now my wife of nineteen years, Windy understood the nature of my friendship with Patricia and saw that she wasn’t a threat to her or our marriage, but was a person she could like and trust. Windy and Patricia became good friends.

I asked Patricia to come to Italy. Her first question was, “Who am I replacing?” I explained how I had arrived at my current situation, and that while the whole idea had been Carol’s, I wasn’t going to let her vanishing act ruin an excellent plan and I would be delighted if Patricia would share it with me and the first step in making that happen was for her to come with me to meet the Jawdats. We had already spent years learning how to travel together and enjoy each other’s company. I’ll admit, it hadn’t been easy. Patricia is the only person I know who has an entire chapter of a book by Alice Adams dedicated to how difficult a traveling companion she could be. But I also had a unique insight into her emotions thanks to an academic text by her second husband, Paul Ekman, devoted entirely to analyzing Patricia’s facial expressions. Ekman, then a professor at UCSF, was the writer and inspiration behind the TV series Lie to Me. Not always a good thing, having a reference manual on how to read a friend’s inner thoughts. There were times when what I saw there sent me diving for cover. But this time I could see she was going to say yes long before she did.

Our meeting with the Jawdats, in their sitting room with tea and biscuits surrounded by old masters’ works, was awkward at first but as we talked and learned about each other the tension eased. We looked at photographs of Villa Manni and shared a little of our backgrounds. Patricia had never met the Jawdats, which was surprising given the small size of the D.C. art world, but Patricia was part of the contemporary art scene and the Jawdats and St. Luke’s gallery were a wonderful part of the old world. Nizar was a renaissance man, steeped in the complexity and subtlety of many cultures, fluent in many languages, and educated in the history, politics, and religions of the world. Ellen was a New England native; smart, insightful, cultured, dignified, and I had the feeling she could look straight into the soul of anyone she met. No need for a psychologist’s crib book she. We passed muster and the Jawdats agreed to let Villa Manni to us for the summer.

A direct flight from Dulles to Rome landed us in Italy early on a June morning. We picked up our rental car and headed straight up the A1, dropping off the autostrada at the small village of Orte Scalo to pick up the house keys from Luigi, the villa’s caretaker, at his café across the street from the train station.

Over espresso, Luigi gave us directions to the villa and all the other minutiae we might need. Water was a great surprise. It turned out all Orte and its surrounds drew water from a spring on Villa Manni’s land, so our water was free. Luigi also told us that Villa Manni, unlike many of the old estates that had changed hands over the centuries, had retained its wild asparagus and truffle rights. I had noticed this sort of thing on previous trips to Italy – signs on a property’s perimeter identifying the owner of asparagus and truffle rights. Villa Manni’s had never been sold off. Luigi said we were free to harvest whatever we could find. Had I known, I would have packed a pig.

Leaving the café, we stopped by a market and picked up basic foodstuffs, wine, beer, gin, and vodka – just the essentials – and set off to follow Luigi’s directions to the villa, whereupon we immediately got lost. In the pre-GPS world, paper maps were king. Or they would have been had they showed every dirt path on private land leading to estates nestled in the foothills of the Apennines. It took an hour to find the villa even though it was only three miles from the café. I’m pretty sure one bridge we crossed was for pedestrians only. But when we finally pulled up in front of the villa, I felt an enormous wave of satisfaction and relief. It was every bit the Tuscan villa as I had imagined. Never mind we were in Lazio. Photographs can deceive, and I wasn’t sure what the reality would be, even after looking through Ellen’s photo album. In the event it was even more than I had hoped.

The massive wooden doors gave entry to a welcoming foyer. Beyond the foyer was a spacious living room with fourteen-foot ceilings and an enormous, ornate, carved stone fireplace. A wall of French doors opened onto a veranda running the width of the villa. The house was built on a slope, putting the main floor and the veranda on the second level, looking out across the Tiber river valley. Vineyards, forest, and fields of brilliant yellow sunflowers stretched as far as the eye could see, with the nearby medieval hilltop town of Orte and two others in the distance clinging to their rocky perches. It had been hot in Rome, but here it was a perfect seventy-five. The house had been closed up for months. We opened all the French doors and then the windows on the opposite side of the house to allow a cool, cleansing breeze to sweep away the mustiness. There was a bedroom suite on the main floor with a sitting room, bedroom, and en-suite bath. Patricia claimed it for her own. The main floor also had a large study, a dining room with an illuminating clerestory, a roomy, well equipped kitchen, and a pantry. Up a broad, open staircase to the next level, one hallway led off to two bedrooms and a shared bath. Another hallway took me to an ancient tower with the master suite. That was for me. Below the main floor were four dormitory-like rooms with bunk beds, a game room, another bathroom, and laundry facilities.

After a shower and a change of clothes, the travel grime had been washed away and jet lag was setting in. With a simple dinner and a glass of wine I was happy to sit on the veranda and listen to the quiet. Only the sound of an occasional train announcing itself in Orte Scalo interrupted the peace. I don’t even remember the sun setting or finding my way up to the tower and falling into bed.

Next morning I was rested and full of excitement, ready to explore. I found Patricia in the kitchen making coffee. Remembering what Luigi had said, I asked if she wanted to wander around the estate and see if we could find some wild asparagus. She said, “NO!” I was more than a little taken aback. What had I said? Was this a harbinger of what the entire vacation would be like? Would it be worthy of another chapter in someone’s book about the horrors of traveling with Patricia? I’d been there before, and I didn’t want to be there again. Patricia handed me a cup of coffee and I sat at the kitchen table, sipping and eating day-old bread. Patricia finally sat opposite me and apologized. She explained her visceral reaction.

I knew she had been raised on a farm in Massachusetts. She was the daughter of Polish immigrants who, in a bizarre twist of fate, anglicized their name to Tobacco at Ellis Island, then became tobacco farmers. But there was a lot I didn’t know. Patricia told me that, with the exception of the dead, frozen months of winter, she and her brother Richard started every day before sun-up harvesting asparagus from her father’s truck garden. The very last thing she wanted to do was go hunting wild asparagus. Her father was an abusive drunk, and she had fled her family and the farm she hated as soon as she was able. She wanted nothing in her life that reminded her of those early years. I will say that she tempered her feeling in later years and when her parents were both gone there were a few things she held onto from the farm, like the copper rooster weathervane from the barn, which now sits atop my house in California.

Patricia could be happy and sad, sometimes very sad. She often battled deep depression. Years later, when she was afflicted with a sudden, rapidly progressing dementia, she took her own life with an overdose of pills washed down with vodka. At her memorial service, an invitation-only affair of artists, art dealers, and her closest friends, her brother Richard told stories of their hard childhood on the farm and explicitly called out Patricia’s hatred of harvesting asparagus. I was up next, and on a whim started with the story of my suggesting we hunt wild asparagus at Villa Manni and her emphatic, single word response, “NO!” Only gallery-owner Chris Addison laughed out loud, although I could see painter Sylvia Snowden trying hard to hold it in. It was a good joke, and I’m absolutely, positively certain Patricia would have laughed loud and long. I told many other stories of my travels and adventures with Patricia. I was the only one there who had really spent time with Patricia the person and not Patricia the artist. At the reception following the service, many people said they were so grateful to hear my stories and to know there was a rich, funny, warm, and complex person beneath her formal persona. I had always known how compartmentalized Patricia kept her life. Every relationship was discrete and she never gossiped. It may not be obvious but I knew it to be part of her independent spirit. But with her degree of independence came deep loneliness. The great sadness inside me was that she died alone, feeling afraid and abandoned, in no small part by me.

But that was fifteen years after Villa Manni. Then, there, in Italy, a great adventure was just beginning.

For the first time on any of my trips with Patricia she made time during the day for exploration and just being a tourist. We visited all the hilltop towns between Orte and Florence. My brother Gray and his disastrous girlfriend Margot visited for a week. Not even Margot’s domineering manipulation of Gray could diminish the joy I felt having him there and sharing a road trip around Monte Argentario. Patricia and I made frequent day trips into Rome to visit ancient sites, architectural wonders, museums, and the Vatican.

Still, most days, Patricia would paint and we would cruise into a nearby town for another outstanding meal. We noticed we were often seated at the best tables and sometimes ahead of others. It was only when restaurant owners and maître d’hôtels started saying, “So nice to see you back again so soon, Mr. Martin,” that I had a clue what was happening. It had happened before. In those days, I was told I bore a striking resemblance to Steve Martin. We both grew up in Orange County, California and spoke with the OC accents of our generation and we both had naturally white hair at a young age. I’m told we also looked alike. I had managed to get internet service at the villa and did some late-night web browsing and found out Steve Martin had rented a villa for the summer in the neighboring town of Amelia. I was happy to mildly and quietly deny I was Steve Martin while enjoying the preferential treatment that only increased as the summer wore on. Early in August Patricia and I were in Rome for the day and walking past Harry’s American Bar on the Via Veneto. In the display case by the entrance were photographs of Steve Martin and Martin Short partying it up at Harry’s the night before. An American husband and wife and their two tween children, a boy and a girl, were standing in front of the case admiring the photographs. I leaned in over the man’s shoulder to see the photos when he turned and looked at my face. His eyes got wide and he looked back at the photographs and then at me and said, “Kids, look, it’s St-t-t-eve M-m-artin!” The kids and his wife kept staring at the photographs and the young boy said, “Yeah, I know Dad. And Martin Short. I can see the pictures! Duh!” I smiled and winked at the father, then turned and caught up with Patricia, who had kept walking. I could hear the father trying to explain himself as the distance between us grew. In perfect Patricia style, she was mad and said, “I’m tired of hearing this whole damn Steve Martin thing everywhere we go! I want it to stop!”

Note to self (at the time): Send Alice Adams a letter in case she’s thinking of updating her chapter on Travels with Patricia Forrester.

Later in August we closed up Villa Manni for a week and took a train and boat to Capri. Of course, it was beautiful and the nightlife was magical and all I could think of was I would rather be there with someone I loved romantically. No disrespect to Plato, but the allure of Capri is for lovers. The Island had been a romantic getaway spot for Romans for more than two thousand years. Never mind that emperor Tiberius threw his enemies off the cliff of his villa into the ocean below. I’m sure he did it with a certain élan.

Three years later, when I was dating Windy, I brought her to Capri, checked into the Hotel Quisisana, and knew I was right about the Island’s magic. Ah! A brief aside. Penny Marshall was staying at the Quisisana the same time we were. Her messages, many messages, kept ending up in our pigeon hole at the front desk and all my attempts to correct the staff were futile. Penny and her friends would usually have cocktails on the hotel veranda at the same time as Windy and I, before heading out for dinner. We made it a habit to hand the messages over to Penny while we waited for our first Bellini. At least she didn’t mistake me for Steve Martin. Maybe she got so many messages the hotel staff just stuffed the overflow in the “other Marshall” pigeon hole when hers was full. I think that was it.

Back from Capri at Villa Manni we put on a Pavarotti  CD, opened up the doors and windows, poured a glass of Orvieto wine, laid out a platter of antepasti and enjoyed the afternoon and all the remaining days of summer in peace and tranquility.

Patricia’s painting of Capri’s I Faraglioni remains my favorite of all her work. It hangs in her Baltimore art dealer’s home. I need to do something about that.

In her will Patricia left me all her possessions with the exception of paintings by her hand and her condominium. I already had quite a few of her paintings (except for I Faraglioni!) and she gifted her remaining portfolio to museums and other friends, dealers, and artists. Her condominium in the Mendota she left to the long-suffering doorman. Patricia was like that.

Nizar and Ellen Jawdat became close friends and I spend many happy evenings discussing matters of great social and political import with Nizar over various exotic meals and libations. About fifteen years ago Nizar suffered a stroke and no longer recognized most people. He passed away early in 2017, at the age of 96. He and Ellen had been married 72 years.

This isn’t one of my stories. It’s one of my father’s. But it’s just too good to be lost to time without writing it down here and sharing it.

In my father’s first semester of medical school at McGill University in Montreal he was told it was every student’s responsibility to acquire, by whatever means possible, a human skull by the start of second term. Today there are polymer-cast skulls that are every bit as good as the real thing for learning skull anatomy, but then, in 1939, there were no suitable alternatives.

My father rode his Indian Chief motorcycle back to Seattle for the Christmas break (It was a warm, dry winter, or I would have thought that an achievement in and of itself!), and fretted over his failure to come up with an idea for how to get his hands on a human skull. A few days before he would have to leave to make it back to Montreal for start of classes his phone rang. It was a Seattle friend who was going to medical school nearby. He said, “Curt, I’m in trouble! I left something for you in your garage, but I’ve got to skip town and lay low for a while. Bye!”

Well, of course, my father went out to the garage. First, he was aware of a horrible stench, then he saw a bucket in the corner closest to the door, covered with a burlap sack. He removed the sack and was confronted with a human face staring back at him. There was a head in the bucket!

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, (yes, I know there are probably many variations on that metaphor that would bring a grittier flavor to this moment), he saw a solution to his dilemma being handed to him on a silver platter, or in reality, in a tin bucket. I’m in metaphor hell here.

He cleaned as much flesh from the head as he could, sawed off the top, and removed the brain. Then he wrapped the skull in newspaper, tied it to the back of his motorcycle seat, and set off for Montreal. When he arrived at the border, the Canadian customs agent asked him what was wrapped up in the paper? He answered, “A human head. Wanna see?” The agent laughed and waved him through.

When he returned to Seattle for summer break he found a friend of a friend who was able to put him in touch with the friend who had left the head in his garage. Over a beer he heard the details of how the head had ended up in his hands.

It turns out his friend had taken a Christmas break job in a funeral home with a crematorium for the explicit purpose of stealing a head, and for the same reason my father needed one: it was a medical school requirement. He asked for and was given the job of pushing the coffins into the crematorium and firing up the furnace. He was alone with each coffin for a few minutes before he was signaled to begin the cremation while family and loved ones sat on the other side of a wall with a small window into the furnace chamber where, if they wished, they could peek in and see the coffin burn. No one ever peeked.

As the break came to an end, he was ready with a saw and a bucket. When he thought the time was right and he was alone with a body about to be cremated, he opened up the coffin, sawed off the head, dropped it in the bucket, closed the top, and when signaled, slid the coffin into the furnace and turned up the heat.

He felt confident everything had gone well until he heard loud and continuous screaming from the other side of the wall. It seemed the wife of the deceased has been the one-in-a-hundred who has decided to watch the cremation through the little window, and when the sides of the coffin fell away, she saw her husband’s head was missing and let out a shriek. My father’s friend high-tailed it out the back door and, well, I’ve told you the rest.

The skull stayed with my father through medical school and after the war it rested on a shelf in his office until he retired. He attached a brass hinge to the skull flap and springs to keep the jaw in place. Just another piece of our family history.

I like football. I was never allowed to play it as a boy. My father was a neurologist, a specialist in electroencephalography, and he knew as far back as the 1950s that football’s repeated small concussions were cumulative and caused serious brain damage. No football for the Marshall boys! But I loved the game. During a too-brief period when I was five and lucky enough to live with my father, he would take me to Velleggia’s in Baltimore’s Little Italy on Sundays after a Colts home game and we would sit just one table away from Johnny Unitas and his teammates as they celebrated another victory (they were all victories, as I remember it).

Like most red-blooded Americans, I look forward to the NFL playoffs and especially to the Super Bowl. Yet it isn’t always easy to find a place to watch. For a number of years I was working in London on Super Bowl Sunday, and the game wasn’t available on local TV, but I found a Chicago-style pizzeria on Maiden Lane, one street north of the Strand, that put the game up live on their big screens at 1 AM. (All other NFL games on British TV are pure fantasy. All the commercials, delays, reviews, time-outs and half-time are edited out. A game takes one hour and the players look like supermen, knocked down flat one moment and lined up for the next play a second later.)

By far the most interesting Super Bowl I watched on television was in Costa Rica in 1994. I was staying in a rental villa with my friend Patricia Forrester on Playa Flamingo along the pacific coast. There was no television and in every other circumstance, I was more than OK with that. I didn’t come to Costa Rica to watch TV! I was spending my days diving with swarms of manta ray and snorkeling pacific reefs while Patricia painted in the jungle while being serenaded by Howler monkies in the trees.

She was a fearless woman, Patricia. On our first night there I got up in the wee hours to use the toilet and my eyes were open just enough to register there was something on the floor that shouldn’t be. I held my foot in the air, switched on the light, and shouted out loud when I saw a seven-inch scorpion beneath my foot, claws raised and stinger poised to strike. I jumped up on the edge of the tub and was contemplating my best course of action when Patricia appeared in the doorway and said, “What’s wrong?” I just pointed at the scorpion and I think I made kind of a strange, whining noise. Words failed me. Patricia looked at the monster, took off her slipper, and with one solid whap, squished it to a pulp. She said, “go back to bed, Marshall,” and stomped off.

In my own defense, after a few more trips to Costa Rica with Patricia, I thought nothing of the occasional tarantula walking across my foot as I rested it on the ground and rocked myself back and forth in a hammock strung between two palm trees on the beach. But I digress.

Super Bowl Sunday was drawing near at Playa Flamingo, and I was bemoaning the fact I had not found anywhere to watch the game. Sunday morning came and Patricia surprised me at breakfast by telling me she had heard there was a place where we could watch. All we had to do was walk a mile north along the deserted beach, find a trail into the jungle and follow that for half a mile, and we would come to a clearing where we would find Jack’s American Bar. Really? But sometimes you just have to say, “Why not?”

If you haven’t been to central America, it might not have registered that Costa Rica is due south of the U.S. east coast and is on Eastern time. So, in the late afternoon we set off along the beach and sure enough, after a mile or so, we found a trail leading into the jungle. We hadn’t seen anyone else walking along the beach and the trail was empty as far as we could see into the dense foliage. Nor did we see any signs of human life as we trudged along the trail. The first hint we were headed in the right direction was the sound of a diesel generator up ahead. And then, right where it should have been, we came out into a roundish clearing about two hundred feet across with a palapa in the center and a sign up in the thatch that read, sure enough, ‘Jack’s American Bar’. There were probably a hundred people there, lounging on stools, benches, and folding camp chairs around barrels of roasted peanuts and hovering around stand-up bar tables. Cans of Miller and Bud covered every level surface and huge ice-filled tubs of beer guaranteed an endless supply. A string of half-oil-drum charcoal grills were lined up along one side of the clearing, and hamburgers, BBQ chicken, ribs, and hot dogs were giving off an all-American aroma in the middle of the tropical jungle.

But the people! Every American in Costa Rica must have made their way to Jack’s. There were DEA agents and drug dealers; tax expats and others with enough felony warrants for their arrests to ensure they would never be able to go home voluntarily. Every Yankee reprobate, misanthrope, sociopath, pedophile, rapist, murderer, and embezzler for hundreds of miles had turned up. Every sport fisherman, sex-tourist, and eco-adventurer come down from El Norte had found their way to this little piece of surreal estate. Jack himself, bearded and in jeans, wife-beater, Stetson, and cowboy boots, tended bar under the shade of the palapa.

And to make good on the promise of the day, an enormous eight-foot satellite dish was perched on top of the palapa, feeding a clear signal to a giant flat-screen TV hanging from the eaves, the diesel generator giving life and sustenance to the anachronistic electronics.

In any other setting the DEA would be arresting half the crowd and the other half would be trying to kill each other, but there was an unspoken truce in effect, like the Christmas Truce along the Western Front in World War I.

I don’t remember who played or who won the Super Bowl that year. There was cheering and booing, angst and exuberance, victory and defeat. I wasn’t watching the screen. I was too busy watching the people there at Jack’s American Bar to care. Second only to my Baltimore Ravens winning Super Bowl XXXV, it was the Best Super Bowl Ever.