Feature Article July 17,2003
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Rowing and LivingNobody rows any more. We have lived beside Mazinaw Lake for 32 years and I can't recall seeing a single solitary rower during all that time. There have been powerboats roaring, personal watercraft screaming, sailboats whispering and canoes gliding, but not a rower in a skiff. Modern life with its obsession with speed has displaced the joys of rowing a boat.
I did a lot of rowing years ago, before the outboard motor became so popular - actually before it was invented. Some of you may recall with me the joys and adventures of rowing on a lake. You younger ones bear with me as I muse and perhaps you will be enticed to participate in the adventures of traveling backwards.
Yes backwards! That is the unique joy of rowing. It is a bit like life, you can clearly see where you have been but it takes a bit of twisting and turning to establish where you are going; your goal is ahead of the skiff but behind your back and hidden from your eyes. Sometimes the path to it meanders because of distractions around you and your preoccupation with what has been accomplished.
Remember lining up the creek mouth on the far shore, turning your back and then by eyeing the wake behind the skiff see how close you could come to the target across the lake? It was fun trying to mentally calculate wind, current and drift. There were no GPS instruments in those days to keep you on target; keeping on the straight and narrow was your personal responsibility.
Unlike a canoe, there is stability in a rowboat. It was needed when an oar would plane on a cresting wave, sometimes throwing the rower off the thwart. One could stand up and pole with an oar when the creek narrowed between its banks. Remember laughing about being up the creek without a paddle? One wasn't necessary with a seven-foot ash oar.
Remember the cute little red headed girl a couple cottages down the shore? She also was a rower. Remember laying the inner oars across both boats and drifting together in the moonlight, pretending to synchronize rowing with the outer oars. Only one arm was occupied and you could attempt pleasures that if tried in a canoe would result in a dunking. Those were the days!
Rowing, like some other old delights, has declined almost to oblivion; only the modern racing shells manned by sweating synchronized rowers remain. What was once a leisurely row across a lake has been adapted to competitive status. One competes to get from A to B fastest but not necessarily with pleasure, except to beat the other guy; that I find most dissatisfying.
I miss the sound of squeaking oarlocks, the opportunity to 'rest on the oars' and drift with the current when the going gets a bit rough. Now it is so easy to crank up the outboard and get an excursion over, hoping that pleasure exists at the end of a smelly, noisy voyage. Such is life; we can get so preoccupied with achieving a goal quickly we speed by too many of the pleasures during the actual journey.
