Rowing is notorious for its early morning wake-up calls, yet there’s something strangely rewarding about stumbling about in the darkness while the rest of Oxford is asleep.
I pull myself out of bed and meander down the wooden, circular staircase of my dormitory. This time is mine. To reflect. To let it all soak in.
I relish the morning cold. I think of my dad and his dad and the way they loved the calm of the early morning chill. I remember Dad’s morning routine: Wake up at 5, make coffee, read the paper, take time to think, to be alone.
I almost understand my grand-father’s insistence that his daily newspaper be delivered by 4:30 a.m.—why, if it wasn’t delivered on time, somebody somewhere got a phone call.
The rowers meet at the Porter’s Lodge and we make our way to the river. The near-silent walk down winding Norham Gardens, lit only by the orange light of the widely spaced street lamps, offers respite from the rigor of the term. Who lives in these houses, these flats? What are their lives like? What are they reading?
The walk in the dark is one of memory, much like the rowing stroke itself. Down Banbury Road to Cornmarket Street, the solitude fades as other contemplatives begin their morning rites. Making deliveries. Cleaning streets. I am in the city of dreaming spires, but I’m wide awake. Imagine Oxford as it could have been hundreds of years ago: Christ Church Meadow with its crushed gravel and dirt paths lined with green grass and grazing cattle framing the Isis—the branch of the River Thames that runs through Oxford.
Lifting the boat, even with eight men, proves a challenge. Heaving the boat onto the water reminds all of us that we are novices.
One by one we carefully ease into our seats, take blades in hand.
At first, balancing is the biggest challenge. The slightest stir rocks the boat: Rowing requires synchronized movements. Make sure everyone’s blades are held at the same height. Follow precisely the time set by the rower sitting in seat eight.
“All eight to backstops,” the cox calls.
Is my back straight enough?
“GO!
Am I putting enough power down with the legs?
“And catch…catch…catch…
Are my hands at the correct height?
“Very good guys, keep it going.
Am I feathering at the correct time?
“Watch the timing.”
Okay.
“And, caaaaatch.”
The technical enterprise soon morphs into a seamless roll of muscle memory. There’s a certain inevitability to rowing: the boat would continue to move with or without my permission. So I might as well keep up with it as these seven guys and I propel the boat. I can’t see where I am going, and neither can anyone else, except the cox. The banks of the Isis slip by in a blurry stream of backward tunnel vision. I see only what I’ve passed.
“Thriving on the Life”
On June 1, 1930, only weeks after graduating from Wabash, Byron Trippet arrived in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. When he left, Trippet had collected not only the blades from his boat—one of the most coveted prizes in Oxford rowing—but also a corpus of letters, keepsakes, and memories he would keep with him for the rest of his life.
Full of detailed descriptions of speakers at the Oxford Union (Gandhi among them), and questions about the spread of the Nazi regime and the Depression back home, Trippet’s letters offer details of the daily Oxford life of the man who would become the captain of Jesus College’s first eight, who would lead his team to five bumps in the Summer Eights Week races.
In one of his first letters home, he writes, “Oxford is beautiful and impresses one as being the seat of all learning. They have retained much of the old symbols of scholarship, such as wearing cap and gown to lectures. The various colleges that go to make up the university are lovely old buildings which seem to hold in their aged walls the secrets of past centuries. I think I should like it there very much.”
In February 1932, Trippet was getting used to a new routine: “Life is going on much the same at Oxford…At any rate I am thriving on the life. I am now a member of the first Jesus College eight, which means that I row at least an hour and a half each day. We are practicing for the spring boat races here at Oxford and also are to take part in the Thames regatta in the latter part of March. I am living a more regular life than I have in the past several years, have got my weight back up to 175 lbs and feel fit as a fiddle.”
In 1934, the Jesus College Boat Club was the talk of the town: “Incidentally, speaking of rowing, our training on the Thames this year aroused considerable excitement. We got our pictures into the papers two or three times,” Trippet wrote.
The JCBC’s measure of fame was thanks, in no small part, to Trippet’s newfound rowing expertise.
While the local newspapers covered Trippet’s eight, ours was never so noteworthy. We prepared for the Christ Church Regatta, a novice race. Trippet prepared for Torpids and Summer Eights, the real races.
That Trippet managed to balance the workload of an extensive commitment to rowing with academics amazes me. It put even Trippet to his limits. He recounted just how full his plate really was: “Nothing unusual has happened since I wrote. I have been covered up with work lately. Whoever said Oxford was a place of leisurely work was sadly mistaken. It may be for some people, but not for me.”
It was that workload that eventually pulled Wabash Professor Steve Morillo away from the river. A Rhodes Scholar from September of 1980 to June of 1983, Morillo went to Oxford to read for a D.Phil in Modern History—Modern in the Oxonian sense of “everything since A.D. 285.”
Before I left for my own journey to Oxford, I asked him about his experience. I told him I’d always wanted to try rowing, and he said I’d have a blast, that he and the members of his eight—“The Legisleight”—had a lot of fun out on the river.
“I mostly just remember the camaraderie. That was how I got to know a bunch of people in the graduate common room,” Morillo told me. “You really do become part of a larger whole, and it’s kind of exhilarating.”
Morillo hadn’t known much about rowing going into Oxford. But with a rower’s build of about six-feet tall and a weight between 175 and 180, Morillo got recruited. In his first year at Jesus, he rowed in the College’s fourth eight with “a bunch of undergrad lawyers,” sitting five in “Smaug,” a wooden plank boat as heavy as its name connotes.
In his second year, Morillo moved up to sit bow in Jesus’ second eight. In that year’s Summer Eights, Morillo’s eight made three bumps in four days of racing, putting his team one bump short of winning blades—one bump short of Trippet’s feat.
It didn’t take any more than that for rowing to make a lasting impression on Morillo.
“That’s the moment when rowing really works: Your individuality becomes subsumed in this larger organism because everything is working perfectly together, and you really feel like your own bodily rhythms are tied with everybody else’s, and the boat is really working as a unit. It’s not eight people rowing. It’s one boat rowing, and you’re just a part of it.
“When you really got into the rhythm it just became a sort of Zen thing where your mind cleared. And you could go for a while just on that.”
That was during practices.
Racing was a different story. While I never knew the fierce competition Morillo or Trippet saw, I can only imagine the grueling physical test the Isis set out for them. At the end of the only race I rowed in, I felt the exhaustion Morillo mentioned in my conversation with him and that Trippet wrote home about. He recounted one of his friends quipping that the best part of rowing is when you stop rowing.
Trippet’s crew held him in high regard. The Jesus College magazine for the end of that 1934 Trinity term wished him well: “Meanwhile, we have to wish bon voyage to our Captain of Boats, who has done so much for the Boat Club since he has been associated with it. We trust he will be able to find congenial waters for his gambols out in Indiana.”
I’m sitting on a wooden seat in a fiberglass fuselage just after 6 a.m. on a fall morning on the River Isis.
How many hundreds of people have rowed along this same river? How many of them have seen the same spires and the sight of the Magdalen bell tower at dawn?
In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Clarissa Vaughan recalls from her 20s a moment of “consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined.”
“It was like the perfect life… [full of] all the things I liked doing, and that’s what I did,” is the way Morillo describes his days at Oxford.
Trippet’s time there revealed to him “secrets of past centuries” cemented in Oxford’s walls. He’ll write years later of the Wabash campus, after a life not always spent in congenial waters: “The poetry in the life of a college is to be found…in the fact that once on this familiar campus and once in these well-known halls, students and teachers as real as ourselves worked and studied, argued and laughed and worshipped together, but are now gone, one generation vanishing after another, as surely as we shall shortly be gone. But if you listen, you can hear their songs and their cheers.”
Now we pierce the clouds of fog hovering just above the Isis as the sun begins to rise.
“Fine and good,” my dad says each time I slide forward.
“Nifty,” says my grandfather as I pulled back on the oars.
It’s one boat rowing—and I’m just a part of it.