Hi Folks--We've just arrived in Istanbul and I haven't been in touch since Malaysia. Much to tell but goddammit THIS IS THE HARDEST KEYBOARD I HAVE EVER USED! This Turkish keyboard has a ç and an ý--plus a þ and a ö and a ç and a ð and a ü and god knows what those look like on your monitors. If that weren't enough, the comma, period, caps, and apostrophe are all in the wrong place and there is even a Euro key: € Anyway, I'm really really sorry about all the earthquakes. I used to kid about this disaster jinx I carry when I travel, but it's really beginning to bug me...the horrible typhoons in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Orissa state, the nuclear meltdown in Tokyo, those were normal for me, but two major earthquakes in Turkey--this is just getting out of hand. Don't worry about me. You remember that the bad things never actually occur where I am. Stick close to me and you'll be just fine. This was dramatically demonstrated last week when we witnessed a near-miraculous rescue from near-certain death by "foolishness" (the captain's term) in the Red Sea.

About 0100 we were jolted out of our berths by the PA announcement they told us we'd never hear: "Mr. MOB, Mr. MOB, all eyes to the starboard side! Mr. Skylight, Mr. Skylight, rescue crew to the Lifeboat Station One!" It took only a few moments, even at one in the morning, to remember that Mr. MOB is a Man Over Board, and Mr. Skylight means "crew emergency." So after a few minutes of tense confusion and rumors, 700 or so of us in various states of bundled-up were indeed "all eyes,"starýng out at the black night sea. . We all remembered the captain's scary talk the first night out at sea from Vancouver, when he described the Man Overboard procedure, but added: "We'll look for you. But if it's night, we won't find you. You will be invisible in the water, and anyway, you'll die of hypothermia in these waters in four minutes. It takes the ship a half an hour to execute the maneuver. We'll resume the search for your corpse in the daylight, but probably won't find that either. I've never witnessed a successful night rescue, though I did once have a spotter plane locate a corpse."

All was out of the ordinary: the captain ordered all that could fit onto the bridge--a previously inviolate sanctum--to help him spot. "Shut the f--- up!" he snapped at whisperers--the only time he's ever been heard to swear. Others of us were ordered tersely to the various decks to watch and search. We saw little floating lights twinkling and strained to hear in the silence. The captain's searchlight swept the seas but picked out only waves and jetsam. Silence was easy--there wasn't much to say. We were sure we had witnessed, in a blind sort of way, a death at sea. It was an odd feeling, knowing intellectually that one ought to be upset, but in fact accepting calmly that there was absolutely nothing more to be done, wondering when enough would be declared enough; wondering whether it was crew or passenger; wondering what would become of the shipboard routine the next day, and how quickly it would return to normal. Watching the smooth black sea seemed to make it all pretty clear. A couple of students down by the lifeboat--witnesses or friends--were being interrogated, and were weeping, but the rest of us just stood and watched the spotlight sweep back and forth.

Incredibly, there was a little voice: help! The spotlight jumped, and picked out a tiny head atop a swell: cheers from the ship. After a moment, thrashing in the water. "Now," the captain yelled, "call to him!" "J---, J---!" they screamed, "Hang in there, J---!" An American name: clearly a student, since our crew is Philipino. Then an awful feeling--what if it was my J---, a sweet cheerful guy in my Silk Road class--??!!--Lower the lifeboat! How can they possibly take so long to lower the lifeboat? Now the thrashing in the water got wild, and while we'd been calm minutes before, this was unbearable. The lifeboat creaked, swung and bounced down the hull of the ship, and only then was it clear just how dangerous this rescue was. Broken bones are the normal reward for a rescue team. Six trained crew in the wobbling, lurching lifeboat--men and women we knew!--each clearly put at great peril into a dark sea. The Red Sea had seemed so calm before--the ship is an enormous object, and one loses all sense of scale looking off of it, but the pitching lifeboat made the waves seem dangerously large. Worse, Mr. MOB swam with all the power of panic straight at the lifeboat and the hull of the ship, hampering his own rescue. Shouted appeals to stay calm and wait were no use. So mostly we stayed silent, and freaked quietly. But eventually they got him, snagged him with a boathook I guess, and dragged him over the side, smothered him with blankets and started the long lurching trip three stories up the hull of the great white mothership. The medical crew stood by with a neat, nautical array of orange emergency stuff that they'd probably never expected would actually be needed or do any good, except maybe for an injured crew member.

We never actually saw the moment of his grand entrance. As soon as he was nestled safely in the ship's boat, the captain ordered a mandatory general lifeboat drill, with life jackets, to count heads and make sure no one else was in the water. By now it was two in the morning, mind you, but off we all scurried back to our cabins, grabbed the jackets, and lined up at our assigned stations to answer roll. Well-rehearsed in this particular manoeuvre, we all had dutifully put on closed-toed shoes and sun-covering clothing. The crew instinctively corrected our knots and buckles. This may seem absurd--attention to sunburn and correct buckling may not seem to be of the least relevance in the situation at hand. But it reestablished routine, and like the "all eyes" command, it gave us something to do and feel useful. Sending us off to get our life-jackets was also, I realized later, a clever way to clear the decks at a crucial moment. What if they'd hauled him up dead, or missing a leg bitten off by a Red Sea shark?

So they saved his life. What to do now? By the time the drill was completed it was three in the morning, but with no one in any mood to sleep the dean called a meeting in the Union, where we got the Official Story and hung out with the counselling staff. We learned that one of our less promising students had conceived a plan during a long evening of partying to rappel down the hull of the ship wearing a life ring, just to see what the moving water felt like...and did just that. The moving sea sucked him right out of the ring and away. But it just so happened that the captain had slowed the ship for the approach to the Suez Canal. At our normal speed, 14 to 18 knots, he would have been pulled under the ship and drowned immediately. His fellow revellers had enough wits to do exactly the right thing, which was to scream bloody murder and throw things into the water to mark the spot. The things at hand just happened to be life jackets and rings with lights activated by contact with water. The watch on the bridge heard the hullabaloo, and did exactly the right thing, which was to throw the ship into a Williamson manoeuvre, a tricky S-shaped turn designed to return a ship to rescue position without (it is fervently hoped) running over or passing the unhappy Mr MOB. And J--- just happened to be a champion swimmer who just happened to choose the Red Sea for his escapade, where the waters are 85 degrees at night. Happily for me, our J--- was not my J---, who found himself overwhelmed by the attentions of similarly concerned people in class the next morning. 

The aftermath: Surprisingly downbeat. The next morning a grim-faced captain swept into the morning assembly to a prolonged and emotional standing ovation, which he acknowledged with a curt "I will convey your sentiments to the crew." He had come to warn us that such fortuitous circumstances could never again be expected to result in a successful night rescue. It was, he insisted, the first and only such in the one hundred years of his and his chief officers' accumulated experience at sea. The last thing in the world he wants is to embolden another drunken hero to try a repeat "foolishness." The equally grim dean announced that since the whole thing was the dumb result of excessive partying, there would be NO alteration of the day's schedule or routine. So we all stumbled, numb, through the day's classes. I gave a test; why not? Maybe it was an effect of the Mefloquine we're all taking against malaria, but the ship mood was deeply depressed. Tom Sawyer's jubilant "funeral" this was not. It had simply been too close a call for fun. We thought we'd witnessed a death at sea, and had indeed witnessed heroic crew members whom we knew and respected put at terrible risk. J--- alone was jubilant over his escapade, reportedly, even though confined to guarded quarters until put ashore at Suez. He's overboard for good now, last seen speeding in a cab to the Cairo airport. His parents were reportedly neither terribly surprised nor visibly concerned. The captain's parting words to him, or so the dean told the faculty, were "Welcome back from the dead. Do something worthwhile with your second life."

I guess because we're in Turkey, I'm reminded of a Nasreddin Hoja story told by the Sufis:

One day the good hoja saw a white bull wth magnificent horns, standing in a field. He conceived an irresistable desire to mount the bull's head and enthrone himself on the velvetty forehead between the horns. Despite all the rational arguments of his friends he could not shake this urge, and some days later did it: he went over the fence, grabbed the bull's horns, hoisted himself aloft and mounted the magnificent throne. His triumph was short-lived; the bull tossed his horns and the poor hoja landed with a wrenched back and broken arm in a bull patty, to the ridicule of his more sensible friends. But he rejected their pious remonstrations around his sick bed, observing that "I have made myself ridiculous, and am suffering pain. But I have pursued a great goal and have achieved it, if only briefly. How many of you can say the same?"

Writing this, I find I'm still a little shook up about it. Clearly it's past time for my dinner. So now I'm off to the Çiçek Pasaj, directly across the street, to eat meze, drink beer and listen to Gypsy music. Picture this, my former fellow aksamlar, and weep.

Güle güle-------------------------------------larry.