Course Correction

by Ginny Gilder

  The foot-stretcher’s thongs were way too big for my bare feet, so I slid my sneakered feet under the cracked leather straps. I cradled my oar handle in my lap and rolled back and forth a couple of times on the seat. Is my butt ever gonna get sore sitting on this skinny thing. I shoved the oar out toward the side of the tank and grasped the handle, keeping the blade free of the water. Rough wood met my soft, damp palm. The coach was talking gibberish. What the hell am I supposed to do? I kept my gaze glued to the person in front of me.

  Holding my oar, I maneuvered my blade so that its edge was perpendicular to the water and thrust my arms straight out in front of me. I crept up the slide on my rolling seat and when there was no place else to go, suddenly my oar dropped into the water. How did that happen? What did I do? I tightened my grip and pulled against the oar. It followed my lead and suddenly fantasy yielded to reality.

  We were indoors, confined in a crummy half-lit basement. The scenery didn’t change. There was no boat to move, only the sound of motor-driven water. The wind wasn’t blowing lightly through my hair; no sunshine beat down, sparkling the water running along the boat’s hull; the air smelled slightly stale. But I didn’t care. I was rowing.

  The oar felt heavy in my hands. I had to concentrate on gripping firmly with both hands to pull it through the water, let it turn in a looser hold as it exited the water, hold it flat until the next stroke was about to start, then reposition its blade edge perpendicular to the water and drop it in at the right time at the right depth, in sync with the person in front of me.

  There was nothing flawless about my first attempts. But I learned how to feather and square up, and heard about the different parts of the stroke. I figured out the girls on the perimeter of the tank were the varsity rowers, muscular, oozing confidence, experienced and expectant, and on the hunt for new teammates. I watched them surreptitiously while tussling with my oar. Perhaps their standards were different from the coach’s. Maybe they would welcome unbridled enthusiasm. Maybe they would recognize themselves in my show of raw desire, instead of being sure at a single glance that I had nothing to offer and lacked the prerequisites for success. I had no idea. All I could do was focus on the girl in front of me and try to follow her, sliding back and forth on my moving seat, putting my oar in the water and taking it out, dancing to the new rhythm I heard that day on the Charles and finally had a chance to make my own.

  “Okay, we’re done for today.” Nat spoke through the megaphone above the rushing water. “There’s a sign-up sheet for practice times tomorrow posted on the board. Make sure you write your name in an open time slot.”

  Okay, made it through that. Do I have to get out now? I glanced up to see another group of girls waiting for their turn. When can I do it again? My turn over, I pulled my oar across my seat, leaving the blade balanced high above the moving water. I slid my shoes out from the leather thongs and walked down the tank’s stairs to the floor.

  As I waited behind a couple of other girls to pick a practice time, one of the observers came over and introduced herself as the team’s captain. Her name was Chris Ernst.

  “How’d you like it?”

  She was short, but there was nothing petite about her. Her blonde hair, cut close to her head but not styled, played to its own tune, with random strands curling in defiant tufts. Blue veins ran down the insides of her arms from her shoulders to her wrists. I had never seen such bulging biceps on a girl before. I could feel intensity seeping from her skin like sweat.

  Her blue eyes, framed by rimless round glasses, looked right into mine. She seemed to be searching for something. I wanted to give it to her, whatever it was.

  “It was good. I’m ready for more. There’s so much to think about … how do you put it all together?”

  She smiled, but the intensity didn’t disappear. “Just keep coming back and you’ll figure it out.”

  “Don’t worry, I will.” I said it lightly, but I could feel my determination stirring again.

  “Wait until we row outside. It’s so much better when you’re in a real boat. We’ll go to the lagoon next week.”

  We! Did you hear that?

  I’d spent my first several days of college over my head, gasping for air. Now, down in the basement of Payne Whitney, a shrimp of a powerhouse tossed me a buoy. Maybe I could find my niche among a new band of sisters, fit in without having to talk about myself, and make friends by sharing the challenges that rowing seemed to promise.

  I penned my name in one of the available slots on the sign-up sheet and left the tanks swinging my arms happily.

  I gloried in the late summer heat as I left my dorm room for my morning class. New Haven was wrapped in a comforting, muggy embrace. As I walked across campus in a T-shirt and shorts, I turned my face to the sun, closing my eyes and basking in its affectionate warmth. I could tolerate anything on a day like this.

  Hours later, I had no one to complain to as I jogged at slug speed in the heat, sweat soaking my brand-new women’s crew training gear, heading to my first outdoor rowing session on the lagoon two miles from the university’s main campus. Yellow school buses regularly departed from outside Payne Whitney to drive students on the football, soccer, and cross-country teams to the athletic fields that lay just beyond the lagoon: for some reason, however, none of the rowers were allowed to ride them.

  I zigzagged through dilapidated New Haven, past houses with shutters hanging off hinges, peeling paint, and rusty chain-link fences. People peered at me from the safe shade of their front porches. What the hell was I doing, running through this neighborhood, in this heat? They may have been wondering, but I wasn’t. A chance to row in a real shell awaited me at the end of my slog.

  My legs felt like lifeless logs. My arms were ten-ton steel beams. My breathing sounded like the chug of a steam engine. I arrived at the lagoon just in time for practice, aching for a drink and a rest, but ready to row.

  The lagoon was part of a public park, but it looked like a war zone. The metal boathouse, covered with graffiti, thick chains securing the boat bay door handles, and surrounded by hard-packed sandy dirt and sparse grass, looked defenseless and alone.

  Nat squinted at the group, divided us into port and starboard rowers, then into groups of eight, with four ports and four starboards, adding a coxswain to round out the crews. We entered the boathouse empty-handed: we came out with a three-hundred-pound wooden shell digging into eight novices’ shoulders. My first encounter with the task of hoisting and carrying a sixty-foot-long boat tempted me to drop it and walk away.

  But we reached the splintered wooden dock a few hundred feet away without anyone abandoning ship. Following Nat’s precise commands, we thrust the boat off our shoulders and up above our heads, grabbed the outriggers, turned the boat over, brought it down to our waists, and placed it in the water. Then we managed to stuff nine people into a shell less than twenty-four inches wide without anyone putting her foot through its bottom, where the wood’s thickness measured less than a quarter of an inch.

  The lagoon water was murky and smelled faintly of chemicals. Trash lay submerged at the water’s edge, caught in the tall reeds that crowded the shore. I tucked my feet into the shoes in front of my seat and smiled at the memory of my dad’s birthday gift offer. I shoved my oar into the oarlock and closed the gate. The blade smacked the water. At the coxswain’s command, eight hands pressed on the edge of the dock and shoved the boat away.

  I found myself in another world, far away from the stench and trash. The wheels under my seat squealed and whined as I slid back and forth. I tried to mimic the person in front of me, to remember when to push my legs down, how to feather and square my blade, how to get the oar out of the water. I heard the coxswain’s commands and worked to translate them into English. Perhaps my sweat dried up or clouds covered the sun, but I no longer felt hot, bothered, or quarrelsome.

  We worked on technique drills: blades squared during the recovery to feel how high the oar had to travel above the water without snag
ging it; pausing after the release, with our hands pushed away from our bodies and our backs angled forward to feel the boat run underneath us; rowing gingerly by pairs, then fours, with our eyes closed to sense our bodies moving together. Nobody knew enough yet to pull hard.

  I was determined to figure out all the things I was challenged to do at once: the correct technique, the right body motion, at the exact same time as the person in front of me. Following involved more than just looking. I had to develop a feel for when one stroke was over and it was time to release my blade and start up my slide on the recovery.

  My brain was bursting with questions. My frustration mounted, but it wasn’t a “forget this, who cares?” desire to return to shore and bail on the whole damn thing: I had to figure this out.

  I returned to my dorm exhilarated, with my first set of blisters sprouting on my palms and fingers: slender shoots of green bursting through the soil in the first sunny day of late winter, harbingers of better climes. As I fingered the rising watery welts, preoccupied with my memory of my first row and hopes for what lay ahead, I discounted the tingle of pain.

  I hadn’t taken one hard stroke yet. And I didn’t know the challenge of rowing would extend well beyond my body.

  2

  When you think of sports, vocabulary likely doesn’t spring to mind, but every sport has language that defines and describes its physical requirements. Using cognitive skills to build physical skills is a nobrainer; language augments the power of observation by providing an avenue to break down a physical act into its component parts and add detailed nuance to pinpoint distinctions.

  When I stepped into this new world, I stumbled into its language, too, and began to learn a new set of terms and expressions, many of them stolen from everyday usage and angled slightly off their normal meanings to coin technical phrases. I loved discovering new meanings and learning to associate them with new sensations. I sprinkled rowing jargon like an old pro, name-dropping technical terms that mere months earlier I didn’t know existed and couldn’t have used in a sentence.

  Start with the “catch.” What a word. A noun and a verb. Play catch; catch the bus. It can convey aggressive action or passive reaction. Catch a thief; catch a cold. It can describe a hindrance: what’s the catch? It acts upon the physical domain or the senses. Catch fire; catch her eye.

  Within a rowing shell, “the catch” defines both a moment in time and an action. It marks the instant between forward and backward, a hovering between two states. In that brief transition, the boat flows under you as your body and breath poise for the next stroke. The controlled ease of the recovery is about to yield to the explosive effort of the drive.

  The catch begins with the oar’s blade seizing the water, initiating the transfer of your body’s energy into boat speed. The oar serves as the medium. It starts with a deceptively simple motion: at the top of the slide, just raise your hands to drop your oar into the water. Catch that precise moment when your body changes direction. From your roll toward the stern, against the boat’s forward momentum, reverse to move with the boat as you begin pulling backward toward the bow.

  This moment, combining timing and technique, is fraught with opportunity for mistakes. The oar can enter the water too early, before the recovery ends; too late, once the drive has begun; or badly, at the wrong angle. Poor timing and bad technique, alone or in combination, can kill your speed.

  Rowing well requires the development of boat sense, the capacity to feel your own body and discern the boat’s rhythm. Where are you on the slide? When is the moment of convergence when all the rowers catch the water with their oars and pick the boat up together? How is the boat flowing underneath you? Choppily, with a back-and-forth stagger? Smoothly, soothingly consistent?

  The ability to position your body correctly, to use your various limbs and muscle groups in optimal order, determines technical proficiency. The techniques to negotiate an oar in and out of the water—squaring up, feathering, releasing, catching—can be taught. Practice and focus develop the muscles’ cellular memory to the point that thinking is not required. But what about timing? Coaches can’t teach it: they can only notice its presence or absence. They can point out what to look and listen for, but they are bystanders, outside the experience.

  Spending time in the boat, paying attention to its inner workings, teaches timing. Listen to the gurgle of the water flowing by. Hear the whoosh of the shell gliding forward beneath the recovery. Notice the jolt at the catch when the crew’s change of direction jerks the boat backward for the barest instant. Feel how the boat responds to the energy transfer—like a lumbering backhoe or a streamlined Mercedes? Sense the quality of the crew’s cadence; is it rushed or relaxed? Twenty-eight strokes per minute can feel breathless and scattered, while thirty-five can feel controlled and light. Consider the impact of the oars’ finish on the boat’s momentum—does the boat slow and sink at the end of the stroke, or run out smoothly as the rowers gird themselves for the next?

  Rowing is a combination of attacking and yielding, of aggression and acceptance. You expend huge effort to create an outcome, and then you must let it unfold. You can’t make it all happen; you have to obey the established rhythm, even though you’re the one responsible for its cadence. Boat speed and boat sense come from your physical effort and your internal awareness combined. Boat sense emerges from practice; you learn what rushing means, develop the feel of a heavy catch, and discover the right ratio of drive and recovery that establishes a balanced cadence.

  How do you develop boat sense about your own inner world? How do you discover what you need to see when it’s hidden, without a coach to guide you?

  One stroke at a time.

  It’s hard to discern the precise moment of the catch, the change in direction that pivots between the two extremes of the recovery and the drive, between indifference and head-over-heels, gotta-have-it determination, the instant that stirs the feeling that lies at the heart of any attraction.

  Like water in the curve of the oar’s blade, I was caught by my desire to row.

  But, at seventeen, a novice rower, and barely an adult, I lacked boat sense and personal sensibility. I knew rowing had caught my interest, but I couldn’t acknowledge my life was caught by my past. My attraction to rowing seemed like a non sequitur, a break in the continuity of my life story that I welcomed with open arms. To me, rowing was completely different from anything I’d ever done before, and that fact alone increased my desire.

  I’d already been on the run from my family story for over five years, determined to leave the details and influence of that saga forgotten on some far-off street corner. I thought rowing gave me another opportunity to distance myself, to swerve off the expected route and run in a new direction. Turns out, I was as ignorant of the deeper motivations propelling my attraction as I was clueless about the lingo of rowing.

  Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward. All rowers know that, as they sit backward facing the stern. Every single stroke is followed by a complete reversal of direction, a gliding return to the top of the slide against the boat’s forward motion. That’s the only way to prepare for another stroke.

  Here, too, there’s only one way to understand why my decision to start rowing made sense, and that’s to go backward. Just as the separate components of a rowing stroke are linked together, so was my choice to take up this grueling endeavor anchored to my past. My denial didn’t negate its influence.

  Whether or not my teenaged self knew it, rowing also offered me a route back to myself. My foray into the world of pencil-thin boats, rock-hard musculature, and near-divine requirements for endurance may have been an accident, but it provided rescue.

  I wasn’t supposed to be that sixteen-year-old girl standing by the Charles River, yearning for escape from my life, already sad and sorry enough to resemble a defeated grown-up. My life’s trajectory had veered off its initial arc, catching me unprepared, leaving me anxious and uncertain. I was too young to learn about the fragility o
f love and the pain of loss, but absorbed those lessons as they came nonetheless, without the benefit of gentle introduction or wise guidance.

  For the longest time, as far as I knew, our family was normal, happy, and healthy. Our family photos boasted the usual suspects: a father and a mother, with four kids entering the picture over the course of an action-packed six years. The second oldest, sandwiched between my two sisters, with my brother the caboose, I was a preadolescent living the high life on Park Avenue with no second thoughts. I knew we were lucky. I saw my share of beggars shaking their tin cups outside the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. I knew everyone didn’t live in an Upper East Side penthouse apartment with elevator men and doormen opening doors and carrying packages, or go to a private school that taught its students to curtsey along with math and science, or spend summers out of town, away from the hard concrete and sodden heat of the city.

  Like any kid who knew only one way of life, I took my family and our circumstances for granted. But I knew the past didn’t hold all happy endings. Mom was a first-generation immigrant who traveled all the way from Sweden, via England, when she was only eighteen years old, determined to reinvent her life. She left her entire family behind—a younger sister, a baby brother, her mother, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles—to escape not poverty, but her father. I couldn’t imagine hating my parents enough to run thousands of miles away, and Mom didn’t give me much to go on. She put me off with a tight-lipped, vehement sideways shake of her head whenever I ventured toward the subject of her father, but I heard enough bitterness about her not being the pretty one—that was her sister, Evy—but the smart, thick-lensed-glasses–wearing, disappointing one, to give me a hint.

  I didn’t find out until years later that my Morfar (maternal grandfather) was a heavy drinker and an abusive drunk, and by then I also knew the wallop that parental disappointment, regardless of its legitimacy, delivers to the hapless children who don’t live up to expectations.