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?