Why is everyone rowing? Because it’s great, that’s why.
By Alex Beam Contributor,Updated February 15, 2024, 3:00 a.m.
Day one of the annual Head of the Charles, Oct. 20, 2023, along the Charles River.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
All of sudden, everybody’s rowing. “The Boys in the Boat,” the irresistible melodrama
about the University of Washington crew’s dramatic victory in the 1936
“Hitler Olympics,” is still in the theaters. Rowing likewise takes a bow
in Bonnie Garmus’s best-selling novel and Apple TV miniseries, “Lessons in Chemistry,” with its famous line, “Rowers only ever want to talk about rowing.”
The same might be said for Garmus, herself a rower who nattered on about rowing in an interview with Hydrow, a local purveyor of video-enhanced home rowing machines. Garmus learned to row as an adult and frequented Seattle’s legendary Pocock Rowing Club, named after British boatmaker George Pocock, a Yoda-like presence in “Boys in the Boat.”
“We
were never eight,” actor Peter Guinness, as Pocock, says of the famous
University of Washington crew that nosed out the Nazis in the Olympic
regatta. “We were one.” Lesson taught to Adolf, young Jedi.
Wait, there’s more. The New York Times recently profiled rising starchitect Joshua Ramus, creator of a new performing arts complex
at Brown University. Ramus competed at the 1996 US Olympic trials in a
single scull. “You’re trying to perfect a thing by doing something over
and over and over almost infinitely,” he tells the paper. “You have to
ride the edge between near explosion and meditative calm.”
Ramus tries to row every day. “If I don’t do it my skin starts to crawl,” he said.
Now comes longtime Harvard rowing coach Dan Boyne with his new mystery novel, “Body of Water.” Here’s the plot synopsis:
“Trooper Sean Delaney and chief coroner Sue Chasen unravel a murder
mystery set in the world of Ivy League rowing.” Oh no — is Yale going to
take it on the chin again?
Why is everyone rowing? Because it’s great, that’s why. Forget microdosing, forget CBD bath bombs, forget laughable “life hacks” promoted by the people at NPR, e.g., “How to talk about STIs.”
Dip your blades in the Charles; start killing fish! — a famous
description of sloppy sculling from David Halberstam’s immortal rowing
book, “The Amateurs.”
Like
author Garmus, I am an adult-onset rower. In the company of hundreds if
not thousands of Bostonians, I started killing fish about a quarter of a
century ago at Community Rowing Inc. I’ve never looked back, though since I’m facing the stern of the boat, the truth is I’ve never looked forward, either.
I am a “The Wind in the Willows”
rower, (“The afternoon sun was getting low as the Rat sculled gently
homewards in a dreamy mood, murmuring poetry-things over to himself, and
not paying much attention to Mole”) also known as a recreational rower.
I’ve never raced, and I never will.
I
am the only boy in the boat; I’ve rowed only a single shell, on the
Charles, on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, and on Florida’s
Intracoastal Waterway. I’ve rowed a variety of boats including a
40-year-old, secondhand Peinert Elite (the name says it all) handmade by the George Pocock of America, John Peinert, on Coffin Street in New Bedford.
I now row a Maas 24,
manufactured on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Hydrodynamically
engineered for rapid one-way trips from Alcatraz, I like to say.
In
Boston, I row alongside swans and muskrats in the hilariously named
“Lakes District,” the stretch of river upstream from Waltham’s Moody
Street dam. The so-called Brandeis loop takes me right past Norumbega Tower, which propagates professor Eben Norton Horsford’s crackpot theory that Viking marauder Leif Erikson navigated these same waters.
I’ve never rowed in Sarasota’s alligator-infested Nathan Benderson Park rowing stadium, but I have rowed many times in the nearby Intracoastal, not far from Stephen King’s house
on Casey Key. Stuff happens in those waters, believe me. A frolicking
porpoise once broke a fragile rowing shell, and a flick of a manatee’s
tail capsized a friend of mine.
There’s a reason rowers only want to talk about rowing. Most everything else pales in comparison.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.
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