I remember the moment I fell in love with crew. The sport. It was a November morning in 2006. I was 20, the temperatures had been dropping since Halloween and we couldn’t muster enough people to run either a full women’s or a full men’s 8. So we were running a mixed crew. Standing at the edge of campus, waiting for a van to Hagg Lake, one of the guys was walking up and down a strip of lawn, listening to the crunch as the ice crystals shattered under his tennis shoes. We could see our breath on the cold morning air and I remember rubbing the newly formed blisters on my hands.
One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Four on my right hand, five on my left. My brother/Irish-twin was being non-communicative. Fairly normal (and totally fair) for him on a morning when he'd been pestered by me non-stop.
It was pitch black, four forty three am. No moon and a the sky was like dark velvet, peppered with diamonds of light. 29 degrees fahrenheit. One degree colder and we could have crawled back into our warm beds and slept until class. Instead we stumbled blindly into the van and dozed through our 15 minute ride from town to the lake. Winding further and further away from city lights. Past the herd of elk that while still exciting would become a daily sight for us, and then up and across the dam. The dark water stretching it seemed like forever into the hills.
In it’s early years, and maybe today--I don’t know--Pacific University’s rowing program was about as hipster as anything comes.
We did not have a boathouse. We had a rack, and a railroad storage container. We did not have a dock. We had mud and shoes we didn’t give a damn about. Our equipment, boats, oars, etc. was ALL from the 1970’s. Beauty and The Beast, our two eights were wooden framed monsters weighing between 300 and 400 pounds each. The internal ribbing visible. No deck to stand on. Just a couple of wooden slats near the foot stretcher and under the seat. I’m not sure how many hours of my life I’ve spent sanding down the wooden bellies of those boats--and our four, The Andrea--so that they could be re-sealed, or helping with what seemed like an endless chain of patches and new paint on the fiberglass hulls, but we stayed afloat as a team, financially and literally, together.
That morning I was bow. The shortest person (save the coxswain) who’d showed up. By the time we’d broken the ice, waded into the water carrying our several hundred pound boat, and locked our oars into place I was freezing. By the time I hauled ass into the boat (after pushing us off) I’d stood in thigh deep icy water for what seemed like an eternity and couldn’t feel my legs. Even the edges of my orange shorts were dripping and freezing to my thighs.
There’s a sort of magic. When the world gets cold enough. When everything seems to hold it’s breath. Even the air settles, still and quiet and unmoving. Letting the surface of the water turn into a perfect reflection the sky. The darkness was so complete that the outline of the trees turned the valley and the lake into an oval of darkness. Peppered with light. Stars above. Reflections of stars in the perfectly still water below. The only sound was the rattle of our slides and the steady clips of our oars locking into place, followed by the tap into the water. Breath, slide, tap. Breath, slide tap. Our trail marring the surface of the universe itself. Pushing stars to tumble and reflect. Spiralling off into the darkness of the water, before reforming in our wake. Breath, slide, tap. Breathe, slide, tap. Breathe, slide, tap. As we cycled from rolling fours up to sixes up to all eights, our rhythm never changed.
Breathe, slide, tap.
Suspended as though between worlds. Sweat gathering under our fleece jackets even as our breath froze on our lips and noses, we hit a moment that lasted an eternity where nothing else mattered. Just the steady strain of our legs, pulling our boat through the belly of existance. Nothing in our minds except the pace of the person in front, and the perfect synchronicity.
Breathe, slide, tap.
I remember that moment. “Easy there.” Pausing at hands away, our oars suspended not over water, but over the depths of eternity, our boat just cruising into nothingness. “And down.” We shattered whole worlds when our blades hit the water. Skimming along and breaking apart stars and endless night and even the patterns our breath made in the air shifted. But we’d held it, for a moment/eternity. We’d been a crew instead of eight people in a boat. Each a part of something greater. Connected inexorably to each other through the rhythm of our blades and the laces of our shoes. I can’t say that moment lasted or the outing was perfect. It wasn’t.
Far from it in fact.
Seven wouldn’t set the boat and three kept catching crabs. Like all outings ever, other people's flaws were easier for me to see than my own--even though I know they were there. But we had our perfect moment. We’d not just been a crew.
We’d been a crew cradled outside of time.
I was hooked. I knew, even as I jumped out of the bow of the boat in our morning parking ritual to keep us from hitting ground, that I’d get to a point where I couldn’t count the number of mornings I stood in ice-cold water, waiting for people to number off and clamber in. As the sun crept over the horizon, shattering the perfection of the illusion of being outside of everything, I knew it wouldn't be the last dawn I'd watch break over the hills surrounding the lake. I was short, and athleticism was not “my thing” by a long shot.
But rowing was more than a sport.
But rowing was more than a sport.
It was a part of who I was becoming, and who I will always be. Something I remembered again, for a moment/eternity in the afternoon sun on the Cam when the world shrank to the back of the person in front of me and our blades dipped into the afternoon water in perfect rhythm. Breath, slide, tap. Breathe, slide, tap. Breathe, slide, tap.
When our motley group of eight girls in a boat became--for that moment/eternity--a crew.
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