The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation), page 10
Each night he climbed up the hill to a place called Shack Town, where he had found a cheap room to rent in a long rickety shed-like building. The building had no indoor plumbing and only enough electricity to supply one bare lightbulb that hung overhead. Each of the gravel streets in Shack Town had a shower house, but Joe soon found that taking a shower was not a comfortable experience. Hordes of black widow spiders lurked in the rafters above the showers, and they tended to drop on the men below as soon as the water was turned on. After watching a few of his neighbors leap out of the shower yelping and batting at themselves, Joe finally took to carrying a broom into the shower each evening to clear the rafters of eight-legged invaders before he turned the water on.
For the first couple of weeks, Joe kept mostly to himself after work and dinner, sitting in the dark, playing his banjo. Then he discovered that there were two boys from the Washington shell house working at the dam as well. He didn’t know either of them very well, but that was about to change. Johnny White had sat in the number two seat in Coach Bolles’s outstanding freshman boat. He was an inch shorter than Joe and more slightly built, with all-American good looks. He was also nearly as poor as Joe Rantz. He graduated from high school at sixteen, then spent the next two years working in a shipyard and a sawmill, saving cash and building brawn. Now he’d arrived at Grand Coulee looking to make more money and build more muscle.
The other Washington boy at Grand Coulee was Chuck Day. He was pure muscle, broad in the shoulders, and his eyes could be cheerful one moment, flashing with rage the next. He wore glasses but managed to look tough doing it, and despite Ulbrickson’s rules, he almost always had a cigarette dangling from his lip. The previous year he had rowed in Bobby Moch’s boat. He and Joe had hardly ever exchanged two words, at least not civil words.
Now, though, the three boys fell into an easy and comfortable friendship. Without a word, they put aside the rivalries of the shell house, forgot about the insults. After their long, crushingly hard workweeks, they gathered on Saturday afternoons to escape the heat and watch movies at the Grand Coulee Theater. At night they wandered B Street, a three-block stretch of dirt and gravel lined on either side with card rooms and bars and pool halls and fleabag hotels and a Chinese restaurant, the Woo Dip Kitchen. Jazz and country music poured out of the bars and dance halls. The boys took it all in with wide eyes. None of them had ever seen anything quite like it, and they weren’t sure how to behave in this new world. They remembered Al Ulbrickson’s rules—no smoking, no drinking, no cussing—but there were many temptations. They drank some beer and played some pool and sang along with ragtag cowboy bands late into the night.
When they wanted to escape the noise of B Street, the boys sometimes traveled down the coulee to swim in Soap Lake. For the most part, though, they stayed in Grand Coulee, where they could toss a football around, hurl rocks off the edges of the cliffs, or sit around a campfire at night telling ghost stories as coyotes yelped in the distance. They were happy, free, and easy, cut loose in the wide expanse of the western desert, ignoring for now the contest that they all knew lay ahead the following year.
George Pocock at work in his shop.
18
The Parts That Really Matter
In mid-September, Joe returned from Grand Coulee with enough money to make it through another year. Joyce had abruptly left her job that summer, after the judge had taken an inappropriate interest in her and chased her around the dining table one afternoon. Luckily she found work with another family nearby. The new job started off on an uncertain note. On the first evening, the lady of the house, Mrs. Tellwright, asked her to make a difficult dish, duck à l’orange, for dinner. Joyce was horrified. She knew what a duck was and what an orange was but nothing about how to bring them together in a recipe. Mrs. Tellwright found Joyce’s effort to be pretty much inedible. Instead of firing her, though, she quietly pulled Joyce aside and suggested that the two of them take cooking classes together. They did, and that turned out to be the beginning of a long and happy friendship.
Joe resumed visiting his father at the bakery, and Harry mentioned again that he and Thula sometimes took trips by themselves, which meant Joe could visit his half siblings without worrying about Thula throwing him out of the house. The first time he and Joyce visited, though, they were shocked. They found that his father and Thula had been gone for three straight days, and the kids were hungry, almost entirely out of food. Harry Junior, the oldest at thirteen, said that his parents had packed a pressure cooker full of stewed beef, potatoes, and vegetables, taken a loaf of bread and some canned goods, and gone to Medical Lake in eastern Washington. He didn’t know when they might return. Joe and Joyce took the kids out for ice cream, then bought some basic provisions before dropping them back home. By the next day, when Joe drove by to check, Harry and Thula had returned. But he could not figure out what they’d been thinking.
Apparently this had been going on all summer long. Thula had begun to pursue her dream of becoming a violinist. That summer, she’d had an audition with a major violinist in Los Angeles, and a local radio station had aired a series of her live performances. Now she was bent on getting out of the house, celebrating, and enjoying her success.
Joe headed back to the shell house to get in shape for what was to come. Johnny White and Chuck Day showed up too, dusty and tanned from Grand Coulee. Coach Ulbrickson was back as well, and his desire for Olympic gold had only grown stronger over the summer. He told his wife in private that if he didn’t fetch gold in Berlin in 1936, he planned to quit coaching. To pull it off, though, he knew he had to find nine young men of exceptional strength, grace, endurance, and most of all mental toughness. They would have to row almost flawlessly in long races and short, under all kinds of conditions. They would have to live well together in close quarters for weeks at a time. They would have to perform on the most prominent stage in the sport, in full view of the whole world. He believed he had such boys somewhere at the shell house, but he had not identified them yet. To find that ideal crew, Ulbrickson had begun to turn to George Pocock for advice.
At some point that fall, as he talked to Pocock, the subject of Joe Rantz came up. Ulbrickson had been studying Joe for a year now, ever since Tom Bolles had told him about the boy. Since then, Ulbrickson had tried everything. He’d scolded Joe, encouraged him, demoted him, promoted him. But he wasn’t any closer to understanding the mystery of Joe Rantz. There were days when he rowed like quicksilver, so smooth and fluid and powerful that he seemed a part of the boat and his oar and the water all at once. But there were other days when he was downright lousy, when he seemed to row as if his mind was somewhere else, lost in his own little world. Now Ulbrickson asked Pocock to take a look at the boy. He wanted Pocock to talk to him, to try to figure him out, and, if possible, to fix him.
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 into the workshop occasionally. He asked if he’d like to look around. Joe was thrilled. Like Pocock, he loved working with wood, and he wanted desperately to see the shop. He all but bounded up the stairs.
The loft was bright and airy, with morning light pouring in from two 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. An eight-oared shell was under construction in the center of the room.
Pocock started off by explaining the various tools he used. He showed Joe his wood planes, 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 tools he’d brought over from England, some of which were a century old. He guided Joe to a lumber rack and pulled out samples of soft, malleable sugar pine, hard yellow spruce, fragrant cedar, and clear white ash.
Joe grew mesmerized. It wasn’t just what the Englishman was saying, it was the way he talked about the wood, as if it was holy and sacred. He told of how the trees had grown in all sorts of conditions, endured lightning strikes and windstorms and infestations. Pocock said the wood taught us about survival, about overcoming difficulty, but it also taught us about the reason for surviving in the first place. Something about infinite beauty, about things larger and greater than ourselves.
“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. The sheet would form the skin of a shell. Pocock flexed the wood and had Joe do the same. He talked about the underlying strength of the individual fibers in the wood. He said those separate fibers, knitted together in the wood, gave cedar its ability to bounce back and resume its shape or take on a new one. The ability to yield, to bend, to give way, Pocock said, was sometimes a source of strength in men as well as in wood.
Pocock stepped back and studied the shell he was building. To build a boat, he told Joe, you had to give yourself up to it spiritually. You had to surrender yourself absolutely to your work, leave a part of your heart in it. 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 nodded, but he was not at all certain that he did. He went back downstairs and resumed his sit-ups, trying to work it out.
Varsity practice did not begin officially until October 21. In the meantime, Joe and Joyce paddled canoes around the bay, window-shopped downtown, went to the movies, and stopped by his father’s house whenever Harry and Thula were away. When they could, they’d take Joe’s half siblings out for quick picnics on Green Lake, then rush the kids back home before Harry and Thula returned.
Joe spent much of his free time at the shell house, exercising and tossing a football around with Johnny White, Chuck Day, Roger Morris, and Shorty Hunt. He found another friend in Stub McMillin, the gangly number five man from the previous year’s JV boat. Joe would often linger at the shell house late into the evening, and one night he came out of the steam room to find Stub pushing a broom. When Joe realized Stub was working as the shell house janitor, he sauntered over and stuck out his hand. As they talked, Joe confided what he had long kept secret from the other boys. He told Stub that he was now a janitor too, working a late-night shift at the YMCA.
When varsity practice began, the previous season’s rivalries and hard feelings and insecurities erupted again. There was no fiery speech from Coach Ulbrickson this time. There was no need for it. Everyone knew exactly what the stakes were this year. Ulbrickson gathered all the boys on the ramp, straightened his tie, and announced that there would be no set boats. He was going to mix and match the boys until he found the ideal crew. Until then it was going to be every man for himself.
For the next few weeks, Joe bumped back and forth between the third and fourth boats. He was rowing hard, but his spirits were starting to flag. He missed the camaraderie that had grown among his classmates after two years of rowing together. He missed Shorty Hunt sitting behind him, whispering, “Don’t worry, Joe. I’ve got your back,” whenever Ulbrickson yelled at him. He missed gruff Roger Morris, who rarely said a word but was always there for him. Joe hadn’t really thought before about how much it mattered to him that those two fellows were in the boat with him. But it turned out that it did matter, a lot.
He had the same feeling every time he watched his Grand Coulee buddy Johnny White sweep by him in another boat, part of something else now, part of a crew of boys dead set on defeating him. When he was abandoned in Sequim, he promised himself he’d never depend on anyone else, not even on Joyce, for his happiness or his sense of who he was. Now he began to see that he’d allowed himself to do exactly that, with the usual painful results. He hadn’t expected it. He hadn’t prepared for it. And now the ground seemed to be shifting under him in an unpredictable way.
Then, just a few days into the season, the ground shifted again. Joe learned that Thula was dead, killed by an infection. He was numb. He didn’t know what to think or to feel. Although she’d abandoned him and turned him away, Thula had been the closest thing to a mother that he had known since he was three. There had been at least some good times back in Spokane when they had all sat together on the big swing in the backyard. Over the years he had wondered what he might have done to make things better between them. Now he would never know. Mostly, though, he worried about how his father, and even more his half siblings, would cope with the change.
The next morning Joe went by his father’s house. He found his father and the kids sitting at a picnic table on a soggy lawn. They talked for a while about Thula’s life. Joe told his father how sorry he was.
Finally Harry turned abruptly to Joe and said, “Son, I’ve got a plan. I’m going to build a house where we can all live together. As soon as it’s done, I want you to come home.”
Joe sat at the table staring at his father. He did not know what to make of the proposal. He did not know if he could trust the man. He stammered out a vague answer. They talked some more about Thula. Joe told the kids that he would be coming by more often to keep them company from now on. But he drove back to the YMCA that night not sure what to do. Slowly his confusion turned to anger, which gave way again to confusion and then anger again, all of it washing over him in waves.
Joe and Joyce with Joe’s half siblings.
19
A Truth to Come to Terms With
The rest of the fall season was grueling, as the boys rowed and raced in weather that had again turned unusually cold and stormy. Joe’s boat often finished third. He was struggling with his emotions, especially since Thula had died and his father had invited him to move home. Then he got a letter from Sequim. Charlie McDonald was dead too, killed in an automobile crash. Charlie had been an adviser and a teacher to Joe, the one adult who had stood by him when no one else had. Now he was gone, and Joe found himself unable to focus. His mind was almost never in the boat, and it showed in his rowing. But it didn’t seem to matter. As far as Joe could tell, no one in the coach’s motorboat was even paying attention to him anymore.
But in fact someone was watching him very closely. Joe had noticed that Pocock was riding along in the motorboat frequently these days, but he hadn’t noticed where Pocock had been training his binoculars.
When the boys returned to the shell house after Christmas break, Ulbrickson warned them that they “must be ready to take part in Washington’s greatest and most grueling crew season.” After months of talking about the Olympic year, it was finally here. On the first Monday of the new season, Joe was surprised to find his name listed among those in the number one varsity boat. He couldn’t fathom why he had suddenly been promoted. As it turned out, it wasn’t really much of a promotion. Ulbrickson planned to spend the first few weeks working on technique and fundamentals, and he believed the boys would be more receptive if they were rowing with familiar crewmates. So Joe was back with the boys from freshman year, including Shorty Hunt and Roger Morris.
Through January and into February, they rowed six days a week. They worked on individual weaknesses. When it wasn’t snowing, it was clear, bitter cold, and windy. Icicles dangled from the bow of the boat. They rowed anyway, with white knuckles and chattering teeth, some of them dressed in ragged sweat suits, some in shorts and stocking caps. Occasionally they staged short races against each other, and Joe’s boat kept coming in third. The third boat kept coming in first.
In general Ulbrickson was pleased. By late February he was starting to form some solid ideas about what his Olympic boat would look like. One choice was obvious. No matter what, Bobby Moch, the clever, fiery coxswain from the previous year’s JV crew, was going to be sitting in the stern. At five foot seven and 119 pounds, he was almost the perfect size for a coxswain. Pocock, in fact, designed his shells to perform best with a 120-pound coxswain.
Despite his small frame, a coxswain had to be strong enough to steer the boat. He had to know enough about the oarsmen inside, their individual strengths and weaknesses, to get the most out of each rower at any given moment. And he had to have the force of character to inspire exhausted rowers to try harder, even when all seemed lost. Bobby Moch had proven he could do all of this the previous year. He had a deep baritone voice that was surprising in a man so small, and he bellowed out commands with absolute authority. Most important, he was smart and he knew how to use his smarts.
Joe’s situation, on the other hand, was only getting worse. In late February he was dropped to the number two boat. On February 20, rowing hard and in a heavy snow and a steady east wind, the first two boats came in about even. Joe’s hopes rose. But a week later Ulbrickson moved him down to the number three boat.
One stormy afternoon in early March, after practice, George Pocock tapped Joe on the shoulder and asked him to come up into the loft again. Upstairs, 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 and sat down on it, facing the older man.
Pocock began by saying he’d been closely watching Joe row for a while now, that he was a fine oarsman. He’d noted a few technical faults, but that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. He said that there were times when Joe seemed to think he was the only one in the boat. He rowed as if it was up to him to row the boat across the finish line all by himself. When a man rowed like that, Pocock said, he was bound to attack the water rather than to work with it. Worse, he would not be able to let his crew help him row.
