This is one of the best books I've read in a long time, it is one of the best books I have ever read. Below are 129 chosen quotes followed by an index to help in finding specific topics. Read the book, check out the quotes.
The Boys in the Boat
Daniel James Brown
2. Pocock on unseen values (Ch 1): Having rowed myself since the tender age of
twelve and having been around rowing ever since, I believe I can speak
authoritatively on what we may call the unseen values of rowing—social, moral,
and spiritual values of this oldest of chronicled sports in the world. No didactic teaching will place these values
in a young man’s soul. He has to get
them by his own observation and lessons.
P. 7
3. History – The Great Depression: Along
the waterfront, seaplanes from the Gorst Air Transport Company rose slowly from
the surface of Puget Sound and droned westward, flying low under the cloud
cover, beginning their short hops over the naval shipyard at Bremerton. Ferries crawled away from Colman Dock on
water as flat and dull as old pewter.
Downtown, the Smith Tower pointed, like an upraised finger, toward
somber skies. On the streets below the
tower, men in fraying suit coats, worn-out shoes, and battered felt fedoras
wheeled wooden carts toward the street corners where they would spend the day
selling apples and oranges and packages of gum for a few pennies apiece. Around the corner, on the steep incline of
Yesler Way, Seattle’s old, original Skid Road, more men stood in long lines,
heads bent, regarding the wet sidewalks and talking softly among themselves as
they waited for the soup kitchens to open.
Trucks form the Seattle Post
Intelligencer rattled along cobblestone streets, dropping off bundles of
newspapers. Newsboys in woolen caps lugged the bundles to busy intersections,
to trolley stops, and to hotel entrances. Where they held the papers aloft,
hawking them for two cents a copy, shouting the day’s headline: “15,000,000 to
Get U. S. Relief.” A few blocks south of Yesler, in a shantytown sprawling
along the edge of Elliott Bay, children awoke in damp cardboard boxes that
served as beds. Their parents crawled
out of tin-and-tar-paper shacks and into the stench of sewage and rotting
seaweed from the mudflats to the west.
They broke apart wooden crates and stooped over smoky campfires, feeding
the flames. The looked up at the uniform gray skies and, seeing in them tokens
of much colder weather ahead, wondered how they would make it through another
winter. Northwest of downtown, in the
old Scandinavian neighborhood of Ballard, tugboats belching plumes of black
smoke nosed long rafts of logs into the locks that would raise them to the
level of Lake Washington. But the gritty shipyards and boat works clustered
around the locks were largely quiet, nearly abandoned in fact. In Salmon Bay, just to the east, dozens of
fishing boats, unused for months, sat bobbing at moorage, the paint peeling
form their weathered hulls. On Phinney
Ridge, looming above Ballard, wood smoke curled up from the stovepipes and
chimneys of hundreds of modest homes and dissolved into the mist overhead. It was the fourth year of the Great
Depression. One in four working
Americans—ten million people—had no job and no prospects of finding one, and
only a quarter of them were receiving any kind of relief. Industrial production had fallen by half in
those four years. At least one million,
and perhaps as many as two million, were homeless, living on the streets or in
shantytowns like Seattle’s Hooverville.
In many American towns, it was impossible to find a bank whose doors
weren’t permanently shuttered; behind those doors the savings of countless
American families had disappeared forever.
Nobody could say when, or if, the hard times would ever end. And perhaps that was the worst of it. Whether you were a banker or a baker, a
homemaker or homeless, it was with you night and day—a terrible, unrelenting
uncertainty about the future, a feeling that the ground could drop out from
under you for good at any moment. In
March an oddly appropriate movie had come out and quickly become a smash hit: King Kong. Long lines formed in front of movie theaters
around the country. People of all ages shelling out precious quarters and dimes
to see the story of a huge, irrational beast that had invaded the civilized
world, taken its inhabitants into its clutches, and left them dangling over the
abyss. pp. 7-9
4. Smoking good for you adds: Others dangled cigarettes from their lips,
and as they paged through the day’s Seattle
Post-Intelligencer they could take satisfaction in the half-page add that
trumpeted the latest proof of the health benefits of smoking. “21 of 23 Giants
World’s Champions Smoked Camels. It
Takes Healthy Nerves to Win the World Series.”
p. 11
5. Ulbrickson and the power of a good coach: He commanded enormous respect among his boys,
but he did so almost entirely without raising his voice, almost, in fact,
without speaking to them. His few words
were so carefully chosen and so effectively delivered that every one of them
feel like a blade or a balm on the boy to whom they were delivered. He strictly forbade his boys form smoking,
cursing, or drinking, though he was known occasionally to do all three himself
when safely out of sight or earshot of his crews. To the boys, he seemed at times almost devoid
of emotion, yet year after year he somehow managed to stir the deepest and most
affirmative emotions many of the had ever know.
pp. 16-17
6. How to select a crew: All that, Ulbrickson knew, had to start here
on this dock, with the boys who were now wandering off into the waning
light. Somewhere among the—those green
and untested boys—lay much of the stock from which he would have to select a
crew capable of going all the way. The
trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the
nearly superhuman stamina, the indomitable willpower, and the intellectual
capacity necessary to master the details of technique. And which of them, coupled improbably with
all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard
his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in
the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory,
but for the other boys in the boat. p. 23
7. Pocock on the growing of trees (Ch. 2):
These giants of the forest are something to behold. Some have been growing for a thousand years,
and each tree contains its own story of the centuries, long struggle for
survival. Looking at the annular rings
of the wood, you can tell what seasons they have been through. In some drought years they almost perished,
as growth is barely perceptible. In
others, the growth was far greater. p.
25
8. Father and son and falling stars: Most
of all he missed the times he and his father would sit out at night on the
cabin’s porch and stare up into the astonishing swirls of stars simmering in
the black vault of the Idaho night sky, saying nothing, just being together,
breathing in the cold air, waiting for a falling star to wish on. “Keep on watching,” his father would
say. “Keep your eyes peeled. You never know when one is going to
fall. The only time you don’t see them
is when you stop watching for them.” Joe
missed that something terrible. p. 37
9. Finding things of value in unlikely
places: One autumn day the
schoolteacher took Joe and the rest of his students on a natural-history field
trip into the woods. He led them to an
old, rotten stump on which a large white fungus was growing—a rounded,
convoluted mass of creamy folds and wrinkles.
The teacher; plucked the fungus off the stump, held it aloft, and
proclaimed it a cauliflower mushroom, Sparassis
radicata. Not only was it edible,
the teacher exclaimed, but is was delicious when stewed slowly. The revelation that one could find free food
just sitting on a stump in the woods landed on Joe like a thunderbolt. That night he lay in his bunk in the
schoolhouse, staring into the dark rafters above, thinking. There seemed to be more than a schoolroom science
lesson in the discovery of the fungus. If
you simply kept your eyes open, it seemed, you just might find something
valuable in the most unlikely of places.
That trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd
or worthless it might at first appear, no matter who else might just walk away
and leave it behind . p. 37
10. Pocock on coaching, teaching, learning
(Ch 3): Every good rowing coach, in
his own way, imparts to his men the kind of self-discipline required to achieve
the ultimate from mind, heart, and body.
Which is why most ex-oarsmen will tell you they learned more
fundamentally important lessons in the racing shell than in the classroom. p.
39
11. Punishment equals beauty: Competitive rowing is an undertaking of
extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment. Unlike most sports, which draw primarily on
particular muscle groups, rowing makes heavy and repeated use of virtually
every muscle in the body, despite the fact that a rower, as Al Ulbrickson liked
to put it. “scrimmages on his posterior annex.”
And rowing makes these muscular demands not at odd intervals but in
rapid sequence, over a protracted period of time, repeatedly and without respite. On one occasion, after watching the
Washington freshmen practice, the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer’s Royal Brougham marveled at the relentlessness of the
sport: “Nobody ever took time out in a boat race,” he noted. “There’s no place to stop and get a
satisfying drink of water or a lungful of cool, invigorating air. You just keep your eyes glued on the red,
perspiring neck of the fellow ahead of you and row until they tell you it’s all
over . . . Neighbor, it’s no game for a softy.” p. 39
12. Muscles needed to row: When you row, the major muscles in your arms,
legs, a back—particularly the quadriceps, triceps, biceps, deltoids, latissimus
dorsi, abdominals, hamstrings, and gluteal muscles—do most of the grunt work,
propelling the boat forward against the unrelenting resistance of water and
wind. At the same time, scores of
smaller muscles in the neck, wrists, hands and even feet continually fine-tune
your efforts, holding the body inconstant equipoise in order to maintain the
exquisite balance necessary to keep a twenty-four-inch-wide vessel—roughly the
width of a man’s waist—on and even keel.
The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the
smaller one, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate
that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists in fact, have calculated that
rowing a two-thousand-meter race—the Olympic standard—takes the same
physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six
minutes. pp. 39-40
13. Oxygen consumption and bodily stress: A well-conditioned oarsman or oarswoman
competing at the highest levels must be able to take in and consume as much as
eight liters of oxygen per minute: an average male is capable of taking in
roughly four to five liters at most.
Pound for pound, Olympic oarsmen may take in and process as much oxygen
as a thoroughbred racehorse. This
extraordinary rate of oxygen intake is of only so much value, it should be
noted. While 75-80 percent of the energy
a rower produces in a two-thousand-meter race is aerobic energy fueled by
oxygen, races always begin, and usually end, with hard sprints. These sprints require levels of energy
production that far exceed the body’s capacity to produce aerobic energy,
regardless of oxygen intake. Instead the
body must immediately produce anaerobic energy.
This, in turn, produces large quantities of lactic acid, and that acid
rapidly builds up in the tissue of the muscles.
The consequence is that the muscles often begin to scream in agony
almost from the outset of a race and continue screaming until the very
end. And it’s not only the muscles that
scream. The skeletal system to which all those muscles are attached also
undergoes tremendous strains and stresses.
Without proper training and conditioning—and
sometimes even with them—competitive rowers are apt to experience a wide
variety of ills in the knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, ribs, neck, and above
all the spine. These injuries and
complaints range from blisters to sever tendonitis, bursitis, slipped
vertebrae, rotator cuff dysfunction, and stress fractures, particularly
fractures of the ribs. p. 40
14. Coach Bolles warns of the difficult task
ahead: In those first weeks,
Bolles’s topic varied each day, depending on factors as unpredictable as the
Seattle weather or what particular infelicities of technique he had noticed in
the previous practice. Joe soon noted
that two larger and intertwined themes inevitably came up in these talks. The boys heard time and again that the course
they had chosen to embark on was difficult almost beyond imagining, that both
their bodies and their moral characters would be tested in the months ahead,
that only a very few of them who possessed near superhuman physical endurance
and mental toughness would prove good enough to wear the W on their chests, and that by Christmas break most of them would
have given up, perhaps to play something less physically and intellectually
demanding, like football. But Bolles
sometimes spoke of life-transforming experiences. He held out the prospect of becoming a part
of something larger than themselves, of finding in themselves something that
did not yet know they possessed, of growing from boyhood to manhood. At times he dropped his voice a bit and
shifted his tone and cadence and talked of near mystical moments on the
water—moments of pride, elation, and deep affection for one’s fellow oarsmen,
moments they would remember, cherishes, and recount to their grandchildren when
they were old men. Moments, even, that
would bring them nearer to God. p. 41
15. Pocock grows up: George Yeoman Pocock was all but born with an
oar in his hands. He came into the world at Kingston upon Thames on March 23,
1891, within sight of some of the finest rowing water in the world. He was descended form a long line of boat
builders. His paternal grandfather had
made his living handcrafting rowboats for the professional watermen who plied
the Thames in London, providing water-taxi and ferry services as their
predecessors had done for centuries. . .
Pocock’s maternal grandfather also worked in the boatbuilding trade,
designing and constructing a wide variety of small craft, among them the Lady Alice, the custom-built sectional
boat that Sir Henry Stanley used to search for Dr. David Livingstone in Central
Africa in 1874. His uncle Bill had built
the first keel-less shell, in his boatbuilding shop under London Bridge. His father, Aaron, had taken up the trade as
well. Building racing shells for Eton College, where gentlemen’s sons had been
rowing competitively since the 1790’s. And it was in Eton’s ancient boathouse,
just across the river from the looming eminence of Windsor Castle, that George
had grown up. At age fifteen, he signed
papers formally apprenticing himself to his father, and for the next six years
he worked side by side with him, laboring with hand tools to maintain and add
to Eton’s prodigious fleet of racing shells.
But George didn’t just build boats; he also learned to row them, and to
row them very well. He carefully studied
the rowing style of the Tames watermen—a style characterized by short but
powerful strokes with a quick catch and a quick release—and adapted it to the
purpose of racing in a shell. The style
he developed soon proved to be in many ways superior to the traditional longer
stroke taught at Eton. Messing about on
the Thames after formal practice, the aristocratic Eton boys discovered that
George and his brother, Dick, although their social inferiors, could be counted
on to leve them in their wakes time and again.
It wasn’t long before the Pocock boys found themselves giving informal
rowing lessons to the likes of the young Anthony Eden, to Prince Prajadipok
of Siam, and to Lord Grosvenor, son of
the Duke of Westminster. George Pocock,
in turn, learned something for the highborn Eton lads. He was inclined by nature to do whatever he
attempted on the highest possible level—to master each and every tool he laid
hands on in his father’s shop, to learn how to row the most efficient stroke,
to build the most elegant and best-performing racing shell possible. Now, feeling the sting of British class
distinctions, pondering the difference between how he and his father spoke and
how they were spoken to, he decided to put in the effort to learn to speak, not
with his natural cockney accent, but with the crisp “educated” accent of the
boys they served. And, to almost
everyone’s amazement, he did it. His
crisp voice soon stood out in the boathouse, not as an affectation but as a
point of pride and a demonstration of his deep commitment to grace, precision,
and what would turn out to be a lifelong pursuit of the ideal. Impressed by George’s perseverance, and by
his ability on the water, Aaron Pocock entered him in a professional race, the
Sportsman Handicap at Putney on the Thames, when he was seventeen. He told his
son he could build his own boat for the contest from scrap lumber in the Eton
boathouse and gave him some advice that George never forgot: “No one will ask
you how long it took to build; they
will only ask who built it.” So George took his time, carefully and
meticulously handcrafting a single sculling shell from Norwegian pine and
mahogany. At Putney he slipped his boat
into the water, leaned deep into his oars, and over the course of three heats
defeated a field of fifty-eight oarsmen.
He came home with a small fortune: fifty pounds in prize money. pp. 42-43
16. Building beautiful boats in bad conditions: In 1912 things started looking up for the
Pocock boys. The Vancouver Rowing Club,
hearing of their reputation in England, commissioned them to build two single
sculls for one hundred dollars apiece.
The Pococks set up shop in an old, derelict shed floating on timbers
fifty yards offshore in Coal Harbor and then finally resumed what would be
their life’s work—crafting fine racing shells, They set to work tirelessly in
their shop downstairs, stopping only at night, to sleep in an unheated room
above the shop. Conditions were not
ideal. Daylight showed through the roof,
and wind and rain shuddered through wide gaps between the wallboards. To bathe, they had to dive out their bedroom
window and into the cold salt chuck of the harbor. For drinking water, they had to row over to a
public fountain in Stanly Park. From
time to time, the shed slipped its anchor and drifted aimlessly among inbound
and outbound ocean liners while the Pococks slept. At low tide the shed sat on the sloping mud
bank, listing twenty-five degrees from bow to stern. When the tide surged back in, the waterlogged
timbers on which the structure was built weighed it down and held it fast to
the mud. George later described the
daily routine: “The water would rise in the shop while we took refuge in the
room above and tried to estimate when the next act of the drama would occur. Eventually, with a swish and a roar, the logs
would break the mud’s hold, and up would come the building, like a surfacing
submarine, with the water rushing out the door at each end. Then we could start working again, until the
next change of tide.” The brothers
completed the work nonetheless, and as word of their craftsmanship spread
across Canada they began to get new commissions. By mid-192 the two of them—just twenty and
twenty-one—were beginning to feel that they had their feet under them. pp. 44-45
17. Conibear Stroke: When George began to watch the Washington
oarsmen on the water, he quickly spotted inefficiencies and deficiencies in the
mechanics of their stroke that no amount of fiddling with a skeleton could
fix. At first he held his peace, not
inclined by nature to offer unsolicited advice.
But when Conibear began to ask the Pocock’s for their opinion about his
boys’ rowing, George gradually spoke up.
He began to teach Conibear elements of the stroke that he had learned
from Thames watermen in his boyhood and taught to the boys at Eton. Conibear listened eagerly, learned quickly,
and what came to be called the “Conibear stroke” soon evolved from those
discussions. It featured a shorter
layback, a quicker catch, and a shorter but more powerful pull in the water. It left the oarsmen sitting more upright at
the end of the stroke, ready to slide forward and begin the next stroke more
quickly and with less fuss and bother.
It differed conspicuously from the rowing stroke long used by the
eastern schools (and Eton), with its exaggerated layback and long recovery, and
it began almost immediately to result in Washington’s first significant
victories. Before long, even the eastern
schools were taking note of the Conibear stroke, trying to figure out how
something so unorthodox could be so successful.
p. 47
18. Driving out the weak: As the freshmen of 1933 flailed at their
oars in the first few days, Tom Bolles and Al Ulbrickson strode up and down Old Nero’s walkway in gray flannel suits
and fedoras. Ulbrickson mostly just
watched the boys, quietly, still sizing them up, Bolles, however, barked at
them continuously—to grip the oar this way and not that, to square their blades
to the water, to straighten their backs, to bend their knees, to straighten
their knees, to pull harder one moment, to ease up another. It was bewildering and backbreaking. Old
Nero was designed, in part, to drive boys who, by temperament, weren’t cut
out for crew—“mollycoddles,” Ulbrickson called them—to an early realization of
the fact, before they could break expensive oars and racing shells. The boys strained and heaved and gasped for
breath, but for all their efforts they moved Old Nero only slowly and erratically out of the Cut and onto the
ruffled expanse of Lake Washington. As
they tried to absorb their lessons and experience, and to synchronize their
efforts, they lived in constant fear of making any of the many egregious errors
Bolles kept pointing out to them. p. 49
19. Catching a crab: One error in particular required no
scolding. They soon learned that if the
blades of the oars entered the water too deeply, at the wrong angle, or out of
time with the others, or if they remained in the water a fraction of a second
too long at the end of a stroke, they were apt to “catch a crab”: The oar would
suddenly and irretrievably become stuck in the water, immobilized as surely as
if some sort of gargantuan crustacean had reached up from the depths and seized
the blade, holding it fast. Old Nero would keep going but the oar
would not. The boy holding the oar would
either be smacked hard in the chest and knocked out of his seat or, if he held
on to the oar too long, be catapulted unceremoniously into the water. Ever stroke he took thus offered each boy the
possibility of a wet, cold, and spectacularly public form of humiliation. p. 49
20. What had to be learned to stroke; like
playing golf: None of the freshmen
in fact, found it easy to master it. To achieve even a reasonable smooth and
powerful stroke, they had to learn to execute a series of precisely timed and
carefully coordinated moves. Facing the
stern of the boat, each boy began with his chest bent over his knees, his arms
stretched out in front of him, and both hands gripping the handle of his one
long oar. At the beginning of the
stroke, the “catch,” he dropped the blade of his oar into the water and leaned
his torso back hard, toward the bow, keeping his back ramrod straight. As his shoulders came vertical over the
center of his body, he began the “leg drive” by propelling his legs forward,
his seat sliding toward the bow on greased runners beneath him. Simultaneously, he pulled the oar toward his
chest against the resistance of the water, throwing all the strength of his
combined arm, back, and leg muscles into the stroke. As the oar came to his chest, and with his
back inclined about fifteen degrees toward the bow, he reached the full extent
of his “layback.” Then he began his
“release.” He dropped his hands toward
his waist and pulled the blade quickly and decisively form the water while at
the same time rolling the wrist of the hand nearest the water in order to
“feather the blade parallel to the surface of the water. Next, to begin the “recovery,” he rotated his
shoulders forward and pushed his arms sternward against the oar while pulling
his knees up toward his chest, thus propelling his body forward on the sliders
back into the crouched position in which he had begun. Finally, as the boat moved forward beneath
him, he again rotated the oar to bring the blade perpendicular to the surface
of the next catch, dropped it cleanly back into the water at precisely the same
moment as the other boys, and immediately repeated the entire procedure over
and over again at whatever rate the coxswain was calling for through the small
megaphone strapped on his head. Done
correctly this process levered the boat forward in the water smoothly and
powerfully, but it had to be done in one continuous and unbroken cycle of
uncoiling and coiling the body. It had
to be done rapidly, and it had to be done in precisely the same manner—at the
same rate and with the same amount of applied power—as everyone else in the
boat was doing it. It was maddeningly
difficult, as if eight men standing on a floating log that threatened to roll
over whenever they moved had to hit eight golf balls at exactly the same
moment, with exactly the same amount of force, directing the ball to exactly the
same point on the green, and doing so over and over, every two or three
seconds. pp. 50-51
21. Joe knew how to hurt: As Joe made his way down to the shell house
every afternoon, he saw more and more familiar boys—boys who had abandoned
their boats—lounging on the grass in front of Suzzallo Library, casting him quick glances as he passed. The hurting was taking its toll, and that was
just fine with Joe. Hurting was nothing
new to him. p. 51
22. Georg Pocock on overcoming resistance
makes you stronger (Ch. 4): It is
hard to make the boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy, of course, is resistance of the
water, as you have to displace the amount of water equal to the weight of men
and equipment, but that very water is what supports you and that very enemy is
your friend. So is life: the very
problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming
them. p. 53
23. Bears and cougars: The woods just beyond the property were full
of bears and cougars. That troubled
Thula and made her understandably nervous about her flock of small children,
but Joe thrilled at night when he heard the bears splashing as they fished in
the pond or the cougars screeching as they met their mates in the dark. p. 55
24. The Depression: A month later came a much more serious
calamity. The rural economy of the
United States had already been in desperate straits for some time by that
fall. Huge surpluses of wheat, corn,
milk, pork, and beef produced in the Midwest had caused the price of farm commodities
to crash. Wheat brought in only a tenth
of what it had nine or ten years before.
In Iowa a bushel of corn fetched less than the price of a packet of gum. And the price collapse began to spread to the
Far West. Things in Sequim were not yet
as hard as on the Great Plains, but they were hard enough. The Rantz farm, like countless others across
the country, had so far barely managed to remain profitable. But when they picked up the Sequim Press on October 30 and read what
had happened in New York over the last several days, Harry and Thula Rantz knew
the cold certainty that the world had utterly changed, that they would not long
be sheltered from the storm on Wall Street, not even in Sequim, out in the far
northwestern corner of the whole country.
p. 57
25. He did get up: Joe lay in bed for a long time, listening,
remembering the days he had spent lying in bed in his aunt’s attic in
Pennsylvania listening to the mournful sound of trains in the distance, with
fear and aloneness weighing on him, pressing down on his chest, pushing him
into the mattress. The feeling was
back. He did not want to get up, did not
really care if he ever got up. Finally,
though, he did get up. He made a fire in
the woodstove, put water on to boil, fried some bacon, and made some coffee. Very slowly, as he ate the bacon and the
coffee cleared his mind, the spinning in his head began to diminish and he
found himself creeping up on a new realization.
He opened his eyes and seized it, took it in, comprehended it all at
once, and found that it came accompanied by a fierce determination, a sense of
rising resolution. He was sick and tired
of finding himself in this positon—scared and hurt and abandoned and endlessly
asking himself why. Whatever else came
his way, he wasn’t going to let anything like this happen again. From now on, he would make his own way, find
his own route to happiness, as his father had said. He’d prove to his father and to himself that
he could do it. He wouldn’t become a
hermit. He liked other people too much
for that, and friends could help push away the loneliness. He would never again let himself depend on
them, though, nor on his family, nor on anyone else, for his sense of who he
was. He would survive, and he would do
it on his own. p. 59
26. The Depression: The crash had started on Wall Street, but it
quickly brought down communities from coast to coast. Downtown Sequim was desolate. The State Bank of Sequim was still afloat but
would fail within months. More and more
storefronts were boarded up every day.
As Joe sang, dogs sat on their haunches on the wooden sidewalks watching
him idly, scratching their fleas in the rain.
Black cars bounced down the unpaved street, splashing through muddy
potholes, sending up jets of brown water, but the drivers paid Joe little
heed. About the only audience he could
count on was a bearded character everyone called the Mad Russian, who had been
wandering Sequim’s streets barefoot and muttering to himself for a long as
anyone could remember. p. 60
27. Joe grows strong – good grades: In all of his Joe grew continually stronger
and ever more self-reliant. Through it
all he stayed in school and earned good grades.
At the end of the day, though, he remained stoically alone, returning
each night to the empty, half-finished house.
p. 62
28. Charlie McDonald, cottonwood trees and a
two horse team, synergy: In the
months that followed, Joe hunted for new opportunities in Sequim. Just down Silberhorn Road, he found part-time
work helping his older neighbor, Charlie McDonald. McDonald made his living logging—harvesting
enormous cottonwood trees that grew in the gravelly bottomlands along the
Dungeness River. The work was
backbreaking. The cottonwoods were so
immense—their diameters so great—that it sometimes took an hour or more for Joe
and Charlie to fell just one. Pulling an
eighty-four-inch two-man saw back and forth through the soft white
heartwood. In the spring, when the sap
was running, it jetted up out of the stumps three or four feet into the air
after the trees finally toppled over.
Then Joe and Charlie lopped off all the branches with axes, pried the
bark from the logs with long iron bars, and harnessed them to Charlie’s draft
horses, Fritz and Dick, so they could be dragged out of the woods and sent off
to the pulp mill in Port Angeles.
Charlie had been gasses in the Great War, his vocal cords all but
destroyed. At best he could manage
croaks and whispers. As they worked
together, Joe marveled at how Charlie could command the ponderous draft horses
to do his bidding with a barely audible “gee” or “haw” or, as often as not,
simply a whistle and nod of his head.
Charlie would give a signal, and in unison Fritz and Dick would squat
down on their haunches while he chained them up. He’d give another signal, and the two would
rise and pull as if they were one horse, their movements crisply
synchronized. And they pulled with all
their hearts. When horses pulled like
that, Charlie told Joe, they could pull far more than twice what each could
pull alone. They’d pull, he said, till
the log moved, the harness broke, or their hearts gave out. pp. 62-63
29. Gymnastics – his link to Ulbrickson: One spring day in 1932, as Joe was practicing
“giants” on the high bar in the gym, he noticed a tall man in a dark gray suit and
a fedora, standing in the doorway and watching him intently. The man disappeared, but a few minutes later
Fred walked into the gym and called Joe over to the door. “A fellow just came into my classroom and
asked who you were,” Fred said. “Said he was from the university. He gave me this. Said you should look him up when you get to
the U. That he might be able to use a
fellow like you.” Fred handed Joe a
card, and Joe glanced down at it: Alvin M Ulbrickson . . . p. 67
30. Remembering the smell: She [Joyce] rushed through the woods looking
for Joe. When she found him, he always
hugged her tight, smelling, as she would remember seventy years later on her
deathbed, of wet wood and sweat and the sweet wildness of the outdoors. p. 68
31. Georg Pocock on endurance- no time outs
(Ch.5): Rowing is perhaps the
toughest of sports. Once the race
starts, there are no time-outs, no substitutions. It calls upon the limits of human
endurance. The coach must therefore
impart the secrets of the special kind of endurance that come from mind, heart,
and body. p. 71
32. Rowing in the rain: Rain pelted their bare heads and
shoulders. Their oars slapped against
wind-tossed waves, sending up plumes of icy spray that blew back into their
faces and stung their eyes. Their hands
grew so numb that they could never be sure they had a proper hold on their
oars. They could not feel their ears or noses.
The icy water of the lake beneath them seemed to suck warmth and energy
out of them more quickly than they could produce it. Their aching muscles cramped up the moment
they stopped moving them. And they
dropped like flies. p. 71
33. Dust Bowl: A pall of another, quite literal, sort
continued to hang over the larger world as well that month. On November 11 farmers in the Dakotas awoke
after a windy night to find something they had never seen before—daytime skies
turned black by topsoil scoured from their fields and carried aloft by the
wind. The next day the skies over Chicago
grew dark and the dust cloud traveled eastward, and a few days later people in
upstate New York looked up, astonished into skies the color of rust. Nobody knew it yet, but the dust that month,
that first “black blizzard,” was merely a harbinger of what would come to be
call the Dust Bowl, the second great act in the long tragedy of the 1930s and
early 1940s. The winds of November 1933
would soon be followed by others, even stronger, that would blow away much of
the topsoil of the American plains and send hundreds of thousands of refugees
streaming westward across the continent in search of jobs that did not
exist—adrift, rootless, homeless, dispossessed in their own land, their
confidence as well and their livelihoods carried away on the wind. p. 76
34. In the 1st boat – tears of joy: Even now that they had stopped rowing, their
breathing was synchronize, and for a brief, fragile moment it seemed to Joe as
if all of them were part of a single thing . . . Joe gulped huge drafts of the frigid air and
sat staring at the scene, watching it turn into a soft blur of colors as, for
the first time since his family had left him, tears filled his eyes. He turned his face to the water, fiddling
with his oar lock so the others would not see.
He didn’t know where the tears had come from, what they were all
about. But something inside him had
shifted, if only for a few moments. pp.
78-79
35. Rains of 33: On the second day of December 1933, it began
to rain in Seattle as it had never rained before and has never rained
since. Over the next thirty days, there
was only one day when the skies were not leaden with clouds, only four when it
did not rain. By the end of the month,
fourteen and a quarter inches of rain had fallen at the University of
Washington. Fifteen and a third inches
had fallen downtown, still the all-time record for any month of the year. Some days it drizzled; some days it
poured. Either way, it just kept
coming. Rivers all across western
Washington—the Chehalis, the Snoqualmie, the Duwamish, the Skokomish, the
Stillaguamish, the Snohomish—overflowed their banks, sweeping away farmhouses,
washing millions of tons of topsoil into Puget Sound, flooding the commercial
districts of riverside communities form the Canadian border all the way south
to the Columbia. North of Seattle the swollen
Skagit River sliced through earthen dikes near its mouth and sent tidal salt
water spilling across twenty thousand acres of the richest farmland in the
state. In many of Seattle’s nicest
hillside neighborhoods—places like Alki and Madrona and Magnolia—homes slid
from eroding bluffs and tumbled into Lake Washington or Puget Sound. Roadways cracked and followed the homes
downhill. Downtown, storm water
overwhelmed the sewers, bubbled up through manholes, and flooded the streets
and businesses of the low-lying International District. In the miserable shantytown spread out along
the shore of Elliott Bay, unrelenting rain dissolved newspaper that had been
wadded into chinks in flimsy walls, soaked its way through the weather-beaten
fabric of old tents, and dripped through rusty corrugated steel roofs, soaking
old mattresses lying on muddy floors and chilling to the bone those who tried
to sleep on them. p. 79
36. Georg Pocock on his goal to be a
first-class artisan (Ch. 6): My
ambition has always been to be the greatest shell builder in the world; and
without false modesty, I believe I have attained that goal. If I were to sell the Boeing stock, I fear I
would lose my incentive and become a wealthy man, but a second-rate
artisan. I prefer to remain a
first-class artisan. p. 83
37. The hard fight, rowing against rain and
cold and each other: It rained, and
they rowed. They rowed through cutting
wind, bitter sleet, and occasional snow, well into the dark of the night every
evening. They rowed with cold rainwater
running down their backs, pooling in the bottom of the boat, and sloshing back
and forth under their sliding seats. A
local sportswriter who watched them work out that month observed that “it
rained and rained and rained. Then it
rained and rained and rained.” Another
commented that they “could have turned their shells upside down and rowed
without making much difference in their progress. It was nearly as wet above the surface of the
lake as it was below.” Through it all,
Bolles followed them doggedly back and forth across Lake Washington and down
the Montlake Cut into Lake Union, where they rowed past the wet, black hulls
and dripping bowsprits of old lumber schooners.
Riding through the slop and the chop in the open cockpit of his brass-trimmed,
mahogany-planked motor launch, the Alumnus,
wearing a bright yellow rain slicker, he bellowed commands at them through his
megaphone until his voice grew hoarse and his throat sore. Once again boys who had endured the bitter
cold workouts in October and November now placed their oars in rack at the end
of the day, climbed wearily back up the hill, and refused to come back for
more. Four boat loads soon became three,
and by the end of the month Bolles sometimes had a hard time filling the third boat. All the boys in Joe’s boat stuck it out, but
the easy camaraderie that had briefly felt the first time they went out
together on Lake Union in November quickly evaporated. Anxiety, self-doubt, and bickering replace
that night’s buoyant optimism as Bolles scrutinized each of them anew, trying
to figure out who to keep in the boat and who to demote. p. 84
38. On coaches (Ulbrickson and Ebright): As difficult as he could sometimes be, though,
Ky Ebright, like Al Ulbrickson, was a remarkable coach—destined, like
Ulbrickson, for rowing’s hall of fame—and he cared deeply for the young men in
his charge. The night California won
Olympic gold in Amsterdam in 1928, an emotional Ebright came to Blessng [a
coxswain he had scolded], put his arm around the younger man, and said with a
cracking voice, “You know, Don, I cussed
you a lot of times and made you mad a lot of times, but you’ve been the
greatest coxswain, the grates student, I’ve ever had, and I want you to know
how much I appreciate that.” “It made me
cry,” Blessing later said. “I mean, he
was God to me.” It was a feeling shared
by most of the boys Ebright coached, among them Robert McNamara, later the U.
S., secretary of defense, and the movie star Gregory Peck, who in 1997 donated
twenty-five thousand dollars to the Cal crew in Ebright’s memory. p. 86
39. Rowing the boat: By and large, every rower in an eight-oared
shell does the same thing—pull an oar through the water as smoothly as
possible, as hard and as frequently as requested by the coxswain. But there are subtle differences in what is
expected of individual rowers depending on
which seat they occupy. Because
the rest of the boat necessarily goes where the bow goes, any deflection or
irregularity in the stroke of the oarsman in the bow seat has the greatest
potential to disrupt the course, speed, and stability of the boat. So while the bow oarsman must be strong, like
all the others, it’s most important that he or she be technically proficient: capable
of pulling a perfect oar, stroke after stroke, without fail.
The same is true to a lesser extent of the rowers in the number two and
three seats. The four, five, and six
seats are often called “the engine room” of the crew, and the rowers who occupy
these seats are typically the biggest and strongest in the boat. While technique is still important in those
seats, the speed of the boat ultimately depends on the raw power of these
rowers and how efficiently they can transmit it through their oars and into the
water. The rower in the number seven
seat is something of a hybrid, He or she
must be nearly as strong as the rowers in the engine room but must also be
particularly alert, constantly aware of and in tune with what is happening in
the rest of the boat. He or she must
precisely match both the timing and the degree of power set by the rower in the
number eight seat, the “stroke oar,” and must transmit that information
efficiently back into the boat’s engine room.
The stroke sits directly in front of and face to face with the coxswain,
who faces the bow and steers the shell.
Theoretically the stroke oar always rows at the rate and with the degree
of power called for by the coxswain, but in the end it is the stroke who
ultimately controls these things.
Everyone else in the boat rows at the rate and power at which the stroke
rows. When working well, the entire boat
operates like a well-lubricated machine, with every rower serving as a vital
link in a chain that powers that machine forward, somewhat like a bicycle
chain. pp. 90-91
40. Strategy: Bolles looked down at his stopwatch, saw the
freshmen’s two-mile time, and looked again.
He had known they were getting sharp, but now he knew in no uncertain
terms that he had the makings of something exceptional in his boat. What he didn’t know was whether California
had something even more exceptional, as Ky Ebright seemed to be hinting in the
press. That would be revealed a week
hence, on April 13. In the meantime, he
resolved to keep the time on his stopwatch to himself. p. 93
41. Two key factors – strength and speed: There are certain laws of physics by which
all crew coaches live and die. The speed of the racing shell is determined
primarily by two factors: the power produced by the combined strokes of the
oars, and the stroke rate, the number of strokes the crew takes each
minute. So if two boats carrying the
same weight have the exact same stroke rate, the one producing more power per
stroke will pull ahead. If those two
boats have the exact same power per stroke but one has a higher stroke rate,
the one with the higher rate will pull ahead.
A boat with both a very high stroke rate and very powerful strokes will
beat a boat that can’t match it on both counts.
But, of course, oarsmen are human and no crew can maintain both powerful
strokes and a very high rate indefinitely.
And, critically, the higher the stroke rate, the harder it is to keep
all the many individual movements of the crew synchronized. So every race is a balancing act, a series of
delicate and deliberate adjustments of power on one hand and stroke rate on the
other. It may be that nobody ever
achieves absolutely optimal performance, but what Bolles had seen that day—his
crew rowing so comfortably at a high but sustainable rate and with such great
power—gave him every reason to think that someday these freshmen just might
pull it off. pp. 93-94
42. The boys: And it wasn’t just their physical
prowess. He liked the character of these
particular freshmen. The boys who had
made it this far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of
their western roots. They were the
genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining
camps, fishing boats, and shipyards.
They looked, they walked, and they talked as if they had spent most of
their lives out of doors. Despite the
hard times and their pinched circumstances, they smiled easily and openly. They extended calloused hands eagerly to
strangers. They looked you in the eye,
not as a challenge, but as an invitation.
They joshed you at the drop of a hat.
They looked at impediments and saw opportunities. All that, Bolles knew, added up to a lot of
potential in a crew, particularly if that crew got a chance to row in the
East.
43. Misdirection a strategic manipulation:
Tom Bolles and Al Ulbrickson had read that account, and now they watched
California’s workout from shore with apparent concern. They had taken their own boys out the same
day, with the press and Ebright looking on, only to have the freshmen turn back
after a mile, their rowing conspicuously lethargic and their shell half full of
water from the heavy chop. Bolles had
returned gloomily to the dock and gone atypically out of his way to approach
the sportswriters assembled at the shell house, giving them a terse but bleak
forecast for the freshmen: “It looks as if we’ll be rowing from behind.” Misdirection was part of the game. It was easy enough to rig a shell so that
oars sat a little too close to the water and easy enough to pull a leisurely
oar but make it look hard. When Bolles’s
quote appeared the newspaper the next day, Joe cut it out, pasted it in his
scrapbook, and wrote next to it, “Coach said Cal had their neck out a
foot. He is giving out pessimistic
reports so they will stick them out farther.
Makes them easier to cut off.” p.
95
44. The race – Washington’s freshmen’s victory: California exploded off the line, lashing the
water at a furious thirty-eight strokes per minute. The silver prow of the shell immediately
surged a quarter length ahead of Washington’s.
Having seized the lead, Cal dropped its rate down a bit, to a more
sustainable thirty-two, and Grover Clark began blowing his whistle in time with
the stroke count. Washington settled in
at thirty but held its position at a quarter length back. The two boats churned up the lake for almost
a quarter of a mile, locked together in that configuration—Washington’s white
blades glinting in the sunlight, Cal’s flashing shards of blue, Sitting in the number three seat, Joe Rantz
was parallel with roughly the six or seven seat in the California boat; in the
seven seat, Roger Moris was parallel with nothing but open water. All the boys had their minds fully in the
boat now. Facing the stern, the only
thing any of them could see was the heaving back of the man in front of
him. None had any idea how far ahead
Cal’s initial surge might have carried them. George Morry, facing forward knew
exactly. He could see Grover Clark’s
backside in front of him, but he continued to hold Washington steady at thirty
strokes per minute. As they passed the quarter-mile mark, the two boats slowly
came even. The Washington began to overtake
California, methodically, seat by seat, the boys still rowing at a remarkably
low thirty. By the one-mile mark
Washington had open water on Cal. As the
California boat fell into the field of view of the Washington boys, their
confidence surged. The pain that had
been building in their arms and legs and chests did not abate, but it fled to
the back of their minds, chased there by a sense, almost, of
invulnerability. In the Cal boat, Grover
Clark pulled the whistle from his mouth and screamed out, “Gimme ten big ones!”
– the standard call in rowing for ten mammoth strokes, strokes as hard and
powerful as each oarsman can muster. The
California oars bent like bows with the strain, and for those ten strokes the
boys form Cal held their position. But
Washington remained out in front their lead—almost two lengths now—essentially
undiminished. At the mile-and-a-half
mark, Clark called for another big ten, but by now Cal’s boys had given
everything they had to give, and Washington’s boys hadn’t. As they entered the last half mile and came
into the lee of the hills at the north end of the lake, the headwind died
down. Cheers began to rise from the
semicircle of boats ahead, form the beaches, form the observation train working
its way along the shore, and—loudest of all—from the ferryboat chock-full of
students. The California boat labored to
catch up, Grover Clark’s whistle now shrieking like an out-of-control steam
locomotive. Approaching the line and
already ahead by four lengths, George Morry finally called for a higher stroke
rate. The Washington boys stepped it up
to thirty-two and then all the way to thirty-six, just because they knew they
could. Washington sliced across the
finish line four and a half lengths ahead of California, and almost twenty
seconds ahead of the freshman course record, despite the headwind. Shrill horns and cheers resounded all along
the shores of Lake Washington. The
Washington freshmen paddled over to the California boat and collected the
traditional trophy of victorious crews everywhere—the shirts off the backs of
their vanquished rivals. The shook hands
with the crestfallen and shirtless Cal boys and then, exultant, paddled off the
course to stow their shell. Tom Bolles
cheerily loaded them on to the Alumnus,
then transported them to the student ferry.
pp. 98-99
45. Georg Pocock on rowing with the head (Ch.
7): Rowing a race is an art, not a
frantic scramble. It must be rowed with
head power as well as hand power. From
the first stroke all thoughts of the other crew must be blocked out. Your thoughts must be directed to you and
your own boat, always positive, never negative.
p. 105
46. How to defeat and adversary – the secret: To defeat an adversary who was your equal,
maybe even you superior, it wasn’t necessarily enough just to give your all
from start to finish. You had to master
your opponent mentally. When the
critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did
not—that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you
had not yet shown, something that once revealed would make him doubt himself,
make him falter just when it counted the most.
Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about
knowing your own heart. p. 106
47. East – v – West: The 1934 regatta was once again shaping up to
be a clash of eastern privilege and prestige on the one hand and western
sincerity and brawn on the other. In
financial terms, it was pretty starkly going to be a clash of old money versus
no money at all. p. 114
48. VICTORY: At the crack of the starting
pistol, Syracuse immediately jumped in front, rowing at thirty-four, followed
closely by Washington, rowing at thirty-one.
Everyone else—Columbia, Rutgers, Pennsylvania, and Cornell—began to fall
behind almost immediately. At a quarter
of a mile down the river, it looked as if the Orange of Syracuse would, as
predicted, settle into the lead. But by
the half-mile mark, Washington had crept up and nosed ahead of them without
raising its stroke rate. As the leaders
swept under the railroad bridge at a mile, officials on the bridge set off a
salvo of three bombs, signifying that the boat in lane three, Washington, was
ahead with another mile still to go.. Slowly the bow of the Syracuse boat came
into Joe’s field of view, just beginning to fall away behind him. He ignored it, focused instead on the oar in
his hands, pulling hard and pulling smoothly, rowing comfortably, almost
without pain, At the mile-and-a-half
mark, some in the middle of the Syracuse boat caught a crab. The Orange faltered for a moment, then
immediately recovered their rhythm. But
it no longer mattered. Washington was two
and a half lengths ahead. Cornell, in
third, had all but disappeared, eight lengths farther back, George Morry whipped
his head around, took a quick look, and stated at the length of their
lead. Nevertheless, as he had against
California in April on Lake Washington, he called up the rate in the last few
hundred feet, just for the show of it.
Another salvo of three bombs exploded as Tom Bolles’s boys passed the
finish line an astonishing five lengths ahead of Syracuse. p. 116
49. Global warming: That summer [1934] was exceptionally hot
across much of the United States, though the summer of 1936 would cruelly eclipse
even this one. In the Dakotas,
Minnesota, and Iowa, summertime temperatures began early. By May 9, it was 109 in Spencer, Iowa, and
108 in Pipestone, Minnesota. And as the
heat rose, the rain stopped falling.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, had only a tenth of an inch of rain that
month, right in the middle of the corn-growing season. From the upper plains, the heat and aridity
radiated across the country. By June
more than half the United States was in the grip of severe heat and extreme
drought conditions. In Saint Louis
temperatures would rise above 100 for eight straight days that summer. At Midway Airport in Chicago, it would top
100 for six straight days and hit an all-time high of 109 on July 23. In Topeka, Kansas, the mercury would pass the
100 mark forty-seven times that summer.
July would be the hottest month ever recorded in Ohio. In the Far West it was even worse. In Orofino, Idaho, it would hit 118 on July
28. The ten states with the highest
average temperatures in the country that summer were all in the West. And the worst of the heat wasn’t in the
Southwest, were people expected it and crops and lifestyles were adapted to
it. Instead the heat scorched enormous
swaths of the Intermountain West and even portions of the normally green
Northwest. Nothing could grow under such
conditions, and without corn, wheat, and hay livestock could not survive. Alarmed, the secretary of agriculture, Henry
Wallace, dispatched an expedition to the Gobi Desert to see if there were any
species of grass there that might be able to survive in the deserts that the
American West and Midwest were quickly becoming. But the heat and the drought were in some
ways the least of it. On May 9 a
colossal dust storm had swung out of eastern Montana, rolled across the Dakotas
and Minnesota, dumped 12 million tons of dirt on Chicago, and then moved onto
tower over Boston and New York. As they
had in November 1933, people stood in Central Park and looked skyward, aghast
at the blackened sky. Somewhere in the
neighborhood of 250 million tons of American topsoil had become airborne in
that single storm. The New Your Times proclaimed it “the
greatest dust storm in United States history.”
But in fact the greater storms, and the greater suffering, were still
months ahead. pp. 119-120
50. Hard times: Yet for millions of Americans—for most
Americans—the hard times still seemed as hard as ever. The opposition pounded the new president,
zeroing in on his methods rather than his results. In a national radio address on July 2, Henry
Fletcher, chairman of the Republican Party, blasted the president’s New Deal,
calling in “an undemocratic departure from all that is distinctively
American.” He went on, gloomily and
ominously predicting dire consequences from what seemed a radical experiment in
socialist-style big-government spending: “The average American is thinking, ‘I
am perhaps better off than last year but I ask myself, will I be better off
when the tax bill comes in, and how about my children and my children’s
children?’” p.122
51. Roosevelt’s speech at the Grand Coulee Dam: Then Roosevelt began to speak, leaning
forward on his podium, clutching it. In
measured tones, but with rising emotion, he began laying out a vision of the
benefits that the new Grand Coulee Dam would bring to this arid land in
exchange for the 175 million public dollars it would cost: 1.2 million acres of
desert land reclaimed for farming, abundant irrigation water for millions more
acres of existing farmland, vast amounts of cheap electrical power that could
be exported all across the West, and thousands of new jobs building the
hydroelectric and irrigation infrastructure that the dam would
necessitate. As he spoke, the crowd
interrupted him again and again with waves of applause and choruses of hearty
cheers. Speaking of the water of the
Columbia running unchecked to the sea, its energy unharnessed he underscored
the commonality of the great task at hand: “It is not a problem of the State of
Washington; it is not a problem of the State of Idaho; it is a problem that
touches all the states in the union.” He
paused, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, and dabbed it against his
glistening brow. “We are going to see, I
believe, with our own eyes, electricity and power made so cheap that they will
become a standard article of use . . . for every home within the reach of an
electrical transmission line.” Then he
moved toward his conclusion, addressing the men and women standing before him
directly: You have great opportunities
and you are doing nobly in grasping them. . . .
So I leave here today with the feeling that this work is well
undertaken; that we are going ahead with a useful project; and that we are going to see it through for the
benefit of our country? When he
finished, the crowd again roared their approval. pp. 122-123
52. Pocock on harmony between shell and crew
(Ch. 8): A good shell has to have life and resilience to get in harmony
with the swing of the crew. p. 125
53. Making shingles and the connection to
making a shell and making a crew and art – the value that can come from what
others have left behind: After his
cross-country trip, Joe spent the rest of the summer of 1934 in the still
half-finished house on Silberhorn Road in Sequim, desperately trying to conjure
up enough money to get himself through another school year. He cut more hay, dug more ditches, dynamited
more stumps, and spread more hot, black asphalt on Highway 101. Mostly, though, he worked in the woods with
Charlie McDonald. Charlie had decided he
needed a new roof on his farmhouse. One afternoon he harnessed his draft horses
to a buckboard and took Joe upriver, hunting for cedar. The upper reaches of his property had been
logged for the first time just a dozen years before. The loggers had hand their pick of the virgin
timber still growing along that section of the Dungeness—towering Douglas firs
and massive western red cedars. Some of
the cedars had been more than two thousand years old, and their stumps—seven or
eight feet in diameter and just as tall—rose like ancient monuments from the
dense tangle of salal, huckleberry, young cottonwoods, and purple plums of
fireweed. In the face of the
extraordinary bounty of the massive cedars, and valuing them primarily for
making roofing shakes and shingles, the men who had cut them down had taken
only the prime middle section of each, leaving behind long sections for the
tops, where the branches were, and the bottoms, where the trunks began to flare
out and the grain of the wood no longer ran perfectly straight and true. Much of what they had left could still be
used but only if one knew how to read the wood, to decipher its inner
structure. Charlie led Joe among the
stumps and downed trees, teaching him how to understand what lay beneath the
bark of the fallen logs. He rolled them
over with a peavey and pounded them with the flat face of a splitting maul,
testing for the ringing tone that indicated soundness. He ran his hands over them, feeling for
hidden knots and irregularities. He
crouched down at the cut ends and peered at the annual growth rings trying to
get the nuanced read on how tight and regular the grain within was likely to
be. Joe was fascinated, intrigued by the
idea that he could learn to see what others not see in the wood, thrilled as
always at the notion that something valuable could be found in what others had
passed over and left behind. When
Charlie found a log he liked, and explained to Joe why he liked it, the two of
them used a crosscut saw to buck the wood into twenty-four inch bolts—sections
the length of a roofing shake—and toted them back to the buckboard. Later Charlie taught Joe how to decipher the
subtle clues of shape, texture, and color that would enable him to cleave the
wood into well-formed shakes, to see hidden points of weakness or
resilience. He taught the younger man
how to split a log neatly into quarters with a maul and iron wedges; how to use
a heavy wooden mallet to pound a froe—the shake maker’s principal tool: a long,
straight blade with an equally long perpendicular handle—into the wood across
rather than with the grain; how to work the froe evenly down the length of the
wood; how to listen to the wood as it began to “talk” back to him, the fibers
crackling and snapping softly as they pulled away from one another, telling him
that they were prepared to split along the plane he intended; how to twist the
froe in the wood decisively at just the right moment to make the shake pop
free, clean and elegant, smooth faced and gently tapered from one end to the
other, ready to put on a roof. Within a
few days, Joe had mastered the froe and the mallet and could size up a log and
split shakes from it nearly as quickly and decisively as Charlie could. A year of rowing had given him prodigious
strength in his arms and shoulders, and he worked his way through the pile of
cedar bolts like a machine. A small
mountain of shakes soon surrounded him in the McDonalds’ barnyard. Proud of his new skill, he found that shaping
cedar resonated with him in an elusive but elemental way—it satisfied him down
in his core, and gave him peace. Partly it
was the old pleasure that he always derived from mastering new tools and
solving practical problems—working out the angles and plane at which the cedar
would or wouldn’t cleave cleanly. And partly
it was the deeply sensuous nature of the work.
He liked the way that the wood murmured to him before it parted, almost
as if it was alive, and when it finally gave way under his hands he liked the
way it invariable revealed itself in lovely and unpredictable patterns of
color—streaks of orange and burgundy and cream.
At the same moment, as the wood opened up, it always perfumed the
air. The spicy-sweet aroma that rose form
freshly split cedar was the same scent that often filled the shell house in
Seattle when Pocock was at work up in his loft.
There seemed to Joe to some kind of connection between what he was doing
here among the pile of freshly split shakes, what Pocock was doing in his shop,
and what he was trying to do himself in the racing shells Pocock
built—something about the deliberate application of strength, and careful
coordination of mind and muscle, the sudden unfolding of mystery and beauty.
pp. 125-127
54. Training rules: “You will eat no fried meats,” he began
abruptly. “You will eat no pastries, but
you will eat plenty of vegetables. You
will eat good, substantial, wholesome food—the kind of food you mother
makes. You will go to bed at ten o’clock
and arise punctually at seven o’clock.
You will not smoke or drink or chew.
And you will follow this regiment all year round, for a long as you row
for me. A man cannot abuse his body for
six months and then expect to row the other six months. He must be a total abstainer all year. You will not use profane language in the
shell house, nor anywhere within my hearing.
You will keep at your studies and maintain a high grade point average. You will not disappoint your parents, nor you
crewmates. Now let’s row.” p. 130
55. Pocock well read: But Pocock was learned far beyond his formal
education, as was immediately obvious to everyone who met him. He was well read in a wide variety of
subjects—religion, literature, history, and philosophy. He could quote Browning or Tennyson or
Shakespeare at the drop of a hat, and the quote was always apt and telling,
never pretentious or affected. The net
effect was that for all his quiet humility the man’s wide-ranging knowledge and
quiet eloquence commanded absolute respect, and never more than when he was at
work in his shop, plying his craft. No
one interrupted Pocock at work.
Ever. p. 135
56. George Pocock at work – maker and artist: In fact, George Pocock was already building
the best, and doing so by a wide margin.
He didn’t just build racing shells, he sculpted them. Looked at one way, a racing shell is a
machine with a narrowly defined purpose:
to enable a number of large men or women, and one small one, to propel
themselves over an expanse of water as quickly and efficiently as
possible. Looked at another way, it is a
work of art, an expression of the human spirit, with its unbounded hunger for
the ideal, for beauty, for purity, for grace.
A large part of Pocock’s genius as a boat builder was that he managed to
excel both as a maker of machines and as an artist. Growing up and learning his trade from his
father at Eton, he had used simple hand tools—saws, hammers chisels, wood
planes, and sanding blocks. For the most
part, he continued to use those same tools even as more modern, laborsaving
power tools came to market in the 1930’s.
Partly, this was because he believed that the hand tools gave him more
precise control over the fine details of the work. Partly, it was because he could not abide the
noise that power tools made.
Craftsmanship required thought, and thought required a quiet
environment. Mostly though, it was
because he wanted more intimacy with the wood—he wanted to feel the life in the
wood with his hands, and in turn to impart some of himself, his own life, his
pride and his caring, into the shell. Up
until 1927, he made his shells precisely as his father had taught him to make
them in England. Working on a perfectly
straight I beam more than sixty feet long, he constructed a delicate framework
of spruce and northern ash. Then he
carefully joined and nailed strips of Spanish cedar to the ribs of the frame to
form the hull. This required thousands
of brass nails and screws the heads of which had to be patiently and
laboriously filed down by hand before he could apply coats of marine varnish to
the exterior. The fitting and nailing on
of the planks was labor intensive and nerve-racking. At any moment the slip of a chisel or a careless
blow form a hammer could ruin days’ worth of work. In 1927 he made an improvement that
revolutionized the building of racing shells in America. For a number of years, Ed Leader, who
succeeded Hiram Conibear as the Washington crew coach, had suggested that
Pocock try making a shell out of the native western red cedar that grew so
abundantly, and so large, in Washington and British Columbia. After all, Spanish cedar was expensive,
having to be imported from its native South America. (Spanish cedar, Cedrela odorata, is in fact neither Spanish nor cedar, being a
member of the mahogany family.) It was
also notoriously brittle, necessitating the almost continual repair of the
school’s fleet of shells. Pocock was
attracted to the idea of trying the native cedar. He had, for years, taken notice of the
lightness and the durability of the old cedar Indian canoes that still
occasionally plied the waters of the Puget Sound. But he had been dissuaded from experimenting
with it by head coach Rusty Callow.
Callow had been a logger in his younger years, and like most lumbermen
he believed that cedar was only good for making shakes and shingles. But when Pocock finally followed his own
heart and began to experiment with the wood in 1927, he was astonished by the
possibilities it opened up. Western red
cedar (Thuja plicata) is a kind of
wonder wood. Its low density makes it
easy to shape, whether with a chisel, a plane, or a handsaw. Its open cell structure makes it light and
buoyant, and in rowing lightness means speed.
Its tight, even grain makes it strong but flexible, easy to bend yet
disinclined to twist, warp, or cup. It
is free of pitch or sap, but its fibers contain chemicals called thujaplicins
that act as natural preservatives, making it highly resistant to rot while at
the same time lending it its lovely scent.
It is beautiful to look at, it takes a finish well, and it can be
polished to a high degree of luster, essential for providing the smooth,
friction-free racing bottom a good shell requires. Pocock quickly became a convert. Soon he was scouring the Northwest for the
highest quality cedar he could find, making long journeys to smoky sawmills out
on the Olympic Peninsula and far to the north in the still-virgin forests of
British Columbia. He found just what he
wanted in the misty woods surrounding Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island. From the cedar stock he found there—long,
tight-grained, straight sections cut from massive, ancient trees—he could mill
elegant planks of wood twenty inches or more wide and sixty feet long. And from the planks he could shave identical
pairs of much thinner planks, delicate sheets of cedar just five-thirty-seconds
of an inch thick, each a mirror image of the other, with the same pattern of
grain. By placing these book-matched
pairs on either side of the keel, he could ensure perfect symmetry in the
boat’s appearance and performance.
These flexible sheets of cedar also allowed Pocock to do away with the
endless nailing of planks to the boat’s ribs.
Instead he could simply strap the sheets of wood over the frame of the
boat, forcing them to conform to its shape, then cover the whole assembly with
heavy blankets and divert steam from the shell house’s heating system under the
blankets. The steam caused the cedar to
relax and bend to fit itself to the shape of the frame. When he turned off the steam and removed the
blankets three days later, the cedar sheets held their new shape
perfectly. All he had to do was dry them
and glue them to the frame. It was the
same technique that the Coast Salish peoples of the Northwest had used for centuries
to fashion bentwood boxes out of single planks of cedar. The sleek shells that resulted from the
process were not only more beautiful than the Spanish cedar shells but also
demonstrable faster. Harvard ordered, as
an experiment, one of the first to come out of Pocock’s shop and promptly
reported back that the boat had taken several full seconds off its crew’s best
times. With the cedar skin attached to
the shell, Pocock installed the runners and the seats, the riggers, the rudder
assembly, and the trim. He took pride in
using a variety of Northwest woods in his products—sugar pine for keels, ash
for the frames, Sitka spruce for the gunnels and the hand-carved seats, Alaska
yellow cedar for the wash boards. The
last of these he favored mostly because as it aged its color evolved from that
of old ivory to a golden honey hue that harmonized with the burnished red of
the cedar hulls. He stretched sheer silk
fabric over the stern and bow sections and painted the silk with varnish. As the varnish dried and hardened on the
fabric, it created a fragile and lovely translucent yellow decking fore and
aft. Finally, he worked on the finish,
hand-rubbing the cedar hull with powdered pumice and rotten stone for hours, applying
thin coats of marine varnish, then rubbing the finish again and again until it
gleamed like still water. All told, it
took four gallons of varnish to get the finish he was looking for. Only when it fairly shimmered, when it seemed
in its sleekness to be alive with the potential for speed, did Pocock pronounce
the boat ready for use. There was one
more thing about cedar—a sort of secret that Pocock had discovered accidentally
after his first shells made of the wood had been in the water for a while. People had taken to calling them “banana
boats,” because once they were exposed to water both their bows and sterns
tended to curve ever so slightly upward.
Pocock pondered this effect and its consequences and gradually came to a
startling realization. Although cedar
does not expand or swell across the
grain of the wood when wet, and thus tends not to warp, it does expand lightly along the grain. This can amount to as much as an inch of
swelling in the length of a sixty-foot shell.
Because the cedar was dry when attached to the frame but then became wet
after being used regularly, the wood wanted to expand slightly in length. However, the interior frame of the boat,
being made of ash that remained perpetually dry and rigid, would not allow it
to expand. The cedar skin thus became
compressed, forcing the ends of the boat up slightly and lending it what boat
builders call “camber.” The result was
that the boat as a whole was under subtle but continual tension caused by the
unreleased compression in the skin, something like a drawn bow waiting to be
release. This gave it a kind of
liveliness, and tendency to spring forward on the catch of the oars in a way
that no other design or material could duplicate. To Pocock, this unflagging resilience—this
readiness to bounce back, to keep coming, to persist in the face of
resistance—was the magic in cedar, the unseen force that imparted life to the
shell. And as far as he was concerned, a
shell that did not have life in it was a shell that was unworthy of the young
men who gave their hearts to the effort of moving it through the water. pp. 136-139
57. Pocock on harmony between shell and crew
(Ch. 8): One of the first admonitions of a good rowing coach, after the
fundamentals are over, is “pull your own weight,” and the young oarsman does
just that when he finds out that the boat goes better when he does. There is certainly a social implication
here. P. 149
58. Ulbrickson like Ahab: He[Ulbrickson] was, in his quiet way, rapidly
becoming obsessed, almost Ahab-like, in his pursuit of the ultimate varsity
crew, one that could beat Ky Ebright in California in April and at Poughkeepsie
in June and be in a position to go to Berlin the following year. p. 156
59. Stub McMillin can’t believe he was beaten: There was another curly-headed boy, a
six-foot-five, slightly goofy-looking beanpole with a smile that could knock
your socks off, named Jim McMillin. His
crew mates called him Stub. He had not
rowed particularly well in the second freshman boat the previous year. Now suddenly he seemed to be finding his
niche in Moch’s boat. He was big enough
to provide the leverage and power that a great crew needs in the middle of the
boat, and he never seemed to believe he was beaten, even if he was. He rowed as hard in a losing cause as in a
winning one. He just plain had a lot of
pepper, and he’d made it clear that he thought he belonged in the first
boat. p. 157
60. Danger of a boat full of individuals: Ulbrickson knew what the real problem
was. He littered his logbook with the
myriad technical faults he was observing:
Rantz and Heartman still weren’t breaking their arms at the right point
in the stroke; Green and Hartman were catching the water too early, Rantz and
Lund were catching it too late; and so on.
But the real problem wasn’t that –wasn’t an accumulation of small
faults. Back in February he had commented to the Seattle Times’ George Varnell that
“there were more good individual men on this year’s squad than on any I have
coached.” The fundamental problem lay in
the fact that he had felt compelled to throw that word “individual” into the
sentence. There were too many days when
they rowed not as crews but as boatfuls of individuals. The more he scolded them for personal
technical issues, even as he preached teamsmanship, the more the boys seemed to
sink into their own separate and sometime defiant little worlds. p. 158
61. Joe’s beauty – as he slept: As Joe slept, Joyce sat in the bow, studying
the face of the young man to whom she had committed herself. He had grown even more handsome since high
school, and at moments like this, when he was fully at ease, his face and his
sculptured body were so full of composure and grace that they reminded Joyce of
the ancient marble statues of Greek athletes that she had recently studied in
her art history class. Looking at him
like this, she thought, it was hard to believe that he had ever know a troubled
moment. p. 159
62. Swing – poetry of motion: There is a thing that sometimes happens in
rowing that is hard to achieve and hard to define. Many crews, even winning crews, never really
find it. Others find it but can’t
sustain it. It’s called “swing.” It only happens when all eight oarsmen are rowing
in such perfect unison that no single action by any one is out of synch with
those of all the others. It’s not just
that the oars enter and leave the water at precisely the same instant. Sixteen arms must begin to pull, sixteen
knees must begin to fold and unfold, eight bodies must begin to slide forward
and backward, eight backs must bend and straighten all at once. Each minute action—each subtle turning of
wrists—must be mirrored exactly by each oarsman, from one end of the boat to
the other. Only then will the boat
continue to run, unchecked, fluidly and gracefully between pulls of the
oars. Only then does pain entirely give
way to exultation. Rowing then becomes a
kind of perfect language. Poetry, that’s
what a good swing feels like. p. 161
63. More swing: A good swing does not necessarily make crews
go faster, except to the extent that if no one’s actions check the run of the
boat, rowers get more bang for their buck on each stroke. Mainly what it does is allow them to conserve
power, to row at a lower stroke rate and still move through the water as
efficiently as possible, and often more rapidly than another crew rowing less
efficiently at a higher rate. It allows
them to possess a reserve of energy for gut-wrenching, muscle-screaming sprint
at the end of a race. It is insanely difficult to keep a good swing as you
raise your rate. As the tempo increases,
each of the myriad separate actions has to happen at shorter and shorter
intervals, so that at some point it becomes virtually impossible to maintain a
good swing at a high rate. But the closer a crew can come to that
ideal—maintaining a good swing while rowing at a high rate—the closer they are
to rowing on another plane, the plane on which champions row. p. 162
64. Pocock on free – it’s got to be (Ch. 10):
A boat is a sensitive thing, an eight-oared shell, and if it isn’t let go free,
it doesn’t work for you. p. 173
65. Dust Bowl: On April 14, the day after the Pacific Coast
Regatta on the Oakland Estuary, the dust storms of the past several years were
suddenly eclipsed by a single catastrophe that is still remembered in the
Plains states as Black Sunday. In only a
few hours’ time, cold, dry winds howling out of the north scoured from dry
fields more than two times the amount of soil that had been excavated from the
Panama Canal and lifted it eight thousand feet into the sky. Across much of five states, late afternoon
sunlight gave way to utter darkness. The
dust particles the wind carried generated so much static electricity in the air
that barbed-wire fences glowed in the midday darkness. Farmers at work in their fields crumpled to
their hands and knees and groped aimlessly about, unable to find their way to
their own doorsteps. Cars careened off
roads and into ditches, where their occupants clutched cloths to their faces,
struggled to breath, gagged, and coughed up dirt. Sometimes they abandoned their cars and
staggered up to the houses of strangers and pounded on their front doors,
begging for and receiving shelter. The
next day, Kansas City AP bureau chief Ed Stanley inserted the phrase “the dust
bowl” into a wire service account and the devastation, and a new term entered
the American lexicon. Over the next few
months, as the extent of the devastation settled in, the trickle of ragged
refugees that Joe Rantz had witnessed heading west the previous summer became a
torrent. Within a few years, two and a
half million Americans would pull up stakes and head west into an uncertain
future—rootless, dispossessed, bereft of the simple comfort and dignity of
having a place to call home. pp. 174-175
66. Passivism: At the same time, the drumbeat of ominous
headlines emanating from Europe had begun to grow steadily louder and more
insistent that spring. Four weeks’ worth
of headlines from the Seattle Times
alone were reason enough for worry: “Death Penalty for Pacifists Is Decreed as
Germany Girds” (April 19); “Nazis Jail
Aged Nuns, Monks in New Attack on Christianity” (April 27); “German Move to
Build U-Boats Rouses Anxiety in Great Britain” (April 28); “Britain to Match
Nazi Planes; Calls on Hitler to Fix Limits: (May 2); “Hitler Warned by Britain
Not to Militarize Rhineland Zone” (May 7); “Nazis Have New Weapon: 60-Knot
Boat” (May 17); “Hitler Police Jail U. S. Citizen” (May 18). The dark news was difficult to ignore. But not impossible. The vast majority of Americans, in Seattle
and elsewhere, did exactly that. The affairs
of Europe still seemed a million miles away, and that’s exactly where most
people wanted to keep them. p. 176
67. Paradoxes of rowing: Rowing is, in a number of ways, a sport of
fundamental paradoxes. For one thing, an
eight-oared racing shell—powered by unusually large and physically powerful men
or women—is commanded, controlled, and directed by the smallest and least
powerful person in the boat. The coxswain (nowadays often a female even in an
otherwise male crew) must have the force of character to look men or women
twice his or her size in the face, bark orders at them, and be confident that
the leviathans will respond instantly and unquestioningly to those orders. It is perhaps the most incongruous
relationship in sports. Another paradox
lies in the physics of the sport. The
object of the endeavor is, of course, to make the boat move through the water
as quickly as possible. But the faster
the boat goes, the harder it is to row well.
The enormously complicated sequence of movements, each of which an
oarsman must execute with exquisite precision, becomes exponentially more
difficult to perform as the stroke rate increases. Rowing at a beat of thirty-six is vastly more
challenging than rowing at a beat of twenty-six. As the tempo accelerates, the penalty of a
miscue—an oar touching the water a fraction of a second too early or too late,
for instance—becomes ever more severe, the opportunity for disaster ever
greater. At the same time, the exertion
required to maintain a high rate makes the physical pain all the more
devastating and therefore the likelihood of a miscue greater. In this sense, speed is both the rower’s
ultimate goal and also his greatest foe.
Put another way, beautiful and effective rowing often means painful rowing. An unnamed coach is reputed to have said,
bluntly, “Rowing is like a beautiful duck.
On the surface it is all grace, but underneath the bastard’s paddling
like mad!” But the greatest paradox of
the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the
oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are
necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous
self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to
frustration. Nobody who does not believe
deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to
prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as
competitive rowing at the highest levels.
The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few
opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously serf reliant and
self-motivated are likely to succeed at it.
And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and
rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of
exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke
oars or bowmen; but they have no stars.
The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat,
and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in
motion becomes—is all that matters. Not
the individual, not the self. pp.
177-179
68. Psychological and physical mix to perfection:
The psychology is complex. Even as
rowers must subsume their often fierce sense of independence and self-reliance,
at the same time they must hold true to their individuality, their unique
capabilities as oarsmen or oarswomen or, for that matter, as human beings. Even if they could, few rowing coaches would
simply clone their biggest, strongest, smartest, and most capable rowers. Crew races are not won by clones. They are won by crews, and great crews are
carefully balanced blends of both physical abilities and personality
types. In physical terms, for instance,
one rower’s arms might be longer than another’s, but the latter might have a
stronger back than the former. Neither
is necessarily a better or more valuable oarsman than the other; both the long
arms and the strong back are assets to the boat. But if they are to row well together, each of
these oarsmen must adjust to the needs and capabilities of the other. Each must be prepared to compromise something
in the way of optimizing his stroke for the overall benefit of the boat—the
shorter-armed man reaching a little farther, the longer-armed man
foreshortening his reach just a bit—so that both men’s oars remain parallel and
both blades enter and exit the water at precisely the same moment. This highly refined coordination and
cooperation must be multiplied out across eight individuals of varying statures
and physiques to make the most of each individual’s strengths. Only in this way can the capabilities that
come with diversity—lighter, more technical rowers in the bow and stronger,
heavier pullers in the middle of the boat, for instance—be turned to advantage
rather than disadvantage. p. 179
69. Diversity - Character: The capitalizing on diversity is perhaps even
more important when it comes to the characters of the oarsmen. A crew composed entirely of eight amped-up,
overly aggressive oarsmen will often degenerate into a dysfunctional brawl in a
boat or exhaust itself in the first leg of a long race. Similarly, a boatload of quiet but strong
introverts may never find the common core of fiery resolve that causes the boat
to explode past its competitors when all seems lost. Good crews are good blends of personalities:
someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to
pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone
to charge ahead without thinking.
Somehow all this must mesh.
That’s the steepest challenge.
Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat
must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and
accept the others as they are. It is an
exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of
exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than
for trophies or accolades. But it takes
young men or women of extraordinary character as well as extraordinary physical
ability to pull it off. pp. 179-180
70. Pocock on what an oar’s man feels (Ch. 11): And the oarsman, too, when he has his mind
trained at the university and his body fit.
Feels something. . . . I think oarsmen understand what I’m talking
about. They get that way. I’ve seen oarsmen—actually I saw one man, who
was so rarin’ to go, so fit and bright, I saw him try to run up a wall. Now isn’t that ridiculous? But he felt that good; he wanted to run up
that wall. p. 193
71. At the end of the last Ice Age: Then he turned north and descended into
the Washington scablands, a tortured landscape shaped by a series of cataclysms
between twelve and fifteen thousand years ago.
As the last ice age waned, a two-thousand-foot-high ice dam holding back
a vast lake in Montana—later dubbed Lake Missoula by geologists—gave way not
once but several times, unleashing a series of floods of unimaginable scope and
ferocity. In the greatest of these,
during a period of roughly forty-eight hours, 220 cubic kilometers of water
rushed over much of what is now northern Idaho, eastern Washington, and the
northern edge of Oregon, carrying more than ten times the flow of all the
rivers in the world. A massive wall of water, mud, and rock—well over a
thousand feet tall in places—exploded over the countryside, rumbling southwest
toward the Pacific at speed up to one hundred miles per hour, leveling whole
mountains, sluicing away millions of tons of topsoil, and gouging deep scars
called “coulees” in the underlying bedrock.
pp. 193-194
72. Joe’s job: Thirty minutes later, he walked out of the
office with a job. Most of the jobs
remaining at the dam site, he had been told, were for common laborers, payed
fifty cents an hour. But studying the
application form, Joe had noticed that there were higher pay grades for certain
jobs—especially for the men whose job it was to dangle from cliff faces in
harnesses and pound away at the reluctant rock with jackhammers. The jackhammer job paid seventy-five cents an
hour, so Joe had put a check next to the box and stepped into the examination
room for his physical. Working with a
jackhammer under those conditions required enough upper body strength to fight
the punishing kickback of the machine, enough leg strength to keep the body
pushed away from the cliff face all day, enough grace and athleticism to
clamber around on the cliffs while dodging rocks falling from above, and enough
self-assurance to climb over the edge of the cliff in the first place. By the time Joe had stripped down to his
shorts and told the doctor that he rowed crew at the university, the job was
his. pp. 194-195
73. More of Joe’s job: The jackhammer work was brutal, but Joe came
to enjoy it. For eight hours a day, he dangled on a rope in the furnace like
heat of the canyon, pounding at the wall of rock in front of him. The jackhammer weighed seventy-five pounds
and seemed to have a life and a will of its own, endlessly pushing back, trying
to wrest itself out of Joe’s grip as he in turn tried to push it into the
rock. The continual rapid-fire chock-chock-chock of his machine and
those of the men around him was deafening.
Rock dust, gritty and irritating, swirled around him, got in his eyes,
his mouth, and his nose. Sharp chips and
shards of rock flew up and stung his face.
Sweat dripped from his back and fell away into the void below. Hundreds of feet of loose rock—the
“overburden” as the engineers called it—had to be peeled away from the face of
the cliffs in order to get down to the older granite bedrock on which the
foundation of the dam would be built.
Then the granite itself had to be shaped to conform to the contours of
the future dam. It was hard stuff. So hard that roughly two thousand feet of
steel disappeared every day from the bit ends of all the jackhammers and
pneumatic drills at work in the canyon.
But tough as the work was, there was much about it that suited Joe. He learned that summer to work closely with
the men dangling on either side of him, each keeping an eye out for rocks
falling from above, calling out warning to those below, searching for better
places to find seams in the rock. He
liked the easygoing camaraderie of it, the simple, stark maleness of it. Most days he worked without a shirt or
hat. His muscles quickly grew bronzed
and his hair ever blonder under the ardent desert sun. By the end of each day, he was exhausted,
parched with thirst, and ravenously hungry.
But—much as he sometimes had after a hard row on Lake Washington back
home—he also felt cleansed by the work,
He felt lithe and limber, full of youth and grace. pp. 197-198
74. Johnny White – all-American boy: Johnny White as the number two man in Tom
Bolle’s outstanding freshman boat that year.
An inch shorter than Joe, and more slightly built, he was nevertheless a
fine physical specimen and striking to look at, with fine, regular features;
graceful proportioned limbs, and an open, eager face. He had warm, inviting eyes and a sunny
smile. If you’d wanted a poster model
for the all-American boy, Johnny would have fit the bill. He was also a thoroughly nice kid and nearly
as poor as Joe Rantz. p. 200
75. Poor family at work: Finally, he [John White – Johnny’s dad] got
up from his chair one day, went down to the lakeshore, and began to plant a garden. His kids needed to be fed, and he was out of
money, but food could be grown. Before
long he had the finest garden in the neighborhood. In the rich black soil along the lakeshore,
he grew tall sweet corn and large, luscious tomatoes, both perpetual challenges
to Seattle gardeners. He grew
loganberries, and picked apples and pears from trees on the property. He raised chickens. Johnny’s mother, Maimie, bartered the eggs
for other goods, canned the tomatoes, made wine from the loganberries. She grew peonies in another garden along the
side of the house and sold them to a florist in Seattle. She went to a flour mill for flour sacks,
bleached them, and made them into dish towels that she sold around town. Once a week she bought a roast and served it
for Sunday dinner. The rest of the week
they ate leftovers. Then in 1934 the
city decided to open a swimming beach along the shore in front of the
house. They condemned the Whites’
waterfront garden. p. 200
76. Johnny on his way to the boat: Johnny was the apple of his [father’s] eye,
and he wanted more than anything for his son to become an oarsman. Johnny, in turn, wanted nothing more than to
meet his father’s often very high expectations, whatever they might be. And Johnny hadn’t let him down so far. He was unusually bright, accomplished, and
ambitious, and he had graduated from Franklin High School two years early, at
the age of sixteen. That had created a
small problem. He was far too young and
too underdeveloped to row for the university, the only rowing game in
town. So by mutual agreement with his
father, Johnny went to work—both to make enough money to attend the university
and, just as importantly, to manufacture enough muscle to row with the best of
them when he got there. He chose the hardest,
most physical challenging work he could find: first wrestling steel beams and
heavy equipment around a shipyard on the waterfront in Seattle and then
stacking lumber and manhandling massive fir and cedar logs with a peavey in a
nearby sawmill. By the time he arrived
at the university, two years later, he had enough cash to make it through a
couple of years of school and enough braw to quickly emerge as one of Tom Bolles’s
most impressive freshmen. Now, in the
summer of 1935, he’d arrived at Grand Coulee looking for more—more money and
more muscle. p. 201
77. Chuck Day – ferocious competitor: At first blush it didn’t seem to make sense
to Joe and a kid like Day would have any reason to work in a place as dirty and
dangerous as the coulee. In point of
fact, though—as Joe would soon find out—there was no place that Chuck Day was
more likely to be that summer than at Grand Coulee. To understand him, you had to understand his
heart. He was a ferocious
competitor. If you put a challenge in
front of him, he attacked it like a bulldog.
And he just plain didn’t know the meaning of surrender. If a river needed to be dammed, then by God just
get out of the way and let him at it. p.
202
78. Friends around Campfire, boys free in the
wilderness: For the most part, though, they stayed in Grand Coulee, where
they could toss a football around in the sagebrush, chuck rocks off the edges
of the cliffs, bask shirtless on stone ledges in the warm morning sun, sit
bleary-eyed in the smoke around a campfire at night telling ghost stories as
coyotes yelped in the distance, and generally act like the teenagers they
actually were—free and easy boys, cut loose in the wide expanse of the western
desert. p. 205
79. Pocock—Be part of the boat (Ch. 12):
Just as a skilled rider is said to become part of his horse, the skilled
oarsman must become part of his boat. p.
207
80. Hitler killed “his” boys: A little less than ten years in the future,
in the last few desperate days of the Third Reich, scores of Hitler Youth—boys
as young as ten or eleven—would crouch below the bell tower among blocks of
fine Franconian limestone, the rubble of the building now being erected,
shooting at advancing Russian boys, many of the not a great deal older than
they. And in those last few days, as
Berlin burned all around them, some of those German goys—those who cried or
refused to shoot or tried to surrender—would be lined up against these
limestone slabs by their officers and shot.
p. 208
81. The coach building the team, the boat:
He [Ulbrickson] was going to have to overlook boys he like personally and work
with boys he didn’t necessarily like, He was going to have to outwit Ky
Ebright—no small challenge. He was going
to have to find funding in what was shaping up to be yet another lean
year. And he was going to have to make
better use of perhaps his greatest resource, George Pocok. P. 212
82. Pocock’s council to Joe – the art of
building beauty: On a bright, crisp September morning, as Pocock started up
the steps to his loft in the shell house, he noticed Joe doing sit-ups on a
bench at the back of the room. He
motioned Joe to come over, said he’d noticed him peering up at the shop
occasionally, and asked him if he’d like to look around. Joe all but bounded up the stairs. The loft was bright and airy, with morning
light pouring in from several large windows in the back wall. The air was thick with the sweet—sharp scent of
marine varnish. Drifts of sawdust and
curls of wood shavings lay on the floor.
A long I beam stretched nearly the full length of the loft, and on it
lay a framework of an eight-oared shell under construction. Pocock started off by explaining the various tools
he used. He showed Joe wood plans, their
wooden handles burnished by decades of use, their blades so sharp and precise
they could shave off curls of wood as thin and transparent as tissue paper, He
handed him different old rasps and augers and chisels and files and mallets
he’d brought over from England. Some of
them, he said, were a century old. He
explained how each kind of tool had many variations, how each file, for
instance, was subtly different from another, how each served a different function
but all were indispensable in the making of a fine shell. He guided Joe to a lumber rack and pulled out
samples of the different woods he used—soft, malleable sugar pine, hard yellow
spruce, fragrant cedar, and clear white ash.
He held each piece up and inspected it, turning it over and over in his
hands, and talking about the unique properties of each and how it took all of
them contributing their individual qualities to make a shell that would come to
life in the water, He pulled a long
cedar plank from a rack and pointed out the annuals growth rings, Joe already knew a good deal about the
qualities of cedar and about growth rings from his time splitting shakes with
Charlie McDonald, but he was drawn in as Pocock began to talk about what they
meant to him. Joe crouched next to the
older man and studied the wood and listened intently. Pocock said the rings told more than a tree’s
age; they told the whole story of the tree’s life over as much as two thousand
years. Their thickness and thinness
spoke of hard years of bitter struggle intermingled with rich years of sudden
growth. The different colors spoke of
the various soils and minerals that the tree’s roots encountered, some harsh
and stunting, some rich and nourishing.
Flaws and irregularities told how the trees endured fires and lightning
strikes and windstorms and infestation and yet continued to grow. As Pocock talked, Joe grew mesmerized. It wasn’t just what the Englishman was
saying, or the soft, earthy cadence of his voice, it was the calm reverence
with which he talked about the wood—as if there was something holy and sacred
about it—that drew Joe in. The wood,
Pocock murmured, taught us about survival, about overcoming difficulty, about
prevailing over adversity, but it also taught us something about the underlying
reason for surviving in the first place.
Something about infinite beauty, about undying grace, about things
larger and greater than ourselves. About
the reasons we were all here. “Sure, I
can make a boat,” he said, and then added, quoting the poet Joyce Kilmer, “’But
only God can make a tree.’” Pocock
pulled out a thin sheet of cedar, one that had been milled down to
three-eighths of an inch for the skin of a shell. He flexed the wood and had Joe do the
same. He talked about camber and the life
it imparted to a shell when wood was put under tension. He talked about the underlying strength of
the individual fibers in cedar and how, coupled with their resilience, they
gave the wood its ability to bounce back and resume its shape, whole and intact,
or how, under steam and pressure, they could take a new form and hold it
forever. The ability to yield, to bend,
to give way, to accommodate, he said, was sometimes a source of strength in men
as well as in wood, so long as it was helmed by inner resolve and by
principle. He took Joe to one end of the
long I beam on which he was constructing the frame for a new shell. Pocock sighted along the pine keel and
invited Joe to do the same. It had to be
precisely straight, he said, for the whole sixty-two-foot length of the boat,
not a centimeter of variance from one end to the other or the boat would never
run true. And in the end the trueness
could only come from its builder, from the care with which he exercised his
craft, from the amount of heart he put into it.
Pocock paused and stepped back from the frame of the shell and put his
hands on his hips, carefully studying the work he had so far done. He said for him the craft of building a boat
was like religion. It wasn’t enough to
master the technical detail of it. You
had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself
absolutely to it. When you were done and
walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of
yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. “Rowing,” he said, “is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts
that really matter anyway. Do you know
what I mean, Joe?” Joe, a bit nervous,
not at all certain that he did, nodded tentatively, went back downstairs, and
resumed his sit-ups, trying to work it out.
pp. 213-215
83. Helping a friend, working through college,
and the power of service: At the end
of the day, after the others had drifted off to their homes or their part-time
jobs, Joe often lingered at the shell house well into the evening, as he had
the previous spring. On one of those
evenings, he came out of the steam room wrapped in a towel and found the big,
gangly number five man from last year’s jayvee boat, Stub McMillin, pushing a
broom around and emptying trash cans.
Joe realized that McMillin must have taken a job as the shell house
janitor. With all the hard feelings
between the two boats, Joe had never had much to do with McMillin, but now,
watching him at work, he felt a surge of affinity for the boy. He sauntered over, stuck out his hand, struck
up a conversation, and finally confided what he had long kept secret from the
other fellows—that he himself worked a late-night shift as janitor at the
YMCA. Joe quickly found that he liked
Stub McMillin a good deal. He’d grown up
in Seattle, on Queen Anne Hill, and was nearly as poor as Joe. He was putting himself through college by
working at anything and everything that came his way—mowing lawns, delivering
newspapers, sweeping floors. When he
wasn’t rowing, studying, or sleeping, he was working, and just barely keeping
himself clothed and fed doing it. Joe
found it comfortable to be around McMillin. He felt as if he could let his
guard down a little when it came to talking about his own financial
circumstances. Before long, Joe was
staying late almost every day, pushing broom alongside McMillin, helping him
get through his work quickly so he could go home and study. pp. 218-129
84. Joe and Pocock, (boys need mothers): Sometimes. Late in the day, instead of helping
McMillin, Joe would climb the stairs at the back of the shell house and see if
George Pocock had time for a chat. If
the Englishman was still working, Joe would perch on a bench, his long legs
bent in front of him, and just watch the Englishman, not saying much, studying
the way the boat builder shaped the wood. If Pocock was done for the day, Joe
would help him put tools and lumber away or sweep the sawdust and wood shaving
from the floor for him. Pocock didn’t
deliver any more long discourses on wood or rowing or life, as he had the first
time they’d talked. Instead he seemed
interested in learning more about Joe.
One afternoon he asked Joe how he came to be there, at the shell
house. It was a big question asked in a
small way, Joe realized. He answered
hesitantly, cautiously, unused to unveiling himself. But Pocock persisted, gently and deftly
probing him about his family, about where he’d come from and where he hoped to
go. Joe talked in fits and starts, circling
nervously around stores about his mother and father and Thula, about Spokane
and the Gold and Ruby mine and Sequim.
Pocock asked him about his likes and dislikes, the things that made him
get up in the morning, the things he feared.
Slowly he zeroed in on what he most wanted to know: “Why do you
row?” “What do you hope to get out of
it, Joe?” And the more he enticed Joe to
talk, the more Pocock began to plumb the inner workings of this enigma of a
boy. It helped that Pocock’s own mother
had died six months after his birth. His
father’s second wife had died a few years later, before George’s
remembering. He knew something about growing
up in a motherless home, and about the hole it left in a boy’s heart. He knew about the ceaseless drive to make
oneself whole, and about the endless yearning.
Slowly he began to close in on the essence of Joe Rantz. p. 219
85. Building the team: Ulbrickson had
magical, almost alchemical, materials to work with—Tom Bolles’s outstanding
freshman champions from last year, now sophomores; the boys in Joe’s boat, all
juniors now and still undefeated; and some outstanding boys from last season’s
VJ boat, now a mix of juniors and seniors.
And the ruminations that Ulbrickson had given the matter in September
seemed to pay dividends right from the start.
He had devoted a lot of thought to his initial boat assignments, and in
the first few days of rowing two of the new crews seemed to show particular
promise. The first was built largely
around a core of last year’s freshmen: Don Hume, the big powerful stroke; Gordy
Adam at number seven; William Seaman at number six; and Johnny White at number
four. The only member of Joe’s old crew
in that first boat was Shorty Hunt, at number two. The second boat that showed particular
promise had three of Joe’s old crewmates: Bob Green at number six, Charles
Hartman at Number two , and Roger Morris in the bow. But Joe Rantz hadn’t made either of those
boats. For the next few weeks, he bumped
back and forth between two other boats, rowing hard but his spirits starting to
flag again as he realized just how stiff the competition was going to be this
year. It wasn’t just the boat
assignments that ate at Joe that fall, or the growing realization that getting
to Berlin was going to be harder than anything he had ever done. Like most competitive rowers, he was drawn to
difficult things. A good challenge had
always interested him, appealing to him.
That was, in many ways, why he rowed.
pp. 220-221
86. Cold Workouts: Al Ulbrickson sent his four potential varsity
boats out onto Lake Washington nonetheless.
This was serious cold-weather rowing.
The boys rowed with white knuckles and chattering teeth, their hands so
cold they could hardly feel the oars, their feet throbbing with pain. Icicles dangled from the bow, the stern, and
the riggers that held the oarlocks.
Layer upon layer of clear, hard ice grew on the shafts of the oars
themselves as they dipped in and out of the water, weighing them down. Lumps of ice formed wherever water splashed
on the boys’ sweatshirts and the stocking hats they wore pulled down over their
ears. p. 223
87. The death of Charlie McDonald: Joe had
been struggling with his rowing for weeks, especially since Thula had died. Then he got a letter from Sequim. Charlie McDonald was dead too, killed in an
automobile crash on Highway 101. It was
a stunning blow. Charlie had been an
adviser and a teacher, the one adult who had stood by him and given him a
chance when no one else had. Now he was
gone, and Joe found himself unable to focus on anything other than the losses
back home. p. 224
88. Pocock on Rhythm – Swing (Ch. 13): When you get the rhythm in an eight, it’s
pure pleasure to be in it. It’s not hard
work when the rhythm comes—that “swing” as they call it. I’ve heard men shriek out with delight when
that swing came in an eight; it’s a thing they’ll never forget as long as they
live. P. 229
89. Team Building: When Joe reported to the shell house that
Monday and glanced at the chalkboard, he was surprised to find that his name
was listed among those in the number one varsity boat, as were Shorty Hunt’s
and Roger Morris’s. After rowing in the
number three and four shells all fall, Joe couldn’t fathom why he had suddenly
been promoted. As it turned out, it
wasn’t really much of a promotion.
Ulbrickson had partially reconstituted some of the old boat assignments
from 1935, purely on a temporary basis.
He wanted to spend the first few weeks working on fundamentals. “As a
general rule,” he said, “men are in more receptive mood for pointers when
working with familiar teammates.” As
soon as they started rowing at a racing beat, though, he would bust the
boatings up and it would once again be every man for himself. The boat assignments really didn’t amount to
a hill of beans for now. p. 229
90. Bobby Moch: At least one thing was obvious, though. If a Washington boat did go on to ply the
waters of the Langer See in Berlin later that year, Bobby Moch was going to be
sitting in the stern with a megaphone strapped to his face. At five foot seven and 119 pounds, Mock was
almost the perfect size for a coxswain.
George Pocock, in fact, designed his shells to perform optimally with a
120-pount coxswain. Even less weight was
generally desirable, but only provided that the man had the strength to steer
the boat. Like jockeys, coxswains often
went to extraordinary lengths to keep their weight down—they starved themselves,
they purged, they exercised compulsively, they spent long hours in the steam
room trying to sweat off an extra pound or two.
Sometime oarsmen who thought their cox was weighing them down took
matter into their own hands and locked their diminutive captain in the steam
room for a few hours. “Typical coxswain
abuse,” one Washington cox later said, laughing. In Bobby Moch’s case, staying small had never
been much of a problem. And at any rate,
even if he had carried an extra pound here or there, the roughly three pounds
devoted to his brain would have more than made up for it. . . . Bobby’s father,
Gaston—a Swiss watchmaker and jeweler—was not a large man. But he was a prominent member of the
citizenry, a proud member of the all-volunteer fire department, and was
celebrated for having driven the first automobile twelve mile from Aberdeen to
Montesano, a journey that he had accomplished in a jaw-dropping hour and a
half. When Bobby was five, a botched
operation on his appendix nearly killed him.
The recovery left him short, skinny, and sickly—affected with severe
asthma—throughout his grade-school years and beyond. Determined not to let his frailty and his
stature stand in his way, in high school he went out for every sport he could
think of, mastering none but playing all of them tenaciously. When he couldn’t make it onto the school
football team, he and other boys who weren’t large enough to make the cut
gathered on the vacant lot just down Broad Street from his home, playing
rough-and-tumble scrub football without benefit of helmets or pads. The smallest of the small boys on the lot,
Bobby was always chosen last, and though he spent much of each game with his
face planted in the dirt, he later credited the experience for much of his
subsequent success in life. “It doesn’t
matter how many times you get knocked down,” he told his daughter,
Marilynn. “What matters is how many
times you get up.” In his senior year in
high school, by sheer force of will, he lettered in—of all
things—basketball. And the three pounds
of gray matter he carried around in his skull served him well in the
classroom. He wound up at the top of his
class, honored as Montesano High’s class valedictorian in 1932. When he
enrolled at the University of Washington, he set his sights on coxing. As with everything else he attempted, he had
to fight tooth and nail to win a seat in the stern of one of Al Ulbrickson’s
boats. But once he was in that seat, his tenacity quickly made a believer out
of Al Ulbrickson. Like everyone else in the
shell house, Ulbrickson soon discovered that the only time Mock didn’t’ seem
entirely happy and comfortable in the coxswain’s seat was when he was in the
lead. As long as he could see another
boat out ahead of him, as long as he had something to overcome, someone to
beat, the boy was on fire. By 1935 Moch
wielded the megaphone in the JV boat that contended with Joe and the other
sophomores for varsity status that season.
He wasn’t a popular choice. He
had displaced a well-regarded boy his new crewmates had been rowing with for
two years, and they initially refused to give Moch the respect a coxswain
absolutely depends on. That just made
Moch push them harder. “That was a tough
year. I wasn’t liked at all,” he later
said. “I demanded they do better, so I
made a lot of enemies.” Moch drove those
boys like Simon Legree with a whip. He
had a deep baritone voice that was surprising in a man so small, and he used it
to good effect, bellowing out commands with absolute authority. But he was also canny enough to know when to
let up on the crew, when to flatter them, when to implore them, when to joke
around with them. Slowly he won his new
crewmates over. The bottom line was that
Moch was smart and he knew how to use his smarts. In fact, by the end of the1936 season he’d
have a Phi Beta Kappa key of his own to twirl on his finger, just like Al
Ulbrickson. pp. 231-233
91. Pocock to Joe – how to row in the stars: One exceptionally stormy afternoon in early
March, when the boy were lounging morosely about the shell house, George Pocock tapped Joe on the shoulder and
asked him to come up into the loft, He
had a few thoughts he wanted to share with him.
In the shop Pocock leaned over one side of a new shell and began to
apply varnish to its upturned hull. Joe pulled a sawhorse to the other side of
the shell and sat down on it, facing the older man. Pocock began by saying he’d been watching Joe
row for a while now, that he was a fine oarsman. He’d noted a few technical faults—that Joe
was braking his arms at the elbows a little too early in the stroke and not
catching the water as cleanly as he would if he keep this hands moving at the
same speed that the water was moving under the boat. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk
about. He told Joe that there were times
when he seemed to think he was the only fellow in the boat, as if it was up to
him to row the boat across the finish line all by himself. When a man rowed like that, he said, he was
bound to attack the water rather than to work with it, and worse, he was bound
not to let his crew help him row. He
suggested that Joe think of a well-rowed race as a symphony, and himself as
just one player in the orchestra. If one
fellow in an orchestra was playing out of tune, or playing at a different
tempo, the whole piece would naturally be ruined. That’s the way it was with rowing. What mattered more than how hard a man rowed
was how well everything he did in the boat harmonized with what the other fellows
were doing. And a man couldn’t harmonize
with his crewmates unless he opened his heart to them. He had to care about his crew. It wasn’t just the rowing but his crewmates
that he had to give himself up to, even if it meant getting his feelings
hurt. Pocock paused and looked up at
Joe. “If you don’t like some fellow in
the boat, Joe, you have to learn to like him.
It has to matter to you whether he wins the race, not just whether you do.” He told Joe to be careful not to miss his
chance. He reminded him that he’d
already learned to row past pain, past exhaustion, past the voice that told him
it couldn’t be done. That meant he had
an opportunity to do things most men would never have a chance to do. And he concluded with a remark that Joe would
never forget. “Joe, when you really
start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that
is far beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.
Sometime, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and
are rowing among the stars.” pp. 234-235
92. Singing: When he returned to the warm cave his father
had constructed, Joe toweled his hair dry, unpacked his banjo, and pulled a
chair up in front of the woodstove. He
gathered the kids around him. He tuned
the banjo carefully, fiddling with knobs and plucking at steel strings. Then he cleared his throat, cracked open a
big white smile, and began to sing. One
by one, the kids and Joyce and Harry all joined in. p. 237
93. The Boys in the Boat: By March 19, Al Ulbrickson figured he had
found his best bet for an Olympic boat.
He still had it pegged as the second boat on his chalkboard, but the
boys in it were beginning to edge the first boat consistently an Ulbrickson was
quietly putting his final selections into this boat. At bow he had Roger Morris. At number two, Chuck Day. At number three was one of Tom Bolles’s
freshmen from the previous year, Gordy Adam, the dairy-farm kid from up on the
Nooksack River near the Canadian border.
Gordy had attended a two-room country schoolhouse, then Mount Baker High
in the small town of Deming. Then he’d
spent five brutal months fishing for salmon on the Bering Sea, up in Alaska, to
put together enough money to start at the university. He was a quiet young man. So quiet that in the previous year’s race
against California he’d rowed the whole two miles with his thumb cut to the
bone and never mentioned it to anyone.
In honor of that Royal Brougham had begun to refer to him now a Gordy
“Courage” Adam. At number four Ulbrickson
had lithe, good-looking Johnny White.
Big, rangy Stub McMillin was at number five. Shorty Hunt was at number six. At number seven was another of Tom Bolles’s
former freshmen, Merton Hatch. At the
stroke position was a fourth member of last year’s freshman crew: poker-faced Don
Hume. It was an unusual move to put a
nineteen-year-old sophomore at the critical stroke position, but Hume had
proven so sensational as a freshman that many were already saying he might turn
out to be Washington’s best stroke since Ulbrickson himself had rowed at that
position, maybe even better. He hailed
from Anacortes, then a gritty lumber and fish-canning port fifty miles north of
Seattle. In high school he’d been the
consummate all-around athlete—a star in football, basketball, and track—and an
honor student. He was also an
accomplished pianist, a devotee of Fats Waller, and capable of pulling off
anything from swing tunes to Mendelssohn.
When he was down at a piano, he always drew a crowd. After the crash, his father lost his job at a
pulp mill and moved to Olympia in search of work. Don stayed behind in Anacorte, lodging with
family friends and eventually finding work in a lumber mill. Walking the cobbled beach on the channel
between Anacortes and Guemes Island one day, he came across and abandoned and
dilapidated thirteen-foot clinker-built rowboat. He refurbished it, took it down to the water,
and discovered that he loved rowing.
Loved it, in fact, more than anything he had ever done. For a year follow his graduation from high
school he rowed obsessively—up and down the channel on foggy days and on long
voyages out among the San Juan Islands on sunny days. When the job at the lumber mill gave out and
he decided to join his parents in Olympia, he rowed all the way there—a six-day
voyage that covered nearly a hundred miles of water. That fall he moved to Seattle, registered as geology
major at the university, and then made a beeline for the shell house, where Tom
Bolles and Al Ulbrickson quickly discovered that they had an extraordinary
athlete on their hands. Hume pulled a
smooth as silk, and with the precise, mechanical regularity of a
metronome. He seemed to have an innate,
deep –seated sense of rhythm. But more
than that, his mastery of his oar, his steady reliability, and his rock-solid
sureness were so apparent that every other boy in the boat could sense them
immediately and thus easily fall into synch with Hume regardless of water
conditions or the state of a race. He
was key. In the stern of Ulbrickson’s
star boat, wearing the megaphone was, inevitably, Bobby Mock. Joe was in the third boat. And it looked as if he’d be staying
there. So fare he hadn’t even made the
presumed JV boat, and so it looked as if he would not be rowing in the Cal race
or beyond. But then, on March 21, he
walked into the shell house and found his name on the chalkboard, sitting at
seat number seven in boat number two, the boat everyone was talking about as
the best bet for the varsity slot. He
couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know if
Pocock had talked to Ulbrickson or if Merton Hatch had simply messed up in some
spectacular way, or if Ulbrickson simply needed someone else at number seven
for the day. Whatever the reason, this
was his chance. pp. 238-239
94. Joe’s chance: Joe knew what he had to do, and he found
doing it surprisingly easy. From the
moment he stepped into the shell that afternoon, he felt at home. He liked these boys. He didn’t know Gordy Adam and Don Hume well,
but both made a point of welcoming him aboard.
His oldest, most reliable shell house friend, Roger Morris, sitting up
front in the bow, gave him a wave and shouted the length of the boat, “Hey, Joe,
I see you finally found the right boat!”
His buddies from Grand Coulee, Chuck Day and Jonny White, were sitting
up near the front too. As he strapped
his shoes to the footboard and began to lace his feet into the shoes, Stub
McMillin, his face alight, said, ”OK, this boat is going to fly now,
boys.” Shorty Hunt slapped him on the
back and whispered, “Got you back, Joe.” pp. 239-240
95. They fly: Joe rowed that day as he had never been able
to row before—as Pocock had told him to row, giving himself up to the crew’s
effort entirely, rowing as if he were an extension of the man in front of him
and the man behind him, following Hume’s stroke flawlessly, transmitting it back
to Shorty behind him in one continuous flow of
muscle and wood. It felt to Joe
like a transformation, as if some kind of magic had come over him. The nearest thing to it he could remember was
the night as a freshman when he had found himself out on Lake Union with the
lights of Seattle twinkling on the water and the breaths of his crewmates
synchronized with his in white plumes in the dark, cold air. Now, as he climbed out of the boat in the
twilight, he realized that the transformation wasn’t so much that he was trying
to do what Pocock had said as that this was a bunch of boys with whom he could do it. He just trusted them. In the end, it was that simple. Ulbrickson wrote in the logbook, “Changed
Rantz and Hatch and it helped a lot.”
That turned out to be an understatement on considerable magnitude. It was the last change Ulbrickson had to
make. Over the next few days, the boat
began to fly, just a Stub McMillin had said it would. pp. 239-240
96. How to pick the best: There was a straightforward reason for what
was happening. The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by
punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had
issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely
determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble
origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had
grown up. Each in his own way, they had
all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their
strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were
greater then they. The challenges they
had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their
individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common
gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what
they had not been able to do before. p.
241
97. Delos Schoch: p. 245
98. Bobby’s secret: Then Bobby Moch began to make use of those
three pounds of brains. He did what was
counterintuitive but smart—what was manifestly hard to do but he knew was the
right thing to do. With his opponent out
in front of him, rowing in the midthirties, and maintaining a lead, he told
Hume to lower the stroke count. Hume dropped to twenty-nine. Almost immediately the boys in the Washington
boat found their swing. Don Hume set the
model, taking huge, smooth, deep pulls.
Joe and the rest of the boys fell in behind him. Very slowly, seat by seat, the Husky Clipper began to regain water on
the California Clipper. By the one-mile mark, the two boats were even
and Washington was starting to edge out ahead.
p. 247
98A. Pocock on Championship caliber of 1936 U.
S. team (Ch. 14): To be of
championship caliber, a crew must have total confidence in each other, able to
drive with abandon, confident that no man will get the full weight of the pull.
. . . The 1936 crew, with Hume at stroke, rowed with abandon, beautifully
timed. Having complete confidence in one
another they would bound on the stroke with one powerful cut; then ghost
forward to the next stroke with the boat running true and hardly a perceptible
slowdown. They were a classic example
of eight-oar rowing at its very best. p.
251
99. Academic disaster: But on May 18, the
shadow of academic disaster fell over the crew.
Ulbrickson learned that despite the break, four of his varsity boys still
had incompletes and were just days away from being declared ineligible. He was
furious. Back in January he had warned
the boys, “We can’t tarry with scholastic laggards . . . any who fall behind
are just out, that’s all.” Now he
dragged Chuck Day, Stub McMillin, Don Hume, and Shorty Hunt into his office,
slammed the door shut, and gave them hell.
“You can be the best individual oarsmen in the country, but you will be
of no service or use to this squad unless you whip up your class efforts. . . .
That means study!” Ulbrickson was still
fuming as the boys trooped out of the office.
Everything was suddenly at risk.
The worst of all was that while most of them just had to turn in some
overdue work, Don Hume had to flat out ace a final examination to remain
eligible. If there was one boy
Ulbrickson couldn’t afford to lose, it was Don Hume. p. 253
100. Friendship at last: The boys, though, were having the times of
their lives. On or off the water, they
were almost always together now. They
ate together, studied together, and played together. Most of them had joined the Varsity Boat Club
and lived in the club’s rented house on Seventeenth Avenue, a block north of
the campus, though Joe remained in the basement of the YMCA. On weekend evening the gathered around the
old upright piano in the club’s parlor and sang for hours as Don Hume tore
through jazz tunes, show tunes, blues, and ragtime. Sometimes Roger Morris pulled out his
saxophone and joined in. Sometimes
Johnny White got out his violin and played along fiddle-style. And almost always Joe got out his banjo or
his guitar and joined in as well. Nobody
laughed at him anymore; nobody dreamed of laughing at him. pp. 253-254
101. Grades up: Don Hume aced his exam. The others finished their incompletes. p. 254
102. Rowing in the stars: Late on the night
of the final time trial, after the wind had died down and the waters had
calmed, they had begun to row back up the river, in the dark, side by side with
the freshman and JV boats. Soon the red
and green running lights of the coaches’ launch disappeared upriver. The shells passed under two bridges draped
with shimmering necklaces of amber lights.
Along the shore and upon the palisades, warm yellow light poured from
the windows of homes and shell houses.
It was a moonless night. The
water was ink black. Bobby Moch set the
varsity boys to rowing at a leisurely twenty-two or twenty-three. Joe and his crewmates chatted softly with the
boys in the other two boats. But they
soon found that they had pulled out ahead without meaning to, just pulling soft
and steady. Soon, in fact, they had
pulled so far ahead that they could not even hear the boys in the other
boats. And then, one by one, they
realized that they couldn’t hear anything at all except for the gentle murmur
of their blades dipping into and out of the water. They were rowing in utter darkness now. They were alone together in a realm of
silence and darkness. Years later, as
old men, they all remembered the moment.
Bobby Moch recalled, “You couldn’t hear anything except of the oars
going in the water . . . it’d be a ‘zep’ and that’s all you could hear . . .
the oarlocks didn’t even rattle on the release.” They were rowing perfectly, fluidly,
mindlessly. They were rowing as if on
another plane, as if in a black void among the stars, just as Pocock had said
they might. And it was beautiful. p. 259
103. F.D.R.’s house: Most of the walls were lined from the floor
to the high celling with shelves of books.
Any spot on the walls not taken up by books were covered with pictures
of American presidents and various Roosevelts.
An ornate fireplace dominated the end of the room where they were
seated. In front of the fireplace was a
fifteen-foot-long library table stacked with new editions of books on every
conceivable topic. Nearly every other
table in the room had a vase of fresh flowers or a porcelain figurine on it. Shorty Hunt, starting to relax, settled into
a comfortable upholstered chair near the fireplace, and then nearly jumped out
of it when Frank told him it was the president’s favorite, and that he
occasionally delivered his famous fireside chats on the radio from that very
chair. p. 263
104. The national championship race ends: Then, in the last two hundred yards, thinking
itself fell away, and pain suddenly came shrieking back into the boat, descending
on all of them at once, searing their legs, their arms, their shoulders,
clawing at the backs, tearing at their hearts and lungs as they desperately
gulped at the air. And in those last two
hundred yards, in an extraordinary burst of speed, rowing at forty stokes per
minute, pounding the water into a froth, Washington passed California. With each stroke the boys took their rivals
down by the length of another seat. By
the time the two boats crossed the line, in the last vestiges of twilight, a
glimmer of open water showed between the stern of the Husky Clipper and the bow of the California Clipper. p. 271
105. Coach coaching: Al Ulbrickson went
down to the water and followed the boys back upriver to the shell house in his
launch. As they rowed upstream in the warm
summer dark, Ulbrickson saw that they were pulling flawlessly, with the
exceptional grace and precision that was quickly becoming their norm. He grabbed a megaphone and bellowed over the
wet growling of the boat’s engine. “Now that’s it! Why didn’t you row like that in the
race?” The boys glanced at one another,
grinning nervously. Nobody quite knew
whether he was kidding or not. p. 272
106. Pocock on swing = success = 4th
dimension (Ch. 15): Therein lies the secret of successful crews: Their
“swing,” that fourth dimension of rowing, which can only be appreciated by an
oarsman who has rowed in a swinging crew, where the run is uncanny and the work
of propelling the shell a delight. P.
275
107. Coach gets them to believe in each other:
As the Washington boys retreated to the Princeton Inn that night, anxiety
cascaded down on them again. Al
Ulbrickson once more spent much of the evening going from room to room, sitting
on the ends of bunks, reassuring his boys, reminding them that they had in
effect won a sprint in the last two thousand meters at Poughkeepsie, telling
them what they already knew in their hearts but needed to hear one more
time—that they could beat any crew in America, at any distance, including
California. All they had to do, he told them, was to continue to believe in one
another. pp. 278-279
108. Ready to go: The Washington boys were bare chested, having
stripped off their jerseys just before climbing into their boat. They sat now with their oars in the water
ready for the first hard pull, each staring straight ahead at the neck of the
man in front of him, trying to breathe slow and easy, settling their hearts and
minds into the boat. Bobby Moch reached
under his seat and touched Tom Bolles’s lucky fedora, a few extra ounces of
weight in exchange for a lot of luck. p.
280
109. Rowing right (The Olympic Trials): The Husky
Clipper remained stuck on California’s tail. The boys continued to row at
thirty-four. But what a thirty-four it
was. Don Hume on the port side and Joe
Rantz on the starboard were setting the pace with long, slow, sweet, fluid
strokes, and the boys on each side were falling in behind them flawlessly. From the banks of Lake Carnegie, the boys,
their oars, and the Husky Clipper
looked like a single thing, gracefully and powerfully coiling and uncoiling
itself, propelling itself forward over the surface of the water. Eight bare backs swung forward and backward
in perfect unison. Eight white blades
swung forward and backward in perfect unison.
Eight white blades dipped in and out of the mirror like water at
precisely the same instant. Each time
the blades entered the lake, they disappeared almost without a splash or
ripple. Each time the blades rose from
it, the boat ghosted forward without check or hesitation. Just before the fifteen-hundred-meter mark,
Bobby Mock leaned into Don Hume and shouted, “Here’s California! Here’s where we take California!” Hume knocked the stroke rate up just a bit,
to thirty-six, and Washington swiftly walked past Cal seat by seat. They began to creep up on Penn’s stern. Penn’s stroke man, Lloyd Saxton, watching the
bow of the Husky Clipper coming up
behind him, raised his beat to a killing forty-one. But as Penn’s strokes grew more frequent,
they began inevitably to grow shorter.
Glancing at the “Puddles” Washington’s blades left behind in the water,
Saxton was shocked at the distance between them. “They were spacing five feet to our three. It was unbelievable,” he said after the
race. Washington pulled abreast of
Penn. But Bobby Moch still hadn’t really
turned the boys loose. Coming inside
five hundred meters, he finally did so.
He barked at Hume to pick up the tempo.
The rate surged to thirty-nine and then immediately to forty. For five or six strokes, the bows of the two
boats contested for the lead, back and forth like the heads of racehorses coming
down the stretch. Finally Washington’s
bow swung decisively out in front by a few feet. From there on, it was, as Gordy Adam would
later say, “duck soup.” With four
hundred meters to go, Washington simply blew past the exhausted boys from Penn,
like an express train passing the morning milk train, swinging into the last
few hundred meters with extraordinary grace and power. The last twenty strokes, Shorty Hunt wrote
his parent the next day, were “the best I ever felt in any boat.” At the finish they were a full length ahead
and still widening the lead. As they
crossed the line, Bobby Moch, defying the laws of physics and common sense, suddenly
stood bolt upright in the stern of his twenty-four-inch-wide shell,
triumphantly thrusting one first into the air. p. 282
110. How they won, a Coach’s praise: Al Ulbrickson also made a few, much briefer,
remarks to the press. When asked how he
accounted for his varsity’s success this year, he went straight t the heart of
the matter” “Every man in the boat had absolute confidence in every one of his
mates. . . . Why they won cannot be attributed to individuals, not even to
stroke Don Hume. Heartfelt cooperation
all spring was responsible for the victory.”
Ulbrickson was no poet. That was
Pocock’s territory. But the comment was
as close as he could come to capturing what was in his heart. He must have known, with a kind of certitude
that he felt in his gut, that he finally had in his grasp what had eluded him
for years. Everything had converged; the
right oarsmen, with the right attitudes, the right personalities, the right
skills; a perfect boat, sleek, balanced, and wickedly fast: a winning strategy
at both long and short distances; a coxswain with the guts and smarts to make
hard decisions and make them fast. It
all added up to more than he could really put into words, maybe more than even a poet could—something
beyond the sum of it parts, something mysterious and ineffable and gorgeous to
behold. And he knew whom to thank for
much of it. Walking back to the
Princeton Inn that evening with George Pocock, the two men holding their suit
coats over their shoulders in the warm, humid twilight, Ulbrickson stopped
suddenly, turned abruptly to Pocock, and extending his right hand. “Thanks, George, for your help,” he
said. Pocock later remembered the
moment: “Coming from Al,” he mused, “That was the equivalent of fireworks and a
brass band.” pp. 283-284
111. New York’s diversity: They made their way through the throng,
fascinated by the thousand voices of New York—Italian-speaking mothers and
Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican boys, Yiddish-speaking grandfathers and
Polish-speaking girls, giddy children calling out to one another in dozens of tongues
and all varieties of English, their voices tinged with the inflections of the
Bronx and Brooklyn and New Jersey. p.
287
112. Exploring New York: As they explored
New York, they began to come, one by one, to a new realization about how things
stood for them. In Time Square one
afternoon, a tall, somewhat heavy man rushed up to Shorty, took a good look,
and said, “You’re Shorty Hunt!’ He
looked at the other boys. “You fellows
are the Washington crew, aren’t’ you?”
When they assured him they were, he gushed that he had recognized Shorty
from a picture in the newspaper. He was
a former Columbia oarsman himself, he said, and after watching their recent
exploits he had decided to send his son west for college so he too might become
a great crewman. It was the first time
any of them really began to understand that they were now America’s crew, not
the University of Washington’s—that the W on their jerseys was about to be
replaced with “USA.” For Joe, the moment
of epiphany came on the eighty-sixth floor of the new Empire State
Building. None of the boys had ever
ridden an elevator more than a few floors in a hotel, and the rapid ascent both
thrilled and frightened them. “Ears popped,
eyes bulged,” Shorty Hunt wrote home breathlessly that night. Joe had never flown in an airplane, never
seen a city from any higher vantage point than that afforded by his own
six-foot-three frame. Now, standing on
the observation deck, he looked out at the many spires of New York rising
through a pall of smoke and steam and heat haze and did not know whether he
found it beautiful or frightening. He
learned over the low stone parapet and peered down at miniature cars and buses
and swarms of tiny people scurrying along the streets. The city below him, Joe realized,
murmured. The cacophony of honking horns
and wailing sirens and rumbling streetcars that had assaulted his ears at
street level were reduced up here to something gentler and more soothing, like
the sonorous breathing of an enormous living thing. It was much bigger, more connected, world
than he had ever thought possible. He
dropped a nickel in a telescope for a better view of the Brooklyn Bridge, then
swept across Lower Manhattan and out to the distant Statue of Liberty. In a few days, he would be sailing under her
on his way to a place where as he understood it, liberty was not a given, where
it seemed to be under some kind of assault.
The realization that was settling on all the boys settled on Joe. They were now representative of something
much larger than themselves—a way of life, a shared set of values. Liberty was perhaps the most fundamental of
those values. But the things that held
them together—trust in each other, mutual respect, humility, fair play,
watching out for one another—those were also part of what American meant to all
of them. And right along with a passion
for liberty, those were the things they were about to take to Berlin and lay
before the world when they took to the water at Grunau. pp. 288-289
113. Heat Wave: By July 9, New York City was baking in the
greatest heat wave in American history.
For a moth, unheard-of temperatures had been searing the West and
Midwest. Even the terrible summer of
1934 hadn’t been this bad. Now the dome
of heat extended from coast to coast and far north into Canada. Three thousand Americans would die of the
heat that week, forty of them in New York City.
p. 290
114. Pocock on muscle, hearts and minds as one
(Ch 16): Good thoughts have much to do with good rowing. It isn’t enough for the muscles of a crew to
work in unison; their hearts and minds must also be as one. p. 297
115. Pocock on harmony of heart and head (Ch.
17): To see a winning crew in action is to witness a perfect harmony in
which everything is right. . . . That is the formula for endurance and success:
rowing with the heart and head as well as physical strength. P. 321
116. They come together: Yet even as they fretted and fumed, something
else was quietly at work among Ulbrickson’s boys. As they began to see traces of tension and
nervousness in one another, they began instinctively to draw close
together. They took to huddling on the
float before and after workouts, talking about what, precisely, they could do
to make each row better than the one before, looking one another in the eye,
speaking earnestly. Joking and horseplay
fell by the wayside. They began to grow
serious in a way they had never been before.
Each of them knew that a defining moment in his life was nearly at hand;
none wanted to waste it. And none wanted
to waste it for the others. All along
Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to
the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of the sport,
and he still tended to row erratically.
But what Joe didn’t yet knew—what he wouldn’t, in fact, fully realize
until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men—was that
every boy in the boat felt exactly the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply
lucky to be rowing in the boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious
greatness of the other boys, and that he might fail the others at any
moment. Every one of them was fiercely
determined not to let that happen.
Slowly, in those last few days, the boys—each in his own way—centered
and clamed themselves. Huddled on the
dock, they draped arms over one another’s shoulders and talked through their
race plan, speaking softly but with more assurance, accelerating their advance
along the rough road from boyhood to manhood.
They quoted Pocock to one another.
Roger and Joe took walks along the shores of the Langer See, skipping
stones, clearing their minds, Johnny White took some time to lie shirtless in
the sun on the lawn in front of Haus West, working on a tan to complement his
Pepsodent –white smile but also thinking through how he was going to row,
Shorty Hunt wrote long letters home, purging his anxiety by leaving it behind
on pieces of paper. And finally the boat
beneath them began to come to life again.
Rowing twice a day, they began to release what was latent in their
bodies and to find their swing.
Everything began to fell right again, so long as Don Hume was in at
stroke. And Hume seemed to be key. As soon as Hume returned, the tentativeness,
awkwardness, and uncertainty they had felt when Ulbrickson had taken him out
evaporated. George Pocock had seen the
difference at a glance. They were
back. All they needed now, Pocock told
them on August 10, was a little competition.
The next day a British reporter watching them warned readers back home
that the boys for the Leander Club might just meet their match in the American
crew: The Washington University [sic] eight is the finest eight here, and it is
as perfect as a crew can be.” pp.
326-327
117. Preliminary Race – Victory: Still, the
British bow remained out in front of the American bow with 150 meters to
go. But the American boys had found
their swing and they were holding on to it.
They were rowing as hard as they had ever rowed, taking huge sweeping
cuts at the water, over and over again, rocking into the beat as if they were
forged together, approaching forty strokes per minute. Every muscle, tendon, and ligament in their
bodies was burning with pain, but they were rowing beyond pain, rowing in
perfect, flawless harmony. Nothing was
going to stop them. In the last twenty
strokes, and particularly in the final twelve gorgeous strokes, they simply
powered past the British boat, decisively and unambiguously, The twenty-five thousand international fans
in the stands—a good portion of them Americans—rose and cheered them as their
bow knifed across the line a full twenty feet ahead of the British shell. A moment later, Don Hume pitched forward and
collapsed across his oar. It took Moch a
full minute of splashing water on Hume’s face before he was able to sit upright
again and help paddle the shell over to the float. When they got there, though, the boys got
sweet news. Their time, 6:00.8, was a
new course record. And, sweeter yet, it
was a new world and Olympic record, eclipsing California’s 1928 time of
6:03.02. When Al Ulbrickson arrived on the float, he crouched down next to the
boat and, with a cryptic smile, quietly said, “Well done boys.” Joe had never heard his coach speak in quite
that tone of voice. There seemed to be a
hint of hushed respect in it. Almost
deference. pp. 331-332
118. Nazi terror: But there was a Germany the boys could not
see, a Germany that was hidden from them, either by design or by time. It wasn’t just that the signs—“Fur Juden
verboten,” “Juden sind hier unerwunscht”—had been removed, or that the Gypsies
had been rounded up and taken away, or that the vicious Sturmer newspaper had been withdrawn from the racks in the tobacco shops
in Kopenick. There were larger, darker,
more enveloping secrets all around them.
They knew nothing of the tendrils of blood that had billowed in the
waters of the river Spree and the Langer See in June of 1933, when SA storm
troopers rounded up hundreds of Kopenick’s Jews, Social Democrats, and Catholic
and tortured ninety-one of them to death—beating some until their kidneys
ruptured or the skin split open, and then pouring hot tar into their wounds
before dumping the mutilated bodies into the town’s tranquil waterways. They could not see the sprawling Sachsenhausen
concentration camp under construction that summer just north of Berlin, where
before long more than two hundred thousand Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Gypsies, and eventually Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians,
and Czech university students would be held, and where tens of thousands of
them would die. And there was much more
just over the horizon of time. They
could see the sprawling yellow clinker-brick complex of the AEG Kabelwerk
factory just outside town, but they could not see the thousands of slave laborers
that would soon be put to work there, manufacturing electric cables, laboring twelve
hour a day, living in squalid camps nearby until they died of typhus or
malnutrition, When the boys walked past
the pretty synagogue at 8 Freiheit, or “Freedom,” street, they could not see
the mob with torches that would loot it and burn it to the ground on the night
of November 9, 1938—Kristalnacht. If
they peered into Richard Hirschhahn’s clothing shop, they might have seen
Richard and his wife, Hedwig, at work on sewing machines in the back of the shop
as their daughters—eighteen-year-old Evan and nine-year-old Ruth—waited on
customers up front. The Hirschhahns were
Jewish, members of the congregation on Freiheit street, and they were deeply
concerned about how things were going in Germany. But Richard had fought and been wounded in
the Great War, and he did not think any harm would come to him or his family in
the long run. “I’ve bled for Germany. Germany won’t let me down,” he like to tell
his wife and daughters. Still, Hedwig
had returned recently from a trip to Wisconsin, and the Hirschhahns had begun
to think about trying to move there.
They had, in fact, some American friends staying with them in Koopenick
that week, in town to see the Olympics.
The boys might have peeked into the shop and seen all of them, but what
they couldn’t have seen was the night when the SS men would come for Ruth, the
littlest of them. Ruth they would take
to her death first, because she had asthma and was too weak to work. The rest of the family they would leave in
Kopenick to work as slaves—Eva in Siemens munition factory, her parents in a
sweatshop, manufacturing German military uniforms—until it was time to come
back for them too, in March 1943. Then
the SS men would put Richard and Hedwig on a train to Auschwitz. Eva would evade them, escape into Berlin,
hide there, and miraculously survive the war.
But she would be the only one, the rarest of exceptions. Like the Hirschhahns, many of the Kopenickers
the boys passed on the street that afternoon were doomed: people who waited on
the boys in shops, old women strolling around the castle grounds, mothers
pushing baby carriages on cobblestone streets, children shrieking gleefully on
playgrounds, old men walking dogs—loved and loving and destined for cattle cars
and death. pp. 333-334
119. Sperm whale oil advantage: George Pocock, meanwhile, began applying a
coat of sperm whale oil to the underside of the Husky Clipper. p. 337
120. Why eight-oared race is #1: As the final and most prestigious event of
the day—the eight-oared race—grew near, the crowd began to grow noisy once
more. This was the rowing even that
nations boasted about more than any other, the ultimate test of young men’s
ability to pull together, the greatest display of power, grace, and guts on
water. p. 338
121. Pocock on the champion’s reserve of power –
Ch. 18: Men as fit as you, when your
everyday strength is gone, can draw on a mysterious reservoir of power far
greater. Then it is that you can reach
for the stars. That is the way champions
are made.
122. The final, the Olympic, victory: Two
seats in front of him, Bobby Mock was still desperately trying to figure out
what to do. Hume still wasn’t
responding, and as they approached the twelve-hundred-meter mark, the situation
was becoming critical. The only option
Mock had left, the only thing he could think of, was to hand the stroke off to
Joe. It would be a dangerous
move—unheard of really—more likely than not to confuse everyone with an oar in
his hand, to throw the rhythm of the boat into utter chaos. But Moch had lost his ability to regulate the
pace of his boat, and that spelled certain doom. If he could get Joe to set the rhythm, maybe
Hume would sense the change and pick it up.
At any rate, he had to do something, and he had to do it now. As Moch leaned forward to tell Joe to set the
stroke and raise the rate, Don Hume’s head snapped up, his eyes popped open, he
clamped his mouth shut, and then looked Bobby Moch straight in the eyes. Moch, started, locked eyes with him and
yelled, “Pick’er up! Pick’er up!” Hume
picked up the pace. Moch yelled again,
“One length to make up—six hundred meters!”
The boys leaned into their oars.
The stroke rate jumped to thirty-six, the thirty-seven. By the time the field charged past the
fifteen-hundred-meter mark, the Husky
Clipper had eased from fifth to third place. On the shell house balcony, down the course,
Al Ulbrickson’s hopes silently soared when he saw the boat move, but the move
seemed to peter out with the boys still well short of the lead. With five hundred meters to go, there were
still nearly a full length behind Germany and Italy, over in lanes one and
two. The Swiss and the Hungarians were
fading badly The British were coming
back, but once again Ran Laurie, with his narrow-bladed oar, was having a
difficult time getting enough of a catch to help power his shell through the
wind and waves. Moch commanded Hume to
take the beat up another notch. Across
the way, Wilhelm Mahlow, the cox in the German boat, told Gerd Vols, his stroke
the same thing. Thirty-year-old Cesare
Milani in the Italian boat shouted the same directive to his stroke, Enrico
Garzelli. Italy crept a few feet farther
ahead of the field. As the Langer See
narrowed down into the home stretch, the Husky
Clipper at last entered water that was more sheltered from the wind,
protected on both sides by tall trees and buildings. The game was on now. Bobby Moch eased the rudder back parallel
with the hull of the boat and the Clipper
finally began to run free. With the
playing field more even, and Don Hume back among the living, the boys suddenly
started to move again at 350 meters, reeling the leaders in seat by seat. With 300 meters to go, the bow of the
American boat pulled roughly even with the German and Italian bows. Approaching the final 200 meters, the boys
pulled ahead by a third of a length. A
ripple of apprehension shuddered through the crowd. Bobby Moch glanced up at the huge
black-and-white “Ziel” sign at the finish.
He began to calculate just what he needed to get out of the boys to make
sure he got there ahead of the boats off to his left, it was time to start
lying. Mock barked, “Twenty more
strokes!” He started counting them down,
“Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen fifteen . . . Twenty, nineteen . .
.” Each time he hit fifteen he reset back
to twenty. In a daze, believing they
were finally bearing down on the line, the boys threw their long bodies into
each stroe, rowing furiously, flawlessly, and with uncanny elegance. Their oars smoothly , efficiently, the
shell’s whale-oil-slick hull ghosting forward between pulls, its sharp cedar
prow slicing through dark water, boat and men forged together, bounding
fiercely forward like a living thing.
The they rowed into a world of confusion. They were in full-sprint mode, ratcheting the
stroke rate up toward forty, when they hit a wall of sound. They were suddenly right up alongside the
enormous wooden bleachers on the north side of the course, not more than ten
feet from thousands of spectators screaming in unison, “Deutsch-land!
Deutsch-land!” Deutsch-land!” The sound
of it cascaded down on them, reverberated from one shore to the other, and
utterly drowned out Bobby Moch’s voice.
Even Don Hume, sitting just eighteen inches in front of him, couldn’t
make out what Mock was shouting. The
noise assaulted them, bewildered them.
Across the way, the Italian boat began another surge. So did the German boat, both rowing at over
forty now. Both clawed their way back to
even with the American boat. Bobby Moch
saw them and screamed into Hume’s face, “Higher! Higher! Give her all you’ve got!” Nobody could hear him. Stub McMillin didn’t know what was happening,
but he didn’t like whatever it was. He
flung the F word into the wind. Joe
didn’t know what was happening either, except that he hurt as he’d never hurt
in a boat before—hot knives slipped into the sinews of his arms and legs and
sliced across his broad back with each stroke; every desperate breath seared
his lungs. He fixed his eyes on the back
of Hume’s neck and focused his mine on the simple, cruel necessity of taking
the next stroke. On the balcony of Haus
West, Hitler dropped his binoculars to his side. He continued to rock back and forth with the
chanting of the crowd, rubbing his right knee each time he leaned forward. Goebels held his hands over his head
applauding wildly. Goring began thumping
Werner von Bomberg’s back. On the balcony
next door, Al Ulbrickson, the Deadpan Kid, stood motionless, expressionless, a
cigarette in his mouth. He fully
expected to see Don Hume pitch forward over his oar at any moment. NBC’s Bill Slater was screaming over KOMO’s
airwaves in Seattle. Harry and Joyce and
the kids couldn’t make out what was happening, but they were all on their
feet. They thought maybe the boys were
ahead. Moch glanced left, saw the German
and Italian boats surging again, and knew that somehow the boys had to go even
higher, give even more than they were giving, even as he knew they were already
giving everything they had. He could see
it in their faces—in Joe's contorted grimace, in Don Hume’s wide-open,
astonished eyes, eyes that seemed to stare past him into some unfathomable
void. He grabbed the wooden knockers on
the tiller lines and began to bang them against the ironbark knocker-boards
fastened to either side of the hull.
Even if the boys couldn’t hear it, maybe they could feel the
vibrations. They did. And immediately
understood it for what it was—a signal that they needed to do what was
impossible, to go even higher. Somewhere,
deep down inside, each of them grasped at shreds of will and strength they did
not know they possessed. Their hearts
were pumping at nearly two hundred beats per minute now. They were utterly beyond exhaustion, beyond
what their bodies should be able to endure.
The slightest miscue by any one of them would mean catching a crab, and
catastrophe. In the gray gloom below the
grandstands full of screaming faces, their white blades flickered in and out of
the water. It was neck and neck
now. On the balcony, Al Ulbrickson bit
the cigarette in his mouth in half, spat it out, jumped onto a chair, and began
to bellow at Moch: “Now! Now! Now!” Somewhere a voice squealed hysterically on
a loudspeaker, “Italien! Deutschland! Italien! Achh . . . Amerika! Italien!” The three boats stormed toward the finish
line, the lead going back and forth.
Moch pounded on the ironwood as hard and as fast as he could, the snap-snap-snap of the firing almost like
a machine gun in the stern of the boat.
Hume took the beat higher and higher until the boys hit forty-five. They had never rowed this high before—never
even conceived of it as possible. They edged
narrowly ahead, but the Italians began to close again. The Germans were right beside them. “Deutsch-land! Deutsch-land! Deutsch-land!”
Thundered in the boys’ ears. Bobby Moch
sat astride the stern, hunched forward, pounding the wood, screaming words no
one could hear. The boys took on last
mighty stroke and hurled the boat across the line. In a span of a single second, the German,
Italian, and American boats all crossed the line. On the balcony Hitler raised a clenched fist
shoulder high. Goebbels leapt up and
down. Hermann Goring slapped his knee
again, a maniacal grin on his face. In
the American boat, Don Hume bowed his head as if in prayer. In the German boat, Gerd Vols toppled
backward into the lap of the number seven man, Herbert Schmidt, who had raised
a triumphant fist high over his head. In
the Italian boat, somebody leaned forward and vomited overboard. The crowd continued to roar, “Deutsch-land!
Deutsch-land! Deutsch-land!” Nobody knew
who had won. The American boat drifted
on down the lake, beyond the grandstands, into a quieter world, the boys
leaning over their oars, gasping for breath, their faces still shattered by
pain. Shorty Hunt realized he couldn’t
get his eyes to track. Someone
whispered, “Who won?” Roger Morris
croaked, “Well . . . we did . . . I think.”
Finally the loudspeakers crackled back to life with the official results. The bow of the American boat had touched the
line at 6:25.4, six-tenths of a second ahead of the Italian boat, exactly a
second ahead of the German boat. The
chanting of the crowd faded suddenly, as if turned off by a spigot. On the balcony of Haus West, Hitler turned
and strode back into the building, unspeaking.
Goebbels and Goring and the rest of the Nazi officials scurried in
behind him. In the American boat, it
took a moment for the boys to understand the German announcement. But when they did, their grimaces of pain
turned suddenly to broad white smiles, smiles that decades later would flicker
across old newsreels, illuminating the greatest moment of their lives. pp. 348-351
123. Pocock on the crew as a whole (Ch. 19): Where is the spiritual value of rowing? . . .
The losing of self entirely to the cooperative effort of the crew as a whole.
p. 353
124. Ulbrickson on his crew: This time Ulbrickson found his voice. They were, he said unambiguously, “the finest
I ever saw seated in a shell. And I’ve
seen some corking boatloads.” p. 354
125. What Joe realized at last: Immediately after the race, even as he sat
gasping for air in the Husky Clipper
while it drifted down the Langer See beyond the finish line, an expansive sense
of calm had enveloped him. In the last
desperate few hundred meters of the race, in the searing pain and bewildering
noise of hat final furious sprint, there had come a singular moment when Joe
realized with startling clarity that there was nothing more he could do to win
the race, beyond what he was already doing.
Except for one thing. He could
finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely without reservation that he and the
boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they
need to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it. He had known in that instant that there could
be no hesitating, no shred of indecision.
He had had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were
throwing himself off of a cliff into a void, with unquestioned faith that the
others would be there to save him from catching the whole weight of the shell
on his blade. And he had done it. Over and Over, forty-four times per minute,
he had hurled himself blindly into his future, not just believing but knowing
that the other boys would be there for him, all of them moment by precious
moment. In the white-hot emotional
furnace of those final meters at Grunau, Joe and the boys had finally forged the
prize they had sought all season, the prize Joe had sought nearly all his
life. Now he felt whole, He was ready to
go home. p. 355
126. Pocock on the things that last (Epilogue): Harmony,
balance and rhythm. They’re the three
things that stay with you your whole life.
Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out
in life, he can fight it, he can handle life.
That’s what he gets from rowing.
p. 357
127. The cost of victory: Poughkeepsie [national championship] was the
last race for Roger Morris, Shorty Hunt, and Joe Rantz. By Royal Brougham’s calculations, done that
night on a bar napkin, in four years of college rowing, each of them had rowed
approximately 4,344 miles, far enough to take him from Seattle to Japan. Along the way, each had taken roughly 469,000
strokes with his oar, all in preparation for only 28 miles of actual collegiate
racing. In those four years, and over
the course of those 28 miles, the three of them—Joe, Shorty, and Roger—had
never once been defeated. p. 359
128. Last years in cedar wood: In his later years, after he retired from
Boeing, Joe immersed himself in his old passion of working with cedar. He hiked deep into the northwest woods,
climbed up steep mountain inclines, and scrambled over jumbles of fallen trees,
hauling with him a chainsaw, a peavey, a splitting maul, and assorted iron
wedges jammed into his pockets, in search of salvageable wood. He wrestle the logs down from the mountains
and brought them back to his workshop where he crafted them by hand into shakes
and posts and rails and other useful items, and established a small and
successful business fulfilling order for his cedar products. As he moved into his ninth decade, his
daughter Judy, and occasionally other family members, went along with him to
lend a hand, and to watch out for him.
pp. 361-362
129. The heralds of Hitler’s doom: Standing there, watching them, it occurred to
me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear
of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five years ago, he
saw, but did not recognize, heralds of his doom
He could not have known that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like
them, boys who shared their essential natures—decent and unassuming, not
privileged or favored by anything particular, just loyal, committed, and
perseverant—would return to Germany dressed in olive drab, hunting him
down. p. 368
Index
America:
America’s Crew – 112, America – 112, Shared Values – 112
Arête:
40, 42, 96, 109, 110, 117
Art: The
Goal – 36, 45, 53, Artist at work – 56, Joe like art – 61, Poetry in motion –
62, 82, 128
Bears:
23
Beauty:
11, 16, 53, 61, 82
The
Boat: The boys that make it – 42, The team – 95, 110, 123, Trust the boat –
125, Quality of the 1936 U. S. Crew – 97A
The
Boys: 42, Stub McMillin – 59, Joe’s beauty – 61, Jonny White, all American Boy
– 74, Jonny White – 75, Jonny White, his father and his boat – 76, Chuck Day,
competition – 77, Stub McMillin – 83, Bobby Moch- 90, Bobby Moch’s Brain,
Determination, Chosen last for boyhood teams, School Work, Leadership -
90, Gordy Adam – 93, Don Hume - 93
Books:
55, 103
Boat
Building: Who built it? – 15, 16, Building the shell – 56, 82
Campfire:
78
Champion’s
reserve of power: 121
Charlie
McDonald: 28, 53, Dead – 87
Character:
42, 69
Climate
Change: 49, 71, 113
Coaching:
5, 6, 10, 31, 38, 81, 85, 91, 96, 105, Tom Bolles – 108, 107, 117, 124
Competition:
77
Coxswain:
67, 90
Crested
Wheat Grass: Search for – 49
Deceit:
122
Delos:
97
Depression:
3, 24, 26, 50, 51, 74, 93
Difference:
All rowing jobs different – 39
Diversity:
68, 68
Doing
Hard Things Makes You Strong: Doing your best – 15, 28, 37
Dust
Bowl: 33, 49, 65
East – v
– west: 47
Eight
Oared Race, #1: 120
Endurance:
31
Failure:
Unacceptable – 59
Faith:
125
Father:
8
Flying:
95
Freedom:
64
Friendship:
83, Necessary – 91, 100, 116
Giving
more than you have: 122
George
Pocock: 15, 81, Helping Joe – 82, Speaks to Joe – 84, Pocock to Joe – 91, Thanks
to him – 110
George
Pocock’s Wise Sayings: Pocock on the Beauty of the Sport (Prolog) – 1, Pocock
on unseen values (Ch 1) – 2, Pocock on the growing of trees (Ch. 2) – 7, Pocock
on coaching, teaching, learning (Ch 3) – 10, Georg Pocock on overcoming
resistance makes you stronger. (Ch. 4) – 22, Georg Pocock on endurance- no time
outs (Ch.5) – 31, Georg Pocock on his goal to be a first-class artisan (Ch. 6) –
35 Georg Pocock on rowing with the head (Ch. 7) – 45, Pocock on harmony between
shell and crew (Ch. 8) – 52, Pocock on harmony between shell and crew (Ch. 8) –
57, Pocock on free – it’s got to be (Ch. 10) – 64, Pocock on what an oar’s man
feels (Ch. 11) – 70, Pocock—Be part of the boat (Ch. 12) – 79, Pocock on Rhythm
– Swing (Ch. 13) – 88, Pocock on Championship caliber of 1936 U. S. team (Ch.
14) – 98A, Pocock on swing = success = 4th dimension (Ch. 15)106, Pocock on muscle, hearts and minds as one (Ch
16) – 114, Pocock on harmony of heart and head (Ch. 17) – 115, Pocock on the
champion’s reserve of power – Ch. 18 – 121, Pocock on the crew as a whole (Ch.
19) – 123, Pocock on the things that last (Epilogue) - 126
Golf on
a Log: 20
Gymnastics:
29
Hard
times: 50
Hard Work:
To build strength – 76, In the cold – 86
Hard
Things: Problems make you strong – 22, Good for You – 67, Work (cleansing) –
73, 85
Harmony:
52, 91, Harmony, balance, and rhythm – 126
History:
Depression – 3, Depression – 24, Depression – 26, Dust Bowl – 33, Climate change
– 35, Climate change – 49, Dust storm – 49, Depression – 50, Depression – 51,
Dust Bowl – 65, Passivism – 66, Climate change – 71, Depression – 75, New York
Diversity – 111, Climate Change – 113
Hitler’s
Doom: 129
Humility:
96, 116
Individuality:
60, Crew is not – 67, Good – 68
Joe
Rantz: Gets up – 25, Grows strong – 27, Joe’s Beauty – 61, Gets a job at Grand
Coulee – 72, Jackhammer job – 72, Joe’s job – 73, Joe’s chance – 94, Gives his
all – 125
Learning:
10
Liberty:
112
Luck:
108
Magic
Feelings: 70
Mother:
Boys need – 84
Muscles:
12
Nazi
Atrocities: 80, 118
Opportunities:
2, 9, Impediments – 42, Cedars no one wants – 53
Own Way:
25
Pain:
11, 12, 13, Joe knew how to hurt – 21, 44, 48, Pain = Beauty – 67, 104, Beyond
pain – 117, 122
Paradox:
Crew – 67
Passivism:
66
Price
Collapse: 24
Psychology:
68
Pulling
your weight: 57
Race
described: Described – 44, Freshman victory – 48, The end – 104, Victory over
Cal – 109, Victory over Briton – 117, Olympic victory – 122
Reading:
Pocock well read – 55
Record
Time: 117
Religion:
82
Resistance:
Overcoming – 22
Resources:
Using good – 51
Reserve
of Power: 63
Roosevelt:
Grand Coulee Dam – 51, His house – 103
Rowing:
12, 13, 17, 39, Key factors – 40, 64, Why? – 84, Why Joe Rowed – 85, Right – 109
Rhythm:
88
Scent:
30, 53
School
Work: 99, 101
Scouting:
2, Staff more important than Director – 39, Rowers like a Camp Staff – 39, Campfire
and wilderness adventure – 78, Singing – 91, Picking a Staff or crew – 96,
Singing – 100
Shirtless:
78, 108, 116
Singing –
92, 100
Smoking:
“Good” for you – 4
Socialism:
50
Sperm
Whale Oil: 119, 122
Sports:
53
Stars:
8, In the stars – 91, Among the stars – 91, 102, Race for the stars – 121
Strategy:
40, Misdirection – 43, 46, 98
Struggle:
Of life makes us strong – 82
Success:
106
Swing:
62, 63, 98
Synergy:
28
Teaching:
2, 9, 10, 53, Teacher – 87
Team
Building: 6, 14, 18, 34, Make up – 68, Make up – 69, 79, 81, 82, 85, 89, Trust
– 91, 110
Team
Work: 28, 41, 60, 62, 73, 82, Like a symphony – 91, The boat – 93, Team Work –
95, 96, 102, 110, 116
Tears of
Joy: 34
Technique:
Catching a Crab – 19, 20, 39, Balancing act – 40, 45, 67
Training:
Rules – 5, 54
Trees: 7,
28, 53, Rings – 82, 128
Tools:
56, 82
Trophies:
44
Ulbrickson:
5, Like Ahab – 58, 104, 123
Unseen
Force: 56
Values: Unseen
– 2, Unlikely places – 9, American values win the war – 129
Victory:
Winning – 46, Final Olympic – 122, The
cost – 127
Weak:
Leave – 14, 18, 21, 32, 37
Wood:
28, 53, Reading the wood – 53, 56, 82, 128
Work:
Working for money to pay for school – 53, To pay for college – 83, Earning
money for school – 93
Daniel
James Brown
The
Boys in the Boat
New
York
Penguin
Group
2014
Look for a seat with sufficient padding to ensure a comfortable experience during extended periods of sitting. A paddle boarding life jacket can also help alleviate fatigue.
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