water and fire
A ROWER TRACES A FRIENDSHIP ON THE CHARLES RIV-
GAIL CALDWELL
Because she had no winter work-out ( besides erging , which she loathed ), and because I wanted to be on the water as well as in it , my closest friend and I decided to swap sports . I would give her swimming lessons , and she would teach me how to row . Mine was the better deal — Caroline already had a passable front crawl — but she was a natural teacher ; she also , she later confessed , wanted to see me flip . It was the summer of 1997 , and we were staying in a vast old farmhouse in Chocorua , N . H ., a few hundred yards from a mile-long , pristine lake , where we had hauled her Van Dusen single for the month of August . We had the lake mostly to ourselves that year . Each morning and some evenings we would leave behind the dogs , staring dolefully out the huge front windows , and walk down to the lake together , where I would swim the perimeter and she would row . She was the dragon fly and I was the frog , and I ’ d stop every so often to watch her flight : back and forth for six certain miles , hushed and swift and as mesmerizingly precise as a metronome . We shared the intimate competitive spirit that belongs to sisters , or adolescent girls , and so we each longed for whatever prowess the other possessed .
I flipped that first day , of course , pleasing Caroline greatly and thrilling ( if humbling ) me , because first I had managed the seven or eight strokes on flat water that can change a life . So began a mutual passion for single sculling that would span the next several years , with Caroline playing the amused mentor to my half-crazed acolyte . Back on the Charles , where she had been rowing for more than a decade , I was promptly demoted to a wherry , then the obligatory training shells that promise stability and therefore progress . I would fuss and blunder my way downstream from Community Rowing while she rowed up from Riverside to meet me , smiling and nodding as I railed about choppy water or my own shortcomings , surreptitiously checking her watch . I ’ d make her row a hundred yards so I could watch her form , then follow along in loyal imitation so that she might critique mine . We compared blisters in April and callouses in May and power-boat encounters all through the summer ; staring bleakly from the dock of my boathouse during a high wind , I ’ d call her from my cell phone for encouragement or , perversely , for permission not to row : We both had what we referred to as our inner Marine , a cruel taskmaster that needed feeding daily . She always went out earlier than I , and would send unpunctuated email nudges at 8 a . m .: “ hurry up the water is glass .” Both home from the river , we held routine phone debriefings . “ I ’ ve been thinking about aerodynamics ,” I would say , with a noviate ’ s solemnity . “ Can we talk about why the boat wants to move through
WHO SAID THE COURSE WAS A STRAIGHT ONE ?
FORTY-SECOND HEAD OF THE CHARLES REGATTA21