Lives in Ruins (16 page)

She pointed a french fry at me and drilled me with her sharp eyes.

“Now, it's taken me six hours to get you to the point where you understand why it's taking so long, but do you see? We did our first remote sensing, looking for the Revolutionary War fleet, in 1992 and 1993. That's twenty years!

“People say, ‘Well, why haven't you found it, Dr. Abbass?' Do you understand what a big deal this is and how difficult this is? It's a multifarious, multi-site study. Technology is improving, which is a big help, but this is a big project, and all being done by volunteers with no money.”

Dreamed up by someone with a vision, willing to scrub floors to realize it.

SIX MONTHS LATER
, I returned to Newport for an all-day course in marine archaeology. To prepare, I had studied the three pounds of nautical instruction Abbass had sent home with me, the maritime vocabulary and sketches of schooners, the code of ethics, “A Fisherman's Guide to Explosive Ordnance” (there was still stray ordnance from World War II to be encountered in Newport Harbor), and “A Note about Scientific Integrity, Primary Evidence, and the Control and Protection of Data: The Non-Disclosure Policy.” Geekery beyond geekery, but for a fifty-dollar tuition fee, I could spend the day with divers interested in archaeology, and listen to Abbass, who, as I already knew, was an effective teacher. She had sworn I wouldn't have to put my head underwater to get into underwater archaeology; there were maritime sites on land, and there was lots of conservation and classification work with artifacts aboveground.

The class was supposed to start at 9:30 a.m. in a conference room of the handsome Newport Library. I arrived on time, but Raul, a diver who studied at the New York Maritime College (located, romantically, under the Throgs Neck Bridge), and I were still chatting in the conference room at ten when a RIMAP volunteer
finally showed up, rolling a dolly with two big file boxes and bearing bad news: a few hours earlier she had driven Kathy Abbass, screaming with pain, to the hospital. The doctors thought it was kidney stones. The volunteer, Debby Dwyer, had caught the other students outside. Now she gave Raul and me a pound or two each of handouts and announced, with effusive apologies, that the class would be rescheduled. Dwyer was heading back to the hospital; and, yes, she said, I could follow her.

We drove through the winding one-way streets of Newport and arrived at the emergency room just as Abbass was being wheeled back from a CT scan, her white hair gathered into a bundle of curls, and beaming when she caught sight of us. I wanted only to see that she would be all right, but Abbass was pleased to have company, and feeling much better since the painkillers had kicked in. “Pain meds! They work!” she said. For the next hour, Abbass held court while we waited for her test results, a sultana resting on her pillows. She had news of her ancient van, which finally sputtered and died. Now she commuted by bus from her home in Bristol to Newport, which wasn't a problem—it was that two miles from the bus stop to RIMAP's office on the naval base that were tough. Dwyer and other volunteers conspired to keep Abbass mobile, taking turns driving her to the grocery. “She's like my second mom,” Dwyer said. (Eventually one of the volunteers sold Abbass a beat-up Mercury for one dollar.)

The ER nurse interrupted to ask Abbass to rate her pain level. “Much better, six or seven,” she said agreeably, so the nurse prepared another injection and asked us to step outside. “No, no, they can stay,” she told the nurse. Abbass had just begun telling us the improbable tale of the visit of the Earl of Sandwich and his wife to the RIMAP offices, and continued the story while she got sedated. It was slightly more complicated than the usual Abbass story, and decidedly more wacky.

The guy who supposedly invented sandwiches—that is, the
fourth Earl of Sandwich, in his capacity as Lord of the Admiralty of England, had sent James Cook around the world. Naturally, Abbass has been tracking his descendants since her discovery of the
Endeavour
's ties to Newport. She began corresponding with the son of the present earl, the eleventh Earl of Sandwich. The son, who has no title, is the U.S. director of the Earl of Sandwich fast-food franchise. “Dine with the new royal couple, Avocado BLT and Pastrami Reuben,” trumpets the banner on the company's website. “Join the Upper Crust.”

When Abbass got word from the son of the eleventh earl that his titled parents were coming to the United States for the opening of the newest shop in the chain, she swung into motion. She wrote to the earl himself, “Give me a day.” And so, on the last afternoon of their trip to the States, the Earl and Countess of Sandwich—John and Caroline Montagu, as they are otherwise known—found themselves at Newport Naval Base, visiting the offices of RIMAP. Abbass showed them copies of documents she'd dug up in the Public Record Office linking Captain Cook's
Endeavour
with the
Lord Sandwich
and the Revolutionary War. She also shared the few artifacts taken from the sunken ships, things “floating around that might have been seen or stolen,” including the fragment of an old teapot. “They're interested in the search for the
Endeavour
,” Abbass reported happily. She was already plotting an Earl of Sandwich restaurant in the as-yet-unbuilt RIMAP museum and conservation facility. “Shops and restaurants are the way museums make their money. We want the earl to be our British patron. I don't know whether this is going to work, but it's not going to be for lack of trying.”

By the end of their visit, rain had drenched Newport, and the Montagus were hungry before their flight, but—“Where do I take an earl and countess to lunch? And in such weather?” Abbass wondered. She drove them through Burger King. “They split
a hamburger,” she confided. “They shared everything. They're very thin.” And then, she added, “I hugged the Earl of Sandwich goodbye.”

“But wait,” I said, “you drove the earl through the Burger King?” and there we were in the ER, laughing about this clash of worlds, when the young doctor arrived. He was a diver, too, and wanted to hear all about her work as an underwater archaeologist, so he was invited to visit RIMAP to take a class. He then wrote Abbass some prescriptions and cautioned her to make a follow-up appointment (Abbass had no intention of following up), and released her. She insisted she felt well enough for lunch, though, so the three of us went to Bishop's 4th Street Diner, where she grandly treated us to sandwiches.

Later Abbass wrote me:

I haven't had health insurance for the 20+ years of RIMAP. There just isn't enough money, either to pay a policy for the organization or to pay me enough of a salary so I can pay for it myself
.

The reality of being the working poor is pretty grim in the US, and being well-educated doesn't help if you pursue (like I do) a career that doesn't pay a living wage. Part of what we discuss in the Intro class is the reality of the profession, what it takes to become qualified, what the chances are for employment, and what other non-monetary costs you have (like the embarrassment of being considered “indigent” in order to have “charity care” at the hospital). But it was my choice to continue with RIMAP rather than go and get a “real” job
.

And in the end it has turned out that so many who chose what appeared to be a more economically viable path have since lost their retirements in the recent financial scandals, or have seen their wealth crumble with the downturn of the economy, or have been fired and replaced with lower-paid, younger folk. So who is in worse shape—the
one who mostly followed passion and knows how to live on a shoestring, or the one who continued in a drudge job for elusive economic security and is probably deep in debt, too?

Abbass emphasized that this was her choice. This was an adventure that she herself had orchestrated, from England to the South Seas and Australia and into Rhode Island waters. Difficulties be damned.

She credited her determination and growing enterprise to a surprising source, the League of Women Voters. As a young person in the sixties, she wanted to make a difference, but “those were the days when university students were rioting and burning things down.” Joining the League, Abbass thought, was “a way to be politically active without being destructive.” When her husband, a new American citizen, went to Vietnam “to do his duty,” Abbass threw herself into running the local League in Norfolk, Virginia. She learned how to lobby politicians and use the law. “People laugh, but those old broads—like I am now!—they were the ones who taught me how to survive graduate school. Once the mayor has yelled at you at a city council meeting, whatever your professor says at grad school is nothing.” They also taught her that “If you want to overturn the law, you have to get politically active. Archaeologists are few, and we tend not to be the hardball, bare-knuckled types that you have to be to change things.” Her greater ambitions for RIMAP are fueled by the spirit of civic responsibility fostered by the League, and by her belief that, if a thing is worth fighting for, “Well, gird your loins and go to war for it.”

I recalled an earlier visit to RIMAP, when Abbass and I sat on opposite sides of a desk, enjoying a companionable Diet Coke while she assembled stacks of gray literature for me. I made notes, and Diva dozed at our feet. I tried to imagine what I would do for fun if I poured my life into marine archaeology and lived in voluntary poverty with a rescue dog in a wealthy yachting community. I figured
I'd go for malicious pleasures. On a hunch, I asked Abbass if she read murder mysteries. She didn't hesitate a beat. “I'd marry Lord Peter Wimsey right this minute if he walked through this door.” Then she gave me a mysterious Dorothy L. Sayers half-smile. Of course she loves a good mystery. She put herself right in the middle of one.

T
HE AUDIENCE
at an archaeology lecture is ancient. I watched them stream in, drawn to slides of artifacts and talk of ruins: snowy-haired, with canes and sensible shoes. They listened with hunger. It is a common by-product of aging, to find yourself reaching for the unreachable past, longing for the residue of bygone civilizations. The man next to me in the New York University auditorium—we were attending a conference called “Performing Memory in the Ancient World,” sponsored by the NYU Classics Department—leaned forward to concentrate. He was in his sixties, on the younger side in this room, a retired writer. He showed me his marked-up schedule for this conference, with other lectures circled. He was tearing himself away to run uptown to the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia University to hear an Italian scholar talk about Pompeii. Would I save his seat? He figured he'd be back at this conference at NYU by lunchtime, and so he was, slipping into the same chair and opening his notebook.

“Did I miss any handouts?” he wanted to know. He pored over the one I showed him, then sprang up to scavenge his own copy. “It has a bibliography,” he explained, happily. He was eager to hear about one particular talk he'd missed, the one by Joan Breton Connelly, the classical archaeologist and recipient of a MacArthur “genius”
award. I described it in detail and with a little too much relish and his shoulders slumped. The avid consumer of lectures on the ancient world had gambled and lost. You don't want to miss a Joan Connelly talk.

Connelly's book,
Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece
, is both scholarly and engaging, a bold look at the role of women in ancient Greece from the late Bronze Age to the fifth century
A
.
D
. Although commonly characterized as invisible during this era, ancient Greek women, on the contrary, wielded considerable power in the realm of religion, which was woven into almost every aspect of life. The book got me excited about the classics. I sought out stories about Connelly's excavation at Yeronisos, off the coast of Cyprus, where she had, since 1990, been digging a temple built—by Cleopatra's court, Connelly suspected—in homage to Apollo. I couldn't find anything personal about Connelly herself. For someone in the public eye, in the age of social networks, she had cultivated an impressive privacy. Her Wikipedia entry did not even furnish her birthday. She dedicated
Portrait of a Priestess
to four female mentors. The acknowledgments contained not a hint about anyone “without whom this volume could not have been written.” Instead, it evoked a vast network of scholars, cloistered archives, exotic locations, and, in the only personal touch, the “epic summer road trips to Brauron and Eretria with Lilly Kahil in her Citroën DS.” These were wisps out of time, as insubstantial as the fragments of pottery and bits of carvings from which Connelly had teased out her history of Greek priestesses. It was foolish to read anything into them, but I imagined she lived in a cool, orderly sanctuary.