My romantic impression of the Nile had been informed by
the paintings of David Roberts, the nineteenth-century Scottish
artist who depicted the Egyptian Nile as a lagoonish idyll
of soft-sanded banks, mirror-still coves, stands of tasseled
reeds, oxen lazily grazing in the shade of slender date palms,
barefoot women balancing water jugs on their heads, and
sails flushed pink by a tropical sun setting enormously in the
distance, which distance was always punctuated by either a
colossus, an obelisk, a minaret, or a pyramid. Roberts had depicted
the Nile that way because that was the way the Nile
looked when he saw it in 1838.
On that first trip to Egypt, in 1996, I boarded a cruise ship
in Luxor, steamed southward up the river, and found on the
second day out that, without my having registered the gradual
change, we had somewhere along the way shed Luxor's
modern urban shabbiness and glided into the precincts of a
David Roberts canvas. From the luxurious deck of the ship, it
struck me one evening that I was looking at an ox, palm trees,
sandy banks, mirror-still coves, water jugs on women's heads,
pink sails in an archaeological distance. I saw flamingos and
storks, soft colors, an explosive sunset, obelisks and minarets,
and now and then a ruined pharaonic temple. I saw no
skyscraper and only several buildings that could be truly
termed modern. But for a few power lines threading in and
out of the tops of palm trees, an occasional plastic water bottle
bobbing on the current, a motorized water pump, and a
handful of water jugs made not of clay but of aluminum, there
was little in the rural Nile landscape to suggest that nearly
two hundred years had passed since David Roberts visited
Egypt. Beyond Egypt's cities, the Nile was much as I had always
envisioned it - a rare instance of a fantastical preconception
matched by reality.
I was charmed. With a score of middle-aged Spaniards sunbathing
on the large deck behind me, I leaned against the
ship's railing and watched, entranced, as the Nile slipped by.
The wide river and its green banks looked old and placid, inscrutable
and inviting, and yet it was all as distant and inaccessible
to me as it had always been. Unable to leave the ship,
with its planned itinerary and guided tours, I realized I might
as well be watching this wonder from behind a glass wall.
What I wanted, really, was not just to see the Nile River but to
sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone.
I BEGAN ROWING some ten years ago when I lived on a small
island in Maine. Forced to ferry myself over the water, I found
that I enjoyed the task. Rowing was a peaceful, meditative activity,
and the constant movement - the inherent mobility - of
the water was enthralling. Land was stationary and always
belonged to somebody. Water, on the other hand, was free. It
moved and shifted and traveled. It was volatile, and when
aroused it could be unforgiving. I found it frightening and a
little bit thrilling to think that the water that throws itself
against the coast of Kennebunkport in July might feasibly be
the same particular water that laps at the crab-covered rocks
in Bombay Harbor the following March. And it pleased me to
realize that I could sit in a small boat and propel myself across
all this hugely moving water with an engine no more powerful
than my own two arms. One day I told the woman who
owned the island I lived on that I planned to row across Penobscot
Bay to another island two or three miles away. She
protested, said it was impossible, made me promise her I
wouldn't try. I promised, then did it anyway, and having successfully
done it, I wanted to do more, to go farther, to row
elsewhere. I rowed wherever I had a chance - in Boston Harbor
and Central Park and a lake in southern France. I rowed
on the Charles River in a carbuncled dinghy, while the elegant
fours and eights speared by like airborne swans. I rowed on
the Aegean Sea and on a pond in Oregon.
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