Last piece, best piece & the deepness that is a deep end

Thanks to what’s left of my work, I’m finally posting this latest entry.

This past weekend saw the last race of Vassar’s varsity rowing squad. The Dad Vail Regatta is the largest collegiate regatta in the United States, offering crews from across the country and Canada to compete for a shot at gold. The last time I was here, I was an alternate for the novice boat after narrowly losing a seat race. This time, I was to race as a captain and full-fledged member of the varsity squad.

My boat had its fair share of ups and downs. We had no time to taper, as that time was spent seat racing to compose the perfect heavyweight crew. In the end, the results were close, but next year’s captain Morgan Mako had made it into the boat. With Vince Marchetta at stroke, Kyle Sullivan at 3, Morgan at 2 and myself in bow, coxed by the extraordinary Andrew Tabenkin, we were ready to own. On the morning of 6 May, our boat had moved like it had never moved before. Each drive was powerful, each recovery was slow and controlled. There was no rush, there was no check. Our focus remained in the boat and our movement was only focused forward. Perhaps the fact that the last race of the season was upon us changed our mentalities, and everything we had worked on all semester finally came together.

Cut to a chilly Friday morning in Philadelphia. The heavyweight four are preparing for what could be our last row together. I try to retain composure, knowing that this well could be it. During out warm up run, I remembered all the times we spent together working on the ergs, pushing past the point of fatigue with sweat streaming into our eyes, our breathing sharp, our lungs on fire, our legs numb with pain. I realized that I may never find a more dedicated and hardworking group of men anywhere I would go in the world, and that deeply saddened me.

NOTE: This is not a sob story. Put the tissues away, punk. Resuming…

We put our hands in for what could have been our final chant of “VC!” as we touched the bow of the Weinberg, and we walked down with reverence and focus for the race we were about to row.

In contrast to the swing row the day before in 15mph+ wind, the day was still. We were one boat, we had one stroke. And we kept this mentality as we approached the starting line. Assigned lane 1 was a godsend: at the Dad Vail course, lane 1 has a swift current starting at around the mark signifying 500m left to go, and we were excited at our prospect of moving to semi-finals. We moved into our stake boat, reached alignment and took one last deep breath. The countdown began, and we were off. Two hundred strokes to the finish, two hundred strokes to position ourselves for a shot at the semifinals.

We were off. A high twenty at 42/43 and a settle into a 36/38. We were feeling good. The settle felt nothing higher than a 28, and it was relaxed and long. We got into our rhythm an exhaled with each drive, sending the boat forward and away from Binghamton and the College of New Jersey. We were on course to pull away from them and toward Dowling and Lafayette, when a crab slowed out boat substantially. Binghamton, the closest crew, still hadn’t pulled ahead, and we recovered and increased our open water on them. Soon, another boat-stopping crab held us up, just as we were about to enter our spring, providing Binghamton with the chance they needed to take us. They moved through us, but not past us. We kept contact and pushed out with everything we had left in our legs for the sprint, and finished 4 seconds behind Binghamton. We received a sound thrashing from the lead crews, who finished within 3 seconds of each other and beat us by 30 odd seconds, which, in rowing means half a century.

We were disappointed, but found consolation in the fact that we did row well and we moved well. Lafayette and Dowling were just too massive for us, and they had probably been rowing those line-ups from the beginning of the season, as opposed to us who had only been rowing together for 48 hours. We got off the dock and began to derig our boat, and I hung up my lucky red headband for good.

The other rowers had come down to see us race, and soon met us back at the trailer to help us. We had rowed the race of our lives, and it’s a shame we couldn’t have raced together more. Had we done so, we might have had a chance against Dowling and Lafayette. The world is just full of “what-ifs.”

Race day had just begun for everyone else, an the women’s 8+ was next up. They slid solidly into their semifinal, as did the lightweight men. But getting off the dock, the lights had a problem: 2 seat Ben Palacios had a stomach bug that had ripped through him in his exhaustion, and though he felt fine before and during the race, the stress he placed on his body made him considerably more vulnerable.

He had to go to the emergency room to be rehydrated, and in the end everything worked out fine. The lightweight 4+, unfortunately, had to scratch their race, leaving women’s 8+ as the only race to be watched. Once again, they sailed through the competition to a solid third place overall, placing them in the final. But the wind picked up to over 16mph, temporarily suspending the regatta. They were fine to settle for a third place overall, as they would have medalled, but as fate would have it, the regatta was resumed and the women were placed in the infamous lane 6. Lane 6 was dreaded in regular conditions because, unlike the rest of the river, the current stopped dead once they reached the 500m-to-go mark. However, when the current and wind were against the rowers, this was a godsend.

On my way up to the grandstand, I met two good friends from home, one a fellow All-Bahamas Merit Scholar studying at Drexel and the other, a friend from high school studying at Wharton. They came to see the races, and I was there to teach them what rowing was all about. Luckily, they came just in time for the women’s V8+ final.

A splashing of water, flashes of blades and they were off. As they rounded the bend at the thousand-metre mark, Vassar was fighting for first place. With 750m to go, Vassar was pulling ahead, and once they hit the 500m to go, they had sealed the deal for a gold medal.

As they crossed the line, the entire Vassar rowing team was ecstatic. We couldn’t hold in our happiness. Out came the cheers of “Vassar! Vassar!,” that selective liberal arts school in the Hudson Valley that had managed to dominate the Dad Vail competition in the first year its women were entered. We had much to celebrate.

When we got back to school, the joy soon wore off in the face of assignments and due dates, and at the moment, I am left to write my last eight-page paper of my undergraduate career. It’s nothing big, just a reflective piece about “War and Memory in East Asia,” with my advisor, Hiraku Shimoda.

At a History major’s senior reception, we bonded over a common favourite in beer, Stella Artois, and a confusion that came with graduation around the corner. Like me, he had no idea what he wanted to do after graduation, and so he went to work in a bank in Buffalo. Weird, no? Two years later, he returned to academia and never left. Perhaps this may be my path as well.

I’m realizing that life has its own little twists and turns and surprises, and often has a way of taking the plans that you’ve spent so long cultivating and manicuring, and balling them up and throwing them into the wastebasket. Who knows? Perhaps this is my fate, to be blindsided by something so random but so wonderful that I end up in a place I never dreamed I would, something like when I came to college. Perhaps I will continue on whatever path I intend for myself at this very point in time. Maybe I will be nobody like the man my teachers in high school envisioned me to be when I left their classrooms four years ago. I’ll leave that all up to God, and that’ll let me get back to this paper. Maybe I’ll even think of a great name for next week’s entry. Who knows?

Last 500 metres…keep it strong here, boys…let’s take up the intensity…bring the pain right here!

Dearest readers, please forgive the rowing metaphors. They really are the only things I know how to write with these days. For the rowers among you, I don’t need to explain myself. For the non-rowers, this basically is the call that is both a boon and a curse. It means that the end is in sight, it’s so close it’s almost palpable. However, it’s also the time when a rower feels that there’s nothing left in his body: an indescribable fire rips through his legs, thousands of blades stab through his chest, all he can hear is the roar of his coxswain demanding he push harder and harder. The oxygen circles are becoming more distinct, and the distance between the head of the rower immediately in front of him is increasingly stretched out, as time and space are at the whim of the rower’s very ability to get oxygen to their depleted body.

Sound like fun? Not to the average person. It’s this part of the race that rowers fight for, to pass through that hole in the wall. Almost like Paul Atreides, the hero from Dune, who learns to pass through his fear, rowers come face to face with their own limits, but break them time and time again. This metaphor for breaking things doesn’t necessarily translate as simply to real life, but this is just about how I feel about the last few weeks of senior year. The end is near, uncomfortably near. On Wednesday, the classes officially rose after Spring Convocation, and I was started on a track to inevitable alumhood. Both speakers, Lee Zalben ’95 and Professor Livingston in CogSci, spoke about not having any idea what they would do after college, which made me feel a lot better about my current situation.

Since completing my thesis roughly two weeks ago, it’s been a real push. Getting motivated to search for jobs is a huge task. Many students here don’t realize that we have to go through the same doors as everyone else, despite coming from one of the nation’s most selective and prestigious schools. The corporate world is one that is gives no quarter, and the metaphor of birth is quite fitting here. At Vassar, we’re warm and comfortable. We’re fed, we’re safe. But come graduation, that uncomfortable and difficult push into the real world, we’re outside of the safety that has been our alma mater. Our ‘soul mother’ will always be there for us, but after graduation, we have to forge ahead to make our names in the exclusive Vassar alumni community.

Bah. Enough of these things. Full of scorpions is my mind, and empty is my stomach. Typical college student, no? But I am drawn again to reflections on transitions. As Daisy Chain co-coordinator, looking at my friends, as they have well become, dressed in their finery reflecting one of the college’s finest traditions, I remembered my days as an usher. The feelings came flooding back as we prepared them to march: I thought about how I would miss my senior friends and how I would feel two years from that day. The day came, and I felt helpless to the forces of time. My own senior Spring Convocation had come too soon. I almost cried. I wasn’t ready to leave this place I have come to call home. I’m not ready. But, like rowing, I have to step up and do what I’m supposed to do: I need to get over myself, get past my head, get past my fears and whatever pain may come, and push through. Just push through.

My senior project is coming along nicely; even though I haven’t been particularly diligent, I’ve been able to pump out some good pages of work with minimal sections for editing. Today, I found out how the Chea/Xie family around the world came upon our surname: a fiefdom in Henan province where there actually exists a Xie City. Once I found out about that, I put that down on my list of places I must absolutely go before I die.

This weekend, we’re off to Whitney Point, NY for the New York State Championships, my second-to-last race. Depending on the weather on Sunday, I have at most, three practices left with the team I love so much. Saturday saw the Men’s 8 enter the Petite finals after beating out RPI in the Men’s Varsity 8, with Marist as the eventual state champions. We had contact on Union for a good part of the race but failed to take them. After a somewhat disheartening race, the lightweight 4 went through to beast it out and take gold. The lightweights are the cream of the men’s team crop, embodying discipline and raw strength despite their scrawniness. The rest of the team envy them for their dedication, but are kind of glad we don’t have to starve ourselves, except for Peter Muhn who rows at 3 seat who’s kind of a bottomless pit. Today was the Petite finals early in the morning, as to beat out the pending thunderstorms. We went out on the water with an attitude to row hard and have fun, and as it was the last time Nick and I would be in the 8 (on top of having it be our last row in the 8 for the rest of season), we wanted to end on a high note.

We got off the line at a 44 on our high 20, settling into a 37/38. We had a lead on the Union boat! They must have been so confused. We kept our half/three-quarter boat lead on Union for the majority of the race, never slipping below a long and solid 36, and once we heard the wily call, “Welcome to the second thousand!” we knew we could take the Union boat. We passed them by the time the 500-metre mark was in sight, and we also began to walk on the Hamilton boat. With 15 strokes to go, we got up to a 38.5 to take Hamilton, eventually beating them by .38 seconds – our 6:29.16 to their 6:29.52. Union must have been confused. They beat us quite soundly yesterday, but today, we blew them out of the water. We got out attitudes right, and we were riding on the high of having our boys win gold. Now, back at Vassar, we seniors are really entering the 500m, and it’s the hardest thing in the world to keep that intensity up.