The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation), page 5
Often now he would take his dinner with the McDonald family, which was better than eating in solitude, sitting at one end of the large table where his family used to gather for boisterous dinners. But at the end of the day, he was always alone, back in the big, empty, half-finished house. Sometimes he plinked at the keys of his mother’s old piano and floated simple melodies through the dark, empty spaces of the house as the lights powered by the water wheel flickered on and off. Other times he sat on the front steps and played his banjo and sang quietly to himself late into the night.
There was one bright spot in Joe’s lonely life. Joyce Simdars had returned from Montana. Joe often invited her to the Chicken Coop, Sequim’s most popular dance hall, but she was rarely allowed to go, and only when her mother could accompany her. In many ways, Joyce’s heavily supervised life could not have been more different from Joe’s completely independent one. While her father worked outside tirelessly, her mother assigned her endless chores inside. She was always washing dishes, scrubbing floors, and wiping windows, even though she detested housework. She would much rather be outside, working in the vegetable garden or tending to the animals with her father. She liked how farmwork often involved solving practical problems or making something new. She loved to take things apart and see how they worked. That appealed to her intellectual curiosity. She was already a great student, interested in everything from photography to Latin to logic.
Joyce and Joe at the beach.
Although she understood that Joe’s life had been hard and lonely, to Joyce, he seemed the very embodiment of freedom. She saw in him a window to a wider, sunnier world. He made his own rules, played his silly songs, and wandered in the woods at will, finding food or things he could use. But best of all, he seemed to care for her just as she was—to Joe there was no “good Joyce” or “bad Joyce,” just “Joyce,” and that was enough. Many girls, she knew, would turn away from a boy as poor as Joe. But not her. She decided that someday she would make up for the way the world had so far treated Joe Rantz.
In the summer of 1931, Joe received a letter from his older brother, Fred, now a chemistry teacher at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. Fred wanted Joe to come live with him and his family and complete his senior year of high school at Roosevelt. If he did well at Roosevelt, Fred said, Joe just might be able to get into the University of Washington. Joe was wary. After nearly two years of struggle, he was finally beginning to get his feet under himself, to make it on his own. He did not want to leave Joyce either. But the prospect of studying at a great high school, and possibly moving on to the university, was just too exciting to pass up. He boarded up the farmhouse, promised Joyce he’d be back at the end of the school year, and moved in with Fred.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, he found himself with three square meals a day and little to do except attend school and explore his interests. He excelled in the classroom and quickly worked his way onto the dean’s honor roll. He sang and performed in plays and made music. He signed up for the men’s gymnastics team and proved to be a standout on the rings, the high bar, and the parallel bars.
One spring day in 1932, as he was practicing 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
HEAD COACH, CREW
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT
Joe pondered the card for a moment, then walked to his locker and put it in his wallet. It couldn’t hurt to give it a try. Rowing couldn’t be any harder than cutting cottonwoods.
9
Part of a Single Thing
After graduating with honors from Roosevelt High School, Joe returned to Sequim as he’d promised Joyce. He planned to work for a year to scrape together enough money for a year’s rent and books and tuition. First he got a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, laying asphalt for the new Olympic Highway at fifty cents an hour. The money was decent, but the work was brutal. For eight hours a day, working under a hot summer sun, he shoveled steaming asphalt out of trucks and raked it out flat in advance of the steamrollers. On weekends he dug irrigation ditches and cut hay for local farmers. That winter he went back to cutting down cottonwoods with Charlie McDonald. All of the work was hard, but there was a saving grace. Joyce was in her last year of high school, and when she got off the bus each day, she would rush through the woods. Seventy years later, as an old woman, she would remember how when she hugged him he smelled of wet wood and the sweet wildness of the outdoors.
One radiant day in late April, he led her through a cottonwood grove to a small meadow on the bank of the Dungeness. Joe loved to find four-leaf clovers for Joyce. She was mystified at how easily he found them, but he always told her that it wasn’t a matter of luck at all. The trick was simply keeping your eyes open. “The only time you don’t find a four-leaf clover,” he liked to say, “is when you stop looking for one.” When he told her to sit and wait for a moment, she figured he was looking for one of those tokens of his affection. After a short while, shorter than usual, Joe returned.
“Found one,” he said, beaming.
He held out a closed fist, and she reached out to receive the clover. But as he slowly unfolded his hand, she saw that it held not a clover but a golden ring with a small but perfect diamond sparkling in the rare spring sunshine.
After she graduated, Joyce moved to Seattle to be near Joe and attend the university herself. She had no intention of living a life like her mother’s, where endless housework limited the horizons of her worldview. She wanted to live a life of the mind, and the university was her ticket to that life. Like Joe, she needed to work to stay in school, and despite her bright mind the only job available to her was the one she detested most: housework. After two weeks of unsuccessful interviews, she knocked on the door of a gaunt-looking elderly gentleman, a prominent local judge. There was a long, awkward silence as he stared at her after she’d stated her case. Finally he croaked, “Come back in the morning, and we’ll see if you fit in the last maid’s uniform.”
Joe and Joyce in Seattle.
The uniform fit, and with that Joyce had landed a job and a place to live. Now, on weekend evenings, when they both could get some time off, she and Joe could board a streetcar and go downtown to catch a movie. They danced at Club Victor on Friday nights, then attended college dances in the school’s gymnasium on Saturday nights. Joe longed to bring Joyce to the swank, fancy places downtown that many of her friends frequented. Those more expensive spots had glittering chandeliers and pink walls painted with tropical scenes and polished dance floors capable of holding five thousand people at a time. You could dress up in fancy clothes and dance all night to popular bands’ music at such places. It pained Joe that he couldn’t afford that kind of date, but Joyce swore she didn’t care. Sometimes for dates they just met at the student cafeteria, where they ate soda crackers and mixed ketchup with hot water and called it tomato soup.
On the afternoon of November 28, the last practice day of the fall term, the freshmen took one final, frigid workout. When the last boat had returned to the shell house, Coach Bolles told the boys to stick around. He said that it was time to announce who had made the first and second boats. Then he ducked into Al Ulbrickson’s office.
The boys glanced at one another. Most of those who had kept rowing through the fall were working-class boys like Joe and Roger. Through the steamy windowpanes of the glassed-in office they could see the two coaches hunched over a desk in their flannel suits, studying a piece of paper. Now that the rainy season had begun, the shell house reeked sourly of sweat and damp socks and mildew. The wind shook the massive sliding door. As the two coaches lingered, the normally talkative boys turned uncomfortably silent. The only sound was a soft tapping. Up in the loft at the back of the room, Pocock was nailing together the frame for a new shell. Roger Morris drifted over and stood quietly next to Joe, toweling his hair dry.
Finally Coach Bolles emerged from the office and climbed up onto a bench, clutching the piece of paper. The boys shuffled into a semicircle around him.
He began by saying that this selection was not final. All of them could continue to compete for the seats he was about to announce. Nobody should get all swell headed just because he heard his name called out now. Nobody should think he was a sure thing. There wasn’t any such animal. Then he began to read off the names on the list. He moved first through the assignments for the second boat.
When Coach Bolles finished, Joe glanced at Roger. His friend was staring morosely down at the floor. Neither of them had been called. Then Coach Bolles began calling out the first-boat assignments: “Bow seat, Roger Morris. Number two seat, Shorty Hunt. Number three seat, Joe Rantz.” As Bolles continued, Joe clenched his fist at his side and gave it a subtle little pump. Next to him, Roger began to exhale softly.
As the rest of the boys headed for the showers, those selected for the first boat took a shell barge off its rack, hoisted it over their heads, and marched it down to the darkening lake for a celebratory row. A light but cutting wind ruffled the water. As the sun set, they began to row westward, seeking the calmer waters of Lake Union.
The temperature had fallen into the upper thirties, and it felt even colder on the water. Joe hardly noticed. As the boat slipped onto the surface of Lake Union, the noise of city traffic fell away, and he entered into a world completely silent except for the rhythmic barking of the coxswain, calling out their pace from the stern. Joe’s seat slid methodically and silently back and forth on the greased runners beneath him. His arms and legs pulled and pushed smoothly, almost easily. When the white blade of his oar entered the black water, it did not splash. It just murmured.
At the north end of the lake, the coxswain called out, “Way . . . nuff!” The boys stopped rowing. The shell glided to a stop, the long oars trailing in the water alongside them. The boys sat without talking, breathing heavily, exhaling plumes of white breath in the darkness. Even now that they had stopped rowing, their breathing was synchronized, and for a brief, fragile moment it seemed to Joe as if all of them were part of a single thing, something alive with breath and spirit of its own. Joe gulped huge drafts of the frigid air and sat staring at the city lights in the distance—the amber lights of downtown, the ruby-red lights of radio towers, the green lights on docks along the shore. He watched the scene turn into a soft blur of colors as tears filled his eyes. For the first time since his family had left him, Joe began to cry.
He turned his face to the water, fiddling with his oarlock 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.
The boys had caught their breaths, and they were talking softly, not joking for a change, not horsing around. Then the coxswain called out, “Ready all!” Joe turned and faced the rear of the boat, slid his seat forward, sank the white blade of his oar into the oil-black water, tensed his muscles, and waited for the coxswain’s next command, the one that would propel him forward into the darkness, and his future.
The coxswain called out again, “Row!”
10
A Broken Machine
In January, after a trip back to Sequim for Christmas break, Joe and Joyce returned to Seattle. When crew practice started up on January 8, Joe and the seventeen other boys in the first and second freshman boats learned that they could now abandon the shell barges and step for the first time into proper racing shells, the sleek and lovely cedar crafts built by George Pocock.
They also learned that what had seemed a brutal workout schedule in the fall was merely a whisper of what the coaches had in mind for them now. In the next few months, they were told, they would race mostly against one another and the upperclassmen on the team. Joe’s spot was not guaranteed. Nobody’s was. The boys would continue to fight for the top eight seats. In mid-April just one boatload of freshmen would face their primary rival, the University of California at Berkeley, right here on Lake Washington. If they prevailed in that race—and only if they did so—they would likely earn a chance to compete against the elite eastern schools for the national freshman championship in June. The whole season would come down to just two major races.
In his six years as freshman coach, Tom Bolles had never coached a crew that had lost a race to California, or anyone else, on Lake Washington. Bolles didn’t intend for this bunch to be the first. But they had some catching up to do. The boys at Cal had been rowing since late August, and racing against each other in real shells since late October, when Joe and the boys had only begun trying out the shell barges. From now until race day, Bolles told his boys, they would row six days a week.
It was a cold, wet winter in Seattle. Day after day it rained, but day after day they rowed anyway. They rowed through cutting wind, bitter sleet, and occasional snow, well into the dark of night. 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. It was nearly as wet above the surface of the lake as below. Through it all, Bolles followed them back and forth across Lake Washington, riding through the slop and chop in the open cockpit of his brass-trimmed, mahogany-planked motorboat, 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 began to give up, climbing wearily back up the hill after practice and refusing to come back for more. While all the boys in Joe’s boat stuck it out, the easy camaraderie they felt the first time they went out together in November quickly evaporated. Anxiety, self-doubt, and bickering replaced that first night’s good feelings. Bolles scrutinized them, trying to figure out who to keep in the first boat and who to demote. By mid-spring he found himself struggling daily with the freshmen. “They seem to be getting slower every day,” he complained.
One of the fundamental challenges in rowing is that when any one member of a crew goes into a slump, the entire crew goes with him. Each of the rowers has a slightly different role, depending on his position in the boat, and each of these roles is critical. The oarsman sitting in the first seat, nearest the bow, has to be strong, but more than anything he has to be technically sound. One wrong move and he can disrupt the course, speed, and stability of the boat. The same is true to a lesser extent of the rowers in the two and three seats. The four, five, and six seats, often called “the engine room” of the crew, have to be the biggest and strongest rowers. The rower in the seventh seat has to be nearly as strong as those in the engine room but also alert, constantly aware of and in tune with what is happening in the rest of the boat. The “stroke oar,” who sits in the eighth seat, faces the coxswain. Theoretically, the stroke rows at the rate and with the degree of power called for by the coxswain. He is supposed to do what he is told. But in the end it is the stroke who controls these things. Everyone else in the boat follows the stroke. 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 it forward.
This machine can break down easily. A lack of concentration on one person’s part can impact the performance of the whole boat. To keep themselves focused, the freshman crew in Joe’s boat had come up with a mantra that their coxswain, George Morry, chanted as they rowed. Morry shouted, “M-I-B, M-I-B, M-I-B!” over and over to the rhythm of their stroke. The letters stood for “mind in boat.” The chant was meant as a reminder that from the time an oarsman steps into a racing shell until the moment the boat crosses the finish line, he must keep his mind focused on what is happening inside the boat. His whole world must shrink down to that small space.
Unfortunately, no amount of chanting could break the freshmen’s slump, so Bolles had to wonder if there were weak links in that chain. One potential weak link seemed to be Joe Rantz. Coach Bolles had tried moving Joe back and forth between the number three seat and number seven, but with no effect. The problem looked to be technical. From the beginning of tryouts, Bolles had not been able to get Joe to “square up” consistently. To square up, a rower has to rotate his oar so that the blade is perpendicular to the surface just before he inserts it into the water on the catch, the beginning of each stroke. If the angle is wrong, the rower cannot produce enough power, and the whole boat suffers a loss of speed. Squaring up requires strong wrists, and Joe just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. Beyond that, his stroke was generally eccentric. He rowed powerfully but decidedly in his own way, and his own way looked to be largely ineffective.
