The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation), page 6
Bolles yanked Joe out of the first boat one afternoon, and the boat slowed down. Perplexed, he put Joe back in, and Joe and the crew beat the second boat by a decisive margin. Bolles was flummoxed. Maybe the problem wasn’t in Rantz’s wrist. Maybe it was in his head.
Bolles didn’t know the answer, but for Joe, the brief incident was a sudden and cold reminder. He could easily lose his position on the crew. His place at the university was not secure either. Everything he had worked for could be over on any given afternoon.
11
The Makings of Something Exceptional
Joe continued to feel like everyone’s poor cousin. He still had to wear his ragged sweater to practice almost every day, and the boys still teased him continuously for it. “Hobo Joe,” they snickered. “You trying to catch moths with that thing?” One evening in the cafeteria, they found a new way to laugh at his expense. Joe had piled his plate high with meat loaf and potatoes and creamed corn. He attacked the food with his knife and fork, shoveling it into his mouth. The moment he had cleared his plate he turned to the boy next to him, asked him for his leftover meat loaf, and devoured it just as rapidly.
Over the noise of the cafeteria, he didn’t notice that someone had come up behind him. Nor did he hear the snickering. When he finally paused, he turned around to find half a dozen fellows from the shell house holding their dirty plates out to him, grins smeared across their faces. Joe paused, startled and humiliated, but then, with his ears growing red, he turned around, put his head down, and resumed eating. He was hungry nearly all the time, and he wasn’t about to walk away from perfectly good food because of a bunch of jerks in jerseys. He’d dug too many ditches, cut down too many cottonwoods, foraged in the cold, wet woods for too many berries and mushrooms.
By the end of March, the freshman slump appeared to be over, and Joe had secured his spot in the number three seat. On April 6, after a windy week had kept the boys off the water, Coach Ulbrickson decided to hold a race between all his crews, including the varsity, junior varsity, and freshmen boats, out on Lake Washington. He gave the JV crew a head start of three boat lengths because they’d been rowing so poorly. He told the freshman crew to end its race at the two-mile mark, the standard distance for freshman races. The varsity and junior varsity were to continue racing to the three-mile mark.
Ulbrickson lined the boats up and barked, “Ready all . . . row!” through his megaphone. Harvey Love, the varsity coxswain, was talking and missed the signal. The freshmen immediately leapt out a half boat length ahead of the older boys. For a mile the boats held their stroke rates and positions. The junior varsity was three boat lengths out in front. The freshmen were in second. The bow of the varsity boat was locked in place alongside the freshman boat’s number five seat. Then, slowly, the varsity’s bow fell back to the six seat, the seven seat, the stroke seat, and finally the coxswain’s seat. By the mile-and-a-half mark, the freshmen had opened a sliver of water between the rear of their boat and the varsity’s bow.
Rowing into the Montlake Cut.
Then they started to close on the junior varsity, despite their head start. Normally a crew would increase its pace to catch a boat in the lead, but so far the freshmen had not raised their stroke rate at all. A quarter mile remained in the race, and coxswain George Morry knew his crew had plenty left in the tank. Finally he told them to kick the stroke rate up a couple of notches. They surged past the junior varsity and into the overall lead. When they reached the two-mile mark, they were two full lengths ahead of both other boats. Morry shouted, “Way ’nuff,” and the freshmen pulled up, let their oars ride the water, and coasted to a stop. As the other two boats finally passed them, the freshman boys pumped their fists in the air.
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 that he had the makings of something exceptional in his boat. What he didn’t know was whether they were fast enough to beat California.
On the day of the Pacific Coast Regatta, Friday, April 13, the weather was near perfect. Joyce Simdars joined fourteen hundred other boisterous students dressed in purple and gold, the school’s colors, as they boarded a ferry to watch the competition from the water. The university’s marching band was already aboard. As the band played fight songs, the brass instruments blaring and the kettle drums rattling, Joyce settled on a bench on the foredeck, sipping coffee in the sun. She was looking forward to watching Joe. She had taken a rare afternoon off from her live-in job at the judge’s house. She needed the break. She detested the job. She had always loathed housework, but now she had to wear a ridiculous uniform and creep around the house as quietly as a dormouse, lest she disturb the judge. Now, sitting on the ferry, she was nervous for Joe, since she knew how much staying on the crew meant to him, but she was happy to be out of the house, out in the fresh air and bright sunlight. The band changed over to jazz tunes and students began to dance out on the main deck.
As the time for the races grew near, people on private docks, backyard decks, and grassy slopes all along the lakeshore spread out blankets, pulled lunches out of picnic hampers, and tested out their binoculars, ready to watch. Hundreds of boats began to form a semicircle around the finish line. Two thousand more fans clambered aboard an observation train. The sides of the train cars were open, so as the train ran parallel to the racecourse, the riders could watch the races from beginning to end. All told, nearly eighty thousand people had come out to watch the races. The university’s football stadium didn’t even hold that many fans.
The Washington and California freshman crews would go first, for a distance of two miles. Out on the lake, Joe sat in the number three seat; Roger Morris sat in the number seven seat. Both were nervous, as were all the boys. They had plenty of reason to be anxious. Warm as it was onshore, a moderately stiff north breeze had sprung up out in midlake, and they would be rowing directly into it. That would slow their time and perhaps cramp their style. In the next few minutes each of them would need to take more than three hundred strokes. And if one of them missed just one of those strokes and caught just one crab, the race would effectively be over, their season in ruins. Joe surveyed the crowd assembled along the shoreline. He wondered whether Joyce was half as nervous as he was.
At 3:00 p.m., the Washington freshmen paddled their shell parallel to California’s, did their best to settle their minds into the boat, and waited for the start signal. The bow of the boat drifted slightly to one side and George Morry, Washington’s coxswain, raised his right arm to signal that his boat was not quite ready to row.
The boys straightened the bow. The band on the ferryboat stopped playing. The students stopped dancing and crowded near the rails. Thousands along the shoreline raised binoculars to their eyes. The starter called out, “Ready all!” The Washington boys slid their seats forward, sank their white blades into the water, hunched over their oars, and stared straight ahead. George Morry lowered his right arm. Grover Clark, the Cal coxswain, did the same. The starter barked, “Row!”
California exploded off the line, rowing furiously and surging a quarter length ahead of Washington’s bow. Having seized the lead, Cal dropped its stroke rate. Washington was rowing even fewer strokes per minute, but held its position just behind Cal. 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 oarsman in front of him.
As they passed the quarter-mile mark, the two boats slowly came even. Then Washington began to overtake California, methodically, seat by seat. The Washington boys were still rowing at a remarkably low rate, but by the one-mile mark, they had open water on Cal. Their confidence surged. The pain in their arms and legs did not much bother them. They felt almost invulnerable.
In the Cal boat, Grover Clark screamed out, “Gimme ten big ones!”—the standard call in rowing for ten mammoth strokes, as hard and powerful as each oarsman can muster. But Washington remained out in front by two boat lengths. 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. Washington’s boys still had more. As they entered the last half mile, the headwind died down. Cheers began to rise from the semicircle of boats ahead, the beaches, and the train. The loudest of all rose from the ferryboat full of students. Ahead by four lengths, George Morry finally called for a higher stroke rate, and Washington sliced across the finish line four and a half lengths ahead of California, and almost twenty seconds ahead of the freshman course record.
Shrill horns and cheers resounded all along the shores of Lake Washington. The freshmen paddled over to the California boat. In a rowing race, the victorious crew traditionally had the right to collect the jerseys of their vanquished rivals. So Joe and the boys accepted the shirts off the Cal crew’s backs, shook their hands, and paddled off, exultant. The real celebration began when the boys were dropped off at the student ferry. Beaming, Joe bounded up the steps, searching for Joyce. At five foot four, she was hard to find in the surging crowd. Joyce had seen him, though. She worked her way through until she finally emerged before Joe. He promptly leaned over, wrapped her in a sweaty hug, and lifted her off her feet.
When the band began to play dance tunes again, Joe, barefoot in his jersey and shorts, took Joyce and twirled her once under his long, outstretched arms. Then they danced, careening around the deck, swinging, smiling, and laughing, giddy under a blue Seattle sky.
12
Almost Without Pain
Seven weeks later, on the evening of June 1, 1934, the University of Washington’s marching band and more than a thousand fans crammed into the ornate marble lobby of the King Street railroad station in Seattle. They cheered and sang fight songs as the freshman and varsity crews boarded a Great Northern train, the Empire Builder, on their way to the national championships in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Joe and the freshman boys were in particularly high spirits. Few of them had ever been outside of Washington; most had never been on a train. For the most part, they’d been brought up milking cows and swinging axes and stacking lumber. They knew the first names of half the people in the towns they came from. Yet here they were, about to cross the entire continent.
As he sat in his plush seat, looking out through the green-tinted train window, Joe could not quite believe the celebration spilling from the lobby out onto the platform. He’d never been celebrated for anything, and yet here he was, a part of something that people didn’t just admire but adored. It filled him with pride but also with a strained unease. It brought up the kinds of things he tried not to think about these days.
That evening, as the Empire Builder climbed over the Cascade Mountains and set out across the arid wheat country of eastern Washington, the boys played cards, told jokes, and raced up and down the aisles of the train, tossing a football. The next day, they filled balloons with water, positioned themselves on the clattering platforms between coaches, and hurled them at any available target—cows grazing in fields, dusty cars waiting at clanging railroad crossings, sleeping dogs sprawled on platforms in small-town stations. Each time they hit a target they sang the fight song “Bow Down to Washington” as they rumbled past their astonished victims.
Later Joe pulled out his guitar and tuned it. He’d been nervous about bringing it along, but the mood was right, and he felt close to his teammates now. He began to strum chords and sing, launching into the camp tunes and cowboy songs he’d played in high school.
At first the boys just stared at him. Then they began to glance at one another, then to snicker, and finally to hoot and holler. “Lookee there at Cowboy Joe!” one shouted. Another called down the aisle, “Hey, boys, come and hear Rantz, the rowing troubadour!” Joe looked up, startled, and stopped playing. Red faced but with his jaw set and his eyes stone cold, he quickly fumbled the guitar back into its case and walked to a different part of the train.
Few things could have been more hurtful for Joe. His music had brightened the bleakest days of his boyhood. It had drawn people to him in high school, made him friends, and even helped him earn a few dollars in Sequim. Thanks to music, he’d gotten to know Joyce. Music was his special talent, a particular point of pride. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, it had turned on him. Just when he was beginning to feel part of something larger than himself, he felt cast out again.
The first athletic competition of any kind between two American colleges was a rowing race pitting Harvard against Yale in 1852. As the years passed, rowing became more popular, and other eastern colleges launched crew programs. In 1895, the Intercollegiate Rowing Association held its first regatta at Poughkeepsie, on a straight four-mile stretch of the Hudson River. Soon, the regatta came to be seen as the most prestigious crew race in the country, the equivalent of a national championship, and it was immensely popular with fans. In 1929, as many as 125,000 people came out to watch it in person. Millions more listened to the radio coverage. The regatta rivaled the Kentucky Derby, the Rose Bowl, and the World Series as a major national sporting event.
For most of the first quarter of the century, the eastern colleges thoroughly dominated the races in Poughkeepsie. By the 1920s, the western crews from Washington and California had begun to claim occasional victories over powerhouses like Cornell and Syracuse. Still, for the thousands of wealthy easterners who sailed their yachts up the Hudson to watch the regatta each June, it remained a natural assumption that the East would once again resume its proper place atop the rowing world. Eastern fans were accustomed to seeing the sons of senators and governors and titans of industry sitting in racing shells—not farmers and fishermen and lumberjacks.
The economic hardships of the last few years had only sharpened the distinction between the eastern boys and Washington’s freshman crew. The Great Depression had ruined many of the westerners’ families and hometowns, but many of the eastern rowers were from another class, the wealthy and privileged few who went on living in luxury despite the rest of the country’s troubles. So the 1934 regatta was not just another boat race. It was shaping up to be a clash of eastern privilege and prestige on the one hand and western sincerity and brawn on the other. In some ways, it was going to be a clash of rich and poor.
This was clear enough when the Washington crews moved into their temporary boathouse in New York, a dilapidated old shed on the Hudson. It was drafty, rickety, sitting on thin stilts over the river. The showers pumped foul-smelling cold water directly from the Hudson over the boys’ heads. Their lodgings were not much better. In the attic of a nearby boarding house, they were crammed six to a room. They struggled to sleep on cots that seemed more like torture racks than beds.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, they’d also been rowing terribly. After their victory over California, Joe and the freshman crew could not seem to maintain any sort of consistency. They rowed sloppily. On one occasion, before leaving for the regatta, they nearly collided with a tugboat. Coach Bolles threatened to replace some of them with substitutes, but then watched them turn in a stunning time on a windy, choppy day on the lake. His confidence was restored, but when they arrived in Poughkeepsie, and Bolles hurried them down to the Hudson to practice, they faltered again.
The weather was oppressively hot and sticky, unlike anything the boys had experienced back home. By the time they carried their shell, the City of Seattle, down to the water, they were already drenched in sweat. The boys rowed at a warm-up pace until Bolles lifted his megaphone and told them to take it up to a sprint. They leaned into their oars, but Bolles didn’t even bother to look at his stopwatch. He could see at a glance that they were rowing well off their best pace. Worse, they looked ragged, clearly done in by the heat.
River rowing was new to them. They could handle almost any amount of wind and chop on Lake Washington, but the waves on the Hudson were different. These were long, low waves that hit the boat from the side. The effects of tide and the river’s current baffled them. They weren’t used to the water moving under their boat, pushing them places they did not intend to go, and they wandered from one side of the course to the other. Frustrated, Bolles shouted, “Way ’nuff!” through his megaphone and waved the boys back to the shell house.
Race day, Saturday, June 16, dawned clear and warm. Fans began to arrive by train and by automobile from all over the East. All afternoon trolleys rattled down the bluff on the steep Poughkeepsie side of the Hudson River, transporting fans to the waterside. A gray heat haze hung over the river. White electric ferries made their way back and forth, shuttling fans over to the west side, where an observation train awaited them. By 5:00 p.m., more than seventy-five thousand people lined both banks of the river, sitting on beaches, standing on docks, perched on roofs, bluffs, and walkways. Fans sipped lemonade and fanned themselves with copies of the program. The river was jammed with yachts at anchor, their teak decks crowded with race fans, many of them wearing crisp nautical whites and royal-blue caps with gold braid. Canoes and wooden motorboats darted in and out among the yachts. A gleaming white Coast Guard cutter and a gray Navy destroyer were anchored at the finish line. Only the seven racing lanes in the middle of the river remained clear and open water.
The freshman race was set to go off first, over a two-mile course. As the shells approached the starting line, the coaches’ boats fell in behind their crews. Their engines sputtered and gurgled, white exhaust fumes burbling from the water behind them. The smell of diesel fuel hung faintly over the river. Washington was in lane three, right next to the Syracuse Orange in lane two. The Orange had won three of the last four freshman titles. They were the defending champions and clear favorites.
