The Rower

The reasons for my wandering mind must be a simple matter: an architect recently retired to our town on the coast of Maine and began to row his single shell in the river that parallels the route I take every morning to drink coffee with the other geezers at the Front Street Diner. The first time I noticed him, I pulled off the road and watched him just long enough to determine that he’d had coaching at some point in his life.

My father was also a rower, at a boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts and later as part of the famous 1938 Harvard heavyweight crew. When I was fourteen, I was shipped off to the same school, where I rowed lightweight in the three seat and later in the four seat at Harvard. Having dodged

Vietnam by applying to graduate school and rushing into marriage and kids, I found myself back at my father’s school as an instructor in English and the coach of the crew. Once I was there, I never really thought of doing anything else until I retired, and my wife Sarah and I moved back to the house in Maine that my parents built when I was young. After Sarah died five years later, my bachelor son said I could join him in California, a place, I told him, that will never, even in the best of times, have enough water.

My life has been straight forward and, in the larger scheme of things, of little conse- quence. I have no interest in pursuing any evidence to the contrary, but there are moments, especially on my morning drives along the river, when I feel the echo of a shadow life out there on the water. A life I might’ve had, a parallel life that I am still living?

Before racing in six consecutive Oxford–Cambridge regattas, the famous oarsman Boris Rankov would beat the boathouse with his fists as he screamed, “This is the worst day of my life!” He would wail and holler into the open air. After the race he would stay in bed for six days and claim that he could not focus his eyes for five.

I told the boys at school: let each muscle serve its function while relaxing the shoulders and keeping a loose grip on the oar. When their blades dropped in the water, they pulled with such ferocity that their teeth bared and eyes squeezed shut. Each time they finished pulling, their bodies fell gently forward to the

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