When one places the first tentative step from dock to the footboard of a carbon fiber racing shell, it’s narrow hull barely wide enough to accommodate the girth of an adults hips, the body feels forces best articulated through equations but if one, such as myself, being just above the X axis of the Cartesian plane (which is to say innumerate) those forces course through the gut impacting the amygdala, cratering rational thought. The center of gravity shifts from the terra firma to one of variable stability counter to buoyancy and in that brief moment literally suspended between the known and multivariable one must embody movement, trusting the unknown. Today was the fourth such exercise and trust has yet to come naturally: the river is frigid, the air colder, and my mended bones have imparted truths of corporeal vulnerability.
I would see these tiny boats effortlessly gliding towards the Sound, perched on top of the water, not half submerged like a kayak or canoe but on top almost predatory in their economy of motion. Their movement enchanted me as I returned from some predawn hike driving across the Snohomish River, lithe bodies in responsive boats breaking through fog. It was a mixed vision. Those figures were the picture of grace, competency, belonging to the elements and starkly in opposition all at once. I find the exacting done effortlessly beautiful, true competency a marvel and yet these people belonged to the affluent world. Being from the south a certain class awareness is nearly innate. It’s the difference between hiking and mountaineering; there comes an elevation where it becomes a question of gear not will and money conjures ice axes, rope, crampons, and access and while money cannot purchase will a glacier field is best not transversed in logging boots filled with desire. Rowing was always on that other side of the tracks where the physician's daughter lived. She may entertain the well built if low born but when reality sets in the safer option is enrolling at Wesleyan and has no calluses on their hands. So I thought it would be similar here and I’m grateful to be wrong. I hold a truth close to my heart, a mantra I attempt (and truly it is an attempt) to live by: the transcendent is on the other side of the seemingly impossible. What looked effortless from fifty feet above the water is the confluence of the laws of physics, mechanical motion, physiology, will, and communication distilled down to a single, repeatable, fluid motion best experienced when the mind is in a state of paradox: both acutely aware of all and completely empty of specifics. Catch, drive, finish, recover, catch, drive, finish, recover, repeated and repeated, until you are all things, moving in all things, becoming nothing.
Until the oar catches catapulting you back into your body, the center of gravity above the metacenter. One could say CSF= Beam/((Displacement/64.2).3) or respond without reactivity allowing that universal language to be spoken in countervailing motion.
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