A Maiden’s Voyage to Fremantle Adventure

FREMANTLE, Australia —  Except for the unmistakable fact that she is wearing a cage around her head, Maureen Kousak is the person I would most like to be like.

Kousak is down here, down under, having what some of us would refer to as an adventure. A real life experience.

“I am. Exactly. I’m having an adventure,” she says.

And this is exactly what I have always associated sailing with--adventure.

Call me a romantic. Call me corny. Call me Ishmael. I can’t help it. Sailing, to me, inspires images dramatic and exotic. Cool ocean breezes. Winds whipping canvas sails. Dark clouds in the distance. Red sails in the sunset. Docking by moonlight. Gulping pills to keep from throwing up. You know, poetic notions like that. The stuff of storybooks.

Sailing to me is synonymous with adventure and romance. Setting fire to the Bounty at Pitcairn’s Island. Shoving off from New Bedford to pursue the white whale. Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly honeymooning on the True Love. Cousteau aboard Calypso. Thor Heyerdahl on Kon-Tiki. A gentleman inviting a lady to “sail the world with me.” The lady packing nothing but sunburn lotion and sandals.

There is only one problem. I don’t own a boat. I don’t even sail. In fact, I am nervous around water. I hardly even bathe. Ask anybody. I swim like Joe Frazier.

Once, I tried water skiing but had trouble standing up. And that was in the boat. I also tried snorkeling. Fish pointed to me and laughed. I also tried scuba diving. I busted my scuba.

Such has been the sadness of my life. I love the thought of sailing, but do not sail. I even live in Marina del Rey, but do not sail. Living in Marina del Rey and not sailing is like living in Detroit and not driving. The city fathers are about to ask me to leave.

Maureen Kousak has no such trouble. She is 28, hails from San Diego by way of Michigan and is more at home on a boat than on a floor. At least she has been lately. She sailed much of the ocean blue, just to get here.

She sailed to Hawaii. She sailed to Tahiti. To Samoa. To Tonga. To Fiji. She saw more of the South Pacific than Mitzi Gaynor. She hitched her way toward Australia as easily as some people thumb rides on country roads.

Remember Otis Redding singing: “2,000 miles I roam, just to make this dock my home”? Maureen Kousak made it 12,000 miles. We were sitting in the morning sun, watching the tide roll in, the other day at the Sail America syndicate’s camp, where she has been lending a hand to Dennis Conner and the Stars & Stripes crew at the America’s Cup races.

You couldn’t miss Maureen. She was the one wearing the metal contraption around her head, the neck brace that turned this woman of otherwise normal appearance into the grillwork of a ’57 Chevy.

From a headpiece that resembled a tiara--”I’m thinking of putting diamonds in it,” she said--to four descending bars that boxed her face and shoulders to a plastic corset strapped around her torso, Kousak was quite a sight. She was also the object of quite a lot of good-natured ribbing.

Some of the guys were calling her R2-D2. Others noticed the screws emerging from her temples and called her Frankenstein. “They tell me they’ll tighten my bolts if I act up,” she said.

Even a sensitive, sympathetic guy like myself couldn’t resist taking one look at this poor woman’s head and asking her if she could pick up HBO.

Kousak doesn’t mind. She’s accustomed to it by now. She knows the people who have been teasing her are some of the same people who filled her room with flowers last week at the Royal Perth Rehabilitation Hospital’s spinal unit.

Stars & Stripes had just eliminated New Zealand’s Cup entry to earn the right to face Australia in the final series, and the Kiwis decided to throw a party--”to celebrate ‘no hard feelings’ and ‘congratulations’ and all that,” Kousak said.

Sounded like fun. So, she and her boyfriend, John Barnitt, a mast man on Conner’s crew, joined the party. And, in the swimming pool of the Kiwis’ residential compound, crewmen from both boats began to build a human pyramid, college cheerleader style.

Kousak, small and light, scrambled to the top of the pyramid, which promptly collapsed.

She hit the water, hard. One of the men fell on top of her. The force of his fall drove her straight down, about five feet, to the floor of the pool.

The dislocated vertebra and pinched nerves that resulted kept her in traction for three days. The brace will be necessary for another five weeks, after which she will either switch to a Fiberglas whiplash collar or wear the same brace for six weeks more.

But it isn’t so bad. Having been in Fremantle since August, working toward the big event, Kousak at first had been certain that she would be hospitalized during the finals, which begin Saturday. “The thought that I couldn’t be there, well, I almost died,” she said.

Then she laughed. “Literally, I guess, almost died,” she said.

Instead, she is working again, as a deckhand, as a hostess, as a helper, wherever and however needed. Sometimes she goes out on the Betsy, the tender that tows Stars & Stripes out to the America’s Cup course.

She is holding up pretty well. Literally, holding up. Holding up that brace, which leaves her with a dull ache in the skull all day long and keeps her listing left and right like a small craft.

None of that kept her from attending Wednesday night’s formal, $300-a-ticket America’s Cup Ball, where Kousak wrapped herself in a strapless dress, tied a bow in front and balanced on high heels, carrying a headdress Carmen Miranda couldn’t have handled.

Well, she figured, she’d gotten this far, she might as well go.

How she got here is what I envy. Perhaps she fantasized of such things, of travel to faraway lands, when growing up in Waterford--what a fitting name--Township in suburban Detroit, in the same neighborhood as Kirk Gibson, the Tiger baseball player.

Maybe somebody flitted around her house all day singing, “I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China,” or “Won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise?”

Whatever. Kousak was running a little refinishing business in San Diego a year ago when she got the urge to go. She set out with friends for Hawaii and stayed there a couple of months. Her next ride intended to sail all the way to Perth, but discovered paradise in Tahiti and decided to stay there.

Kousak was determined to get to Australia by August to join her boyfriend, who was working for Conner. As luck would have it, the crew of Scotch Mist, a New York boat headed in her direction, was about to leave Tahiti. They offered her a lift.

One way or another, she got here. And one way or another, she will get home. I ask what she will do when the cup races end. She says she doesn’t have the slightest idea. It is the statement I have been wanting to make my entire life.

A photographer happens by. He works for Marlin magazine. He has a copy in his hand, and the cover photo of a woman catching a black marlin is his. My mind is racing. Maybe I can work for Marlin magazine. Maybe I can leave Marina del Rey and sail the world, photographing or interviewing marlins.

Kousak likes the guy’s picture. “Maybe I can make a cover photo of a magazine wearing this,” she says, gripping her head bars.

“You ought to hang Christmas-tree lights from that thing,” the guy says.

I am not listening. I am dreaming. I am in Tahiti, eating a mango, when a native boy comes running. My editor from Marlin has just sent word that he needs me on Tonga. I sigh. I kiss a brown maiden goodby. I step onto my boat. I sail.