MzzJoplin
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39 Days on Hell Beach
« on: May 22nd, 2002, 4:13pm » |
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39 Days on Hell Beach
Kathy Vavrick-O'Brien landed at the Burlington International Airport just a few days before Christmas. She was deeply tanned from more than a month in the South Pacific sun. Her hair was bleached blonde from days on tropical island beaches. And her teeth were brilliantly white.
The real estate agent from Monkton, then 47, was also turning yellow from a problem with her liver. She had shed so many pounds that she swam in her clothes and disappeared into a brown coat brought for her by her 21-year-old son, Patrick O'Connell.
And those white teeth? Because she had no toothpaste on the island, she had sucked on lime rinds to freshen her mouth. Acid from the fruit had eaten at the enamel on her teeth.
Her friend and business associate, Mindy Stone, had come to the airport to welcome Kathy home. All she could do was watch and worry.
Stone had been the one to encourage Kathy to audition for "Survivor," the CBS reality show. She left application after application on Kathy's desk at her South Burlington office. Kathy chucked all but the last -- the one for "Survivor: Marquesas."
Kathy filled that one out at the last minute in July. She sent it in with her three-minute audition tape as did at least 40,000 other "Survivor" hopefuls. And, after a series of interviews, she won one of the coveted 16 spots on show.Now, though, Stone couldn't help but wonder what she had gotten her friend into. "I felt so bad because I thought, 'Oh my god, what did I do to this woman?'" Stone said. "God will never forgive me.
"You just wanted to pick her up and carry her someplace nice and warm and soft and take care of her."
But there was no question in Kathy's mind that she had survived. She lasted 38 days on an island near Tahiti called Nuku Hiva. She spent most of her time on the show at a camp a fellow contestant called "Hell Beach" populated by "Satan's pets." She survived while others half her age and twice as strong fell before her. She shed her tough exterior -- her worst enemy in early episodes -- and endured the dramatic depletion of her physical and mental well-being in the last episodes.
All this inflicted on her by a reality show she had seen, what, maybe four times before in her life? A show she had auditioned for on a whim and once thought was staged on a plastic set somewhere in Hollywood.
"It was a lark," Kathy said last week while snacking on a small bag of M&Ms in a conference room at the South Burlington offices of Lang Associates, where she works. "I mean, we're talking a lark.
"And, you know what? I didn't believe it. I didn't believe how real it was."
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If you only know Kathy from her appearances on" Survivor: Marquesas," meeting her on the street in Burlington can be quite a shock.
She's clean. Really clean. Gleaming.
Her fingernails are free from Nuku Hiva dirt. The hair that wildly flared in every direction on the island now lays tamely against her head. She's trim, not skeletal, in clothes that fit precisely.
There are some things that remain the same from the show. Kathy loves to laugh. She'll giggle, growl and cross her eyes at anything she thinks is utterly ridiculous. She'll lean forward and hoot with laughter if it's really funny and sometimes slap the table. At 48, this twice-divorced single mom knows the world is a crazy place.
She just wants to make sure you get the joke, too.
Her friends say she shoots from the hip, always has. But, above all, they call her a hard worker, unafraid to take on any task whether wallpapering a room or foraging for shells in the South Pacific.
Kathy was born in Lancaster, Pa., but her father's job as an RCA executive had the family moving around every few years. She met her future husband, Tim O'Connell, in Cohasset, Mass, and then spent an entire year in the 70s following the former University of Vermont hockey star from town to town. As he played the game with teams in North Carolina, Oklahoma and California, she worked as a radio station ad saleswoman and a cocktail waitress at a county club.
"She was beautiful," recalled friend Dina Child of first meeting Kathy during the days when O'Connell was still at UVM. "She definitely caught everyone's attention."
The couple eventually settled back in Burlington where Kathy and Child became friends. They went through their first pregnancies together and opened a paper products store in Winooski's Champlain Mill.
Although they eventually called it quits as businesses partners, the two stayed close friends as their sons grew up together. Kathy went through two divorces, O'Connell and later Bill O'Brien Jr. And, after the death of Kathy's father, John Vavrick, in March 1993, Child made it a tradition to invite Kathy, her son, Patrick, and Kathy's mother, Helen, to share their Thanksgiving dinner.
This year, Kathy's chair at Child's Shelburne home was empty. She was off filming "Survivor" on Nuku Hiva. No one even knew if she was still in the game or if her fellow players had voted her off of the island. Child wondered if the all-American cast of contestants was celebrating the holiday.
"Here we've got these mounds of food," Child said, "and we're like, 'What do you think Kathy's eating on Thanksgiving?'"
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By Thanksgiving, the filming was in its 11th day. Kathy thought the producers might at least feed their charges on Thanksgiving. She kept asking the cameramen if a turkey was coming. The cameramen remained, as they would throughout the game, silent.
"So, you know, all of a sudden it's dusk," she told the audience at one of the weekly viewing parties she held around Burlington during the "Survivor: Marquesas" season. "The sun's going down and I'm going, 'Man, they aren't going to feed us any bird.' But what it made us was even stronger."
Unlike the three previous editions of the show, the Marquesan contestants were not given food. What they found was what they ate. Grapefruit and crabs were plentiful at one camp used in the first half of the show. The other camp site, which eventually became the final home to all remaining survivors, yielded limited fare.
Kathy harvested troca shells from the ocean for food. One part of the crustacean tasted like tough lobster, the other like really rubbery calamari. The contestants also collected taro, which Kathy called a cross between a potato and a white carrot.
But Kathy's daily diet was less than 200 calories a day -- about as much fuel as one gets from a banana and a serving of yogurt. She had lost more than 27 pounds during "Survivor." The players' bodies went into starvation mode, Kathy said, which forced their bodies to pump out adrenaline. The deprivation also elevated their emotions. Weeping seemed like a natural reaction to everything -- winning food, finishing simple tasks.
"The deprivation factor was huge to me," she said. "That scared me the most, how slow we were getting.
"Mentally, you'd wake up and go, 'OK, I'm going to go out and get the shells and we're going to have taro, and by the time I eat that and drink my water I'm going to feel better.' Now, I wasn't feeling sick, I was just feeling this drain and you couldn't move fast. And, 'I'm going to feel better because I'm going to eat.' And we ate, and we didn't feel any better."
The only choice for the survivors -- as Kathy's son, Patrick O'Connell, learned when he won an overnight visit to his mother's camp roughly a month into the filming -- was to adapt.
"How else can you exist?" Kathy said. "You start really looking at the burnt crud at on the bottom of that pot and probably the bacteria and dead bugs...we would have mentally not made it."
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After 38 days, Kathy stumbled during a test of endurance and left the island to stay on a cruise ship with other former contestants. But she couldn't leave the experience behind.
"That night, I woke up and I'll never forget it, it was the weirdest feeling," she said. "I sat up in bed...and I was looking around and there were vines all around the room, but I didn't think I was on the cruise ship....
"I was in the same room with Tammy (Leitner, a contestant from Mesa, Ariz.) and she said, 'Kath, what's up?' I said, 'Man, don't you think the jungle looks really close? I mean, why is the jungle right on us?'...And she went and turned the lights on and then I went, 'Oh man, that's right, I'm on the cruise ship.'"
Kathy was hallucinating. She did the same thing the next night, mistaking a light on a VCR for the camp's kerosene lamp. The players had kept its pilot light lit at night in case they needed to restart their camp fire.
"I said, 'I know I'm not on the cruise ship because there's the gas lamp.'... I'm seeing all of this. I'm lucid, and... you know what? I think that lamp's going to go out."
Kathy's confusion in the dark woke up Leitner for a second night.
"I said, 'I'm just trying to turn the lamp up.' And she turns the lights on, and I go, 'Damn, I did it again.'"
Kathy laughs about it now, but the mental deception deeply upset her at the time. Talking with the psychiatrist assigned to "Survivor" contestants, Kathy discovered prisoners of war had similar delusions upon release. Only, as the psychiatrist pointed out, POWs didn't always recover.
"The way the shrink said it, of all the contestants, I drank in the experience the most," Kathy said. "It came right in and went through my body and mind.
"I knew I wanted to drink it in, but I didn't think it was going to go that deep."
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Kathy Vavrick-O'Brien landed at the Burlington International Airport just a few days before Christmas.
She left a with a tough exterior and self-imposed walls that she felt prevented her from really connecting with other people.
"My self-confidence, I thought, was pretty good," she said. "But I learned when I was out there that it wasn't that good. That's why I had that bravado in the beginning, I just had too much fear going on....
"I was not showing any vulnerability thinking that would show weakness when showing weakness made it better. People gravitated toward me when they saw I was human."
Kathy returned to Vermont with a glimpse of how open and honest she could be with complete strangers and a desire to encourage others to do the same. She decided to start The Real Foundation to help get women who have "a fire in their belly" the nudge they need to get out of a rut. She wants to connect women with the right resources to build their confidence and strength so they can fulfill their dreams.
Although still in the planning stages, the foundation is something Kathy thinks she would have done even without the "Survivor" experience.
"I always wanted to...adopt a career where I was giving back and it wasn't so money orientated," she said. "And it's sort of a new day.... "I'm going to see what I can do with the lessons learned and change my life around a bit. (The Survivors are) all thinking the same thing, it's just some of us won't carry it through which is OK as long as one of us... learns a little something to change our lives in a better way."
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