Course Correction (3 page)

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 snagging 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 of 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.

When she first arrived in this country, Mom worked as a masseuse, a waitress, and a nanny. She moved up to secretary in an office when she and Dad were first married, then quit when she got pregnant because the doctor told her she would lose the baby if she walked up stairs. Her office was on the fourth floor of a brownstone in Queens, and the elevator was reserved for the executives. One day, many years later, she confided to me, “I didn't tell my boss I shouldn't use the stairs. I didn't tell your father about the elevator. I wanted him to take care of his family, earn the money. He had to do his job.”

From then on, she and Dad divided their duties along traditional lines. Mom took care of all things household and kid-related. Not much for warmth, with a record short on kisses and hugs, she conveyed her love by honing her family management skills. She was in charge of it all, from laundry, dusting, and vacuuming to hosting parties and serving the nightly dinners she concocted.

Meanwhile, following his graduation from Yale and a one-semester fling with law school, my dad landed a job in the investment business. To me, my father's world was a box of mystery, filled with taking care of clients, hiring secretaries, traveling to visit companies, reading boring paperbacks called prospectuses, and buying things called stocks. Occasionally we four kids accompanied him to check out the companies he invested in. Denny's and Dunkin' Donuts were my favorites because Dad never skimped on product testing.

But when we behaved badly, he morphed into the bad guy who wielded the belt and strapped us bare-assed or knocked our heads together
to thrust us back on course. I learned the importance of staying in line and keeping him happy, whether that meant whispering on Sunday mornings to let him sleep undisturbed or doing what he told me to avoid an argument.

By the time I was eleven, Mom had relocated us to our fourth—and most lavish—apartment, edging us out of Queens' Forest Hills neighborhood where I lived as a baby into progressively larger abodes, landing us on the southwest corner of Park Avenue and 81st Street on the topmost floor, in what I assumed would be our family's permanent home. A toddler when we moved from Queens to Manhattan, I didn't register my parents' march up the wealth scale. Moving to the Upper East Side, right off tony Park Avenue, didn't mean anything to me. The next move didn't mean much more, but of course my father was successfully making his way, building a base of clients and figuring out how to negotiate the stock market, buying long, selling short. With the last move, once Mom was done with her remodeling, the evidence of his financial success beamed from every room of our new apartment.

By then, Mom had mastered running our family, ruling with a sure hand and occasionally an iron fist. Collectively, we were a well-oiled operation, our days ordered, the details addressed. She did a bang-up job crafting a home from the maze of nineteen rooms, linked by hallways and connecting doors, she had convinced Dad to purchase.

Although I got lost the first several times I ran through the empty apartment, chasing my big sister Peggy, by the time Mom finished knocking down walls and decorating rooms, I knew exactly what was what and where I belonged. In attending to the myriad of minutia that effects the transformation of space into safety, Mom created magic. From the décor of our home's most public spaces to our family's most private nooks, she made room for all of us. We ended up with a home that impressed the snootiest of guests, secured privacy for her husband, and allowed us kids to roam freely, a refuge filled with sparkling sterling silver, a baby Steinway grand piano, Oriental rugs, European paintings, and durable furniture that could survive pummeling and spilled milk. She paid equal attention to the design of my father's closet with its row of neatly pressed suits and folded underwear, dark socks with garters, and multiple versions of his trademark V-necked navy cashmere sweaters tucked into built-in dresser drawers; the wallpaper
design and paint colors of the private bedrooms she selected for each child; the polka-dotted couch in the kids' sitting room; and the gym at the back of the apartment with Swedish bars, a trapeze, and a rope ladder.