Description of the Journey

On July 2^nd, 2017, I’ll slide my Adirondack Guideboat into the hopefully placid waters of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, Ontario, pushing off towards my home waters of Lake George, New York. This blog will chronicle that 680 mile journey, or at least as much of it as I can cover, and I am grateful beyond words to Kathy and Peg for their help both for lift to Canada and also for the maintenance of this blog. You may notice several earlier blog entries that profile the nature of my laughably irresponsible preparation for this journey, and as I row, the girls will document whatever progress I make along the way. The bulk of the writing will take place when I return…if my then-gnarled fingers can tap a key. Thanks for vicariously joining me in the boat and, Canada, Happy Birthday!!   

I tell the people I meet that one purpose of this row is to raise some money … in this case for financial aid at Boys’ Latin. Financial aid puts a lot of wonderful kids in my classroom and in our schools, young men who otherwise would not have access to a school and community like BL.

So … if you are so moved, hit the link that I’m told is somewhere on the blog (Ed. note – it’s in the column on the right) … and do what you can? I’d be rowing anyway … but this is the classic case of making lemonade out of an aging rower.

Rowing with Kierkegaard, Part I

Sunday morning, 8/21/17

I’ve been looking backwards a lot this summer- literally - and now, this morning, figuratively. 

The literal stems from rowing 695 miles in July, from Lake Huron to Lake George. Rowing entails facing backwards, of course, and as I row I often don’t know what I’ve passed until I’ve already passed it. I’d wave back to that friendly couple on the pier who had been watching me coming for the last ten minutes. Or I’d pull up lightly to observe a heron that I’d just passed as he stood motionless in the reeds not wanting to have to abandon a sweet fishing spot. Or I’d pause gently as a furrow-browed osprey would eye me from her nest above the light tower. “Keep going,” she’d blink. “I’ve been watching you. Don’t make me have to leave this nest.” I’d cease my labors as loons popped up behind to the boat or to allow a threatening wave to slide under the hull or to simply stretch at least once each hour. Sometimes I’d ram a buoy, a rock, or a dock through inattentiveness or just bad luck, and at other times I’d sigh the relief of the reprieved fatalist as a Kevlar-piercing iron bar lurking just under the surface would slide past the hull with just inches to spare. 

There are ways to remedy this kind of blindness when rowing, but each entails compromise.  One can stop and turn around by twisting in the seat and looking forward, a practice that affords a glimpse ahead but painfully knots up the neck by Day 2 and bleeds hard-earned momentum from the boat. I had experimented with an assortment of mirrors before I’d embarked, but a mirror in a rocking boat is ineffectual if it is too small and, if its large enough to be useful, it creates drag in a headwind. 

Besides, an Adirondack guide boat ought not to look like a Peterbilt. 

I soon adopted a technique familiar to pilots who fly tail-wheeled airplanes that block a view directly over the nose when taxiing: the S-turn. I’d pull on only one oar three or four times, yawing the boat in one direction or another to allow for a view ahead over the opposite shoulder without much of a twist of the neck, maintaining some boat speed in the process. This system worked well except when a buoy or rock lurked in the yaw. And they do.  

For three weeks this summer, the world ahead of me was always behind me. I could savor the slowly receding vista over the stern for hours at a time but not avoid the unseen rock ten feet off the bow. I’d recall Kierkegaard’s reflection, “Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.” When you’re in a rowboat for ten hours a day for three weeks, you think about things like Kierkegaard and Shakespeare and life and love. You have to. And you sing. Try Willie’s Sonnet 29 as a country western song. It passes the time.

This morning, in recalling my gratifying adventure from the comfort of this easy chair here in the kitchen, I feel a figurative blindness as I pull towards the opening of school next week. As I look backwards over the chronological fantail, I can survey fifteen years of teaching experience, wonderful colleagues as mentors waving from the pier, and even a curriculum as a rudimentary chart. But considering what I’ve been watching and hearing since I climbed out of my fifteen-foot Kevlar bubble in July, the waters ahead seem turbulent, angry, uncharted. Teaching English will be easy- even joyful, I think- because learning to read thoughtfully and to write honestly and well are enduring life skills, the tools of responsible citizenship. But times being what they are, I ask myself, if rhetorically, “Really, what will I teach this year? What should I teach this year? What do my students need to learn this year? What do they want to learn this year?” As I write this, the TV on the kitchen counter blathers on as the Sunday pundits grapple with the junctures of freedom and censure, history and ignorance, fact and fake news, principled and institutional loyalty, love and hate. 

I wonder what’s ahead. Are the boys paying attention?  These cultural waters are choppy, murky, threatening, and unpredictable. But they are also exhilarating, instructive, and inspiring, calling on our better natures to become our best selves, compelling us to examine who our best selves really are.   

This is an unprecedented presidency in many ways, but these are not unprecedented times in tone, tenor, or intensity. I was a high school sophomore in 1967. A lot happened then, too- you can look it up on your Google machine- and I well remember teachers whose respect for facts, knowledge of history, sensitivity to our malleable natures, patience to listen, and self-discipline not to preach made those waters safer if not calmer, navigable if not comfortable, manageable if not controllable. They were guides in our journey but not determinants of our intellectual or moral destinations, and they trusted us to pull those oars. Their capacities for navigating angry, confused waters with empathy and grace coupled with urgency and conviction inspired us to want to try.   

I hope that I can be that kind of teacher this fall. 

At the end of my row I’d seen each of 695 miles, but not until they were behind me. What’s ahead this year promises to be another grand adventure, and crewmate Kierkegaard might advise me to be patient: to live it first and to learn along with the boys…and to try to understand it later.   

    

Rowing with Kierkegaard, Part II…counterpoint.

  

Tuesday, 8/23/17

Kierkegaard was pretty much right in his thought of how we understand life backwards but have to live it forwards and last Sunday, as I wrote about my row, I couldn’t resist employing this low-hanging philosophical fruit as a metaphor for teaching and learning. But today, as I re-read Rowing with Kierkegaard, Part 1 while also digesting the national news and even some of my summer’s reading, I’d like to apologize for Sunday’s intellectual- and even moral- Pablum. Kierkegaard has no place in a rowboat and rationalizing his one-liner as a framework for teaching is cheesy at best and dangerous at worst.

Here’s the cheese….and a confession, of sorts.

It’s true that while I rowed, I hit things that I couldn’t see from my stern-facing vantage point, but the fact is that I hit them for one of two reasons: either I wasn’t paying attention to what I could and should have known (I carried charts that demarked buoys and hazards to navigation and depths), or I got lazy when losing situational awareness to the thought in my head, the rhythm of the strokes, the heat of the day, or the fatigue of late afternoon. Using Kierkegaard as a moral bumper for the crunch of my bow against rock or concrete does not excuse my complicity; as an episodically negligent rower, I could and should have known what was ahead had I paid more attention or if I’d taken the time and made the effort to do so. Taken literally and argued as I did in Part 1, Kierkegaard’s statement excuses me, suggesting that I could not have known what I did not know and that I could only “understand” the lesson of hitting that dock or rock by actually hitting it….and then contemplating the why. That faux moral high ground does not pass the sniff test. I should not have used K as a cover.

I hit what I hit because of my own inattention, sloth, or negligence, and here’s the confession: I fully knew (“understood”) that I wasn’t paying attention even while I wasn’t paying attention. I was willfully playing the odds, gambling that I’d miss most of the obstacles, calculating that the price of constant vigilance (the sore neck from constantly turning around, the diminished boat speed by doing so) was too high, not worth avoiding the occasional ding, scratch, or dent. 

And here’s the danger in bringing Kierkegaard into the boat as a metaphor for teaching.

As a teacher, I also have charts: charts of experience and prior learning that, as imperfect as they may be, suggest a responsibility to “understand” while simultaneously “living” life forward. While I see the logic of Kierkegaard’s “understand it backwards but live it forwards” precept, teaching calls for constant vigilance, the application of prior experience to the moment, the anticipation of the crunch or the crash as – or even before- it’s happening; I may decide the fate of my hapless Adirondack guide boat and accept the negligible consequences, but the consequences of a teacher’s inattention, lack of engagement, or of ‘letting things roll’ for his or her students are far greater, infinitely more important, and laden with consequence. In this way my students and I should not share a boat propelled by Kierkegaard’s idea of “understanding life backwards but living it forwards.” Teachers are the composites of longer and more reflected experience, and my Part 1 suggestion that I’ll voyage with my students as a fellow crewmember equal in “living it forward and understanding it backwards” is profoundly negligent. I’ll travel the year with them as a fellow learner, as an equal in honoring the importance of - and in honing the practice of - lifelong learning. And yes, I’ll share my own experiential charts with them when doing so might be helpful for context and to facilitate their own voyages. But the implied wisdom of “living…then understanding” discounts what teachers can and should add to a student’s journey. Teachers know the weight of injustice, the dangers of bullying, the price of passivity, the power of empathy, and the potential of community, among other things, because we have learned through living and reflection. We can hardly ignore our ownership of these charts, charts which carry much detail and depth not yet possessed by our students.   

Early this month I picked up a copy of It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935), “a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy…an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.” (In June I’d re-read Orwell’s 1984 and, times being what they are, I was interested in reading an earlier foray into this topic.) Lewis’s protagonist, Doremus Jessup, heroically endures the consequences of fighting the republic’s slide to fascism and concludes,

“I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.” 

The cultivation of “the free, inquiring, critical spirit” evokes the generic mission statement of the educational community…..and ought to inform the responsible oarsman as well. If I‘m going to foster “the free, inquiring, critical spirit(s)” in my students, I’d better get out the metaphorical charts and remember that the “understanding” gleaned from the wakes behind us always informs our journey forward. We can understand what’s ahead, or at the very least anticipate and be better equipped to influence the future, by paying wise attention to the past in explaining and expanding what we know to be true even as we redraw our charts for the future. 

It’s what the responsible oarsman…and teacher…must do.

So…out of the boat, Kierkegaard!  

Home

Cleverdale, NY

34 miles (row), 2 miles (walk)

I’m home. Yesterday’s departure from Chipman Point at 5:45 may have been a bit early, as I had none of the trouble I’d anticipated in winding my way up ‘La Chute’ to Ticonderoga’s town park. At this moment I sit on mom’s porch ‘ the morning after,’ a hot cup of coffee and a day to do nothin’ at all in front of me, and the feeling is bittersweet; the last three weeks established a healthy, challenging, and ever-varying routine concentrated on both enjoying the moment and achieving a goal. What’s not to like – and miss - about that? Yet here, home, with friends and family and an on-demand cup of coffee … well, as I’ve said all through this journey, I’m a very lucky, lucky man.

Yesterday’s sunrise emerged over Vermont, ‘La Chute’ was largely clear, and Doug and Susie Livingston arrived right on schedule to enable me to cart my boat up the hill – a vigorous 2-mile portage – to Lake George. They also delivered an egg salad sandwich and a vanilla malt, the only fare I would eat, or need, to power myself home. A tip o’ the sunhat to Bob and the crew at Snug Harbor Marina, who allowed me to re-launch the boat with good cheer and no fee … and after a five-mile run on Champlain, I was only 29 miles from home.    

La Chute

Where Lake George flows into Lake Champlain

Within two hours, a south wind came up that would be on the nose all day; what could have been a relaxing final sleigh ride down the lake was, instead, a tough, slow slog down the east side. That these clear, inviting waters were familiar and prompted the best kind of nostalgia eased the pain, though, and by 6:30 PM I arrived to cheers, hugs, and kebabs from Hannaford.

Thanks again to Doug and Susie for their heroic logistics support, to Bob and Bean and company for their moral support north of Black Mountain Point, and to son Matt for checking on his dad a few hours later, reminding me again of the warm welcome ahead. You all made a final hard push for home a little bit easier.

So … last night my head hit a real pillow for the first time in three weeks, and I don’t remember it. Instant sleep. Instant. Today I’ll assemble the bits and pieces of my 3-week universe … I’ll take my steaming laundry to a laundromat in town rather than tax our ‘lil Whirlpool, I’ll disassemble and clean boat parts and hardware, and I’ll sleep and swim. And repeat.

And as odd as it sounds in the reading, I’ll write again when Peg arrives with my computer; the handwritten journal has been a wonderful old school throwback medium, but I’ll look to my keyboard for deeper stuff in the coming weeks, if only for my own sense of closure to this blog.

Peg, thanks for the transcription and editing of it all, for even sending a hard copy to my techno-peasant brother, and for being there in every way … including finding my wallet by telephone. You rock!

If you’ve read, thanks for reading. If you’ve passed a gift to Boys’ Latin, thanks for that generosity as well; ‘paying it forward’ leads to our best selves, yes?

More blog later!

Peace, love, and happiness … and thanks for being aboard.  

Lake Champlain

Chipman Point, VT

19 miles, 1 lock

I’m off the water at 2 pm today after 19 easy miles up southern Lake Champlain. If there were ‘bankers hours’ in a rowing expedition, this is it. Or them? Chipman Point, a lovely spit of land at a particularly narrow point of the lake, affords me a good jumping-off point for Ticonderoga tomorrow morning. I’ve moved my cart rendezvous with Doug to 9 AM so I can hopefully beat the predicted turbulent weather tomorrow afternoon. Thanks, Doug!

This morning’s rowing was sublime … even a bit sad … as I’ve come to love the sense of adventure, and progress to a beloved destination, over these last three weeks. The ospreys barked out their warnings at each nav tower.

And a couple took turns circling overhead, perhaps considering my cheesy straw hat as possible material for the nest. I’d be easy pickings for the likes of them if they decided to get serious.

As one proceeds north on Champlain, the lake opens up like a picture book, a delightful development after 200+ miles of canal confinement.

Granite cliffs are appearing, the water is clarifying …. And hey, it’s Vermont!    

The row today was proceeded by my horror this morning in discovering the breech in my tent that one thousand mosquitoes had already communicated to their thousand friends. I must have been pretty tired not to have detected the transfusion that was taking place … or maybe the Chicken Parm served as an innoculant. Sadly, every mosquito who paid the ultimate price showed evidence of an earlier score. I’ve got some sanitizin’ to do when I get home.

The placid nature of this morning’s row incited some reflection about these past 20 days, particularly the rhythms of this sojourn from the high, clean waters of the Trent-Severn and its dozens of lakes to the truly oceanic and thrilling expanse of Lake Ontario to the Oswego/Erie/Champlain canals … placid, mostly, but not when the Tstorms sweep in! Skinny water, wide water, crystalline water, muddy water, dead calm to deadly rolling … I’ve been able to see it all over these last three weeks – how lucky I’ve been to have the time and to enjoy the blessing of Peg and my family to go explore.

I love you all more than I can say, and my time to think and remember and recognize my many blessings has brought me closer to all of you than ever … but the hugs will wait until after a long, hot shower.

Peace, love, and happiness …   

My Best Purchase

Bonus Blog!

While rowing on a sliding seat delivers a full body workout, some might wonder what challenges are inherent in a carpal tunnel-like scenario such as this. Let’s break it down. As of tonight, Day 19, we’ve clicked off 642 miles. If we took 4 mph as an average, that’s 180 hours in the seat. Adding 70 or so locks to the mix at, say, 15 minutes average per lock, we’ll add about 17 more ‘sitting’ hours … maybe 200 total hours to date with two days to go.

Even though the hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, hips and legs are all moving with every stroke, the derriere sits. This concentration of weight and focal energy led me to the best purchase of this adventure.

The bare sliding seat, standard on the boat. This hardwood seat of elegant craftsmanship features slightly ‘dished’ halves that would comfortably accommodate the posterior of an Olympic balance beam medalist. Sadly, as I am a bit of a ‘wide body,’ my backside simply overwhelms this seat pan … and after an hour or two, pain ensues. Towels, shorts, or thin cushions are similarly compressed after a while. A solution needed to be found if long distance rowing was to be pursued. (Sorry for the passive verbs.)

I turned to the long-distance trucker community. Who knows more about ‘active sitting’ than these people? Their answer? The Dura-Max.

This cushion did indeed extend ‘time in the seat’ to unimagined lengths. Up until Monday, July 17, it was ‘the answer’ to fanny fatigue. Taking time to stretch every few hours was still imperative, and the Dura Max, while not ‘plush’ or ‘luxuriant,’ nevertheless represented a quantum leap over all other experiments. Yet, could there be more?

But then, on Monday, July 17, at the town dock adjacent to the Fonda exit of the New York State Thruway, I saw it: across the road, a retail store dedicated to … truckers! My people! No strangers to pain!

I gimped across the road hoping to find a way to augment my tiring Dura Max. I’m sure it was as tired of me as I was of it; we both needed help, a kind of mediator to bring each of us back to our best selves.

On a low shelf I found ‘Black/Noire siege angulaire, bulles massent la region lombaire du dos!’ This translates, I think, to ‘Comfort Bubble Wedge’ ..  and to success, placed on top of the Dura Max which is itself draped over the wooden seat pan, ‘siege angulaire’ adds just the little tad of extra buoyancy I’d been needing … the two cushions work in silent but agreeable harmony, and my seat pain issues have now been subordinated to my creaky neck, which is tiring of peeking around to see where I’m going.

So my $19.95 gamble on a Comfort Bubble has paid off handsomely; now I don’t have to have the buns of an Olympic gymnast to be comfy in my boat!  

   

The Champlain Canal

Whitehall, NY

36 miles. 6 locks

I walked into this tavern at a marina and saw it right away: a preposterously over-proportional chicken parm and pasta – whatever physical advancement that may have come from 9 hours / 36 miles of rowing is about to be obliterated … or at least neutralized.

It’s a testament to Kate’s sharing at Three Amigos last night that I got through the day on Nature Valley breakfast bars, fingers in the peanut butter, and lots and lots of fluids. Kate, that meal did the job it had to do … and possibly this Chicken Parm will step up as well.

Today’s rowing? After 8 more miles on the contrarian Hudson, I left the river and spent the rest of the day on the neutral waters of the Champlain Canal. Long stretches of perfectly straight waterway – four or five miles at a stretch with nary a turn – were dotted with lovely farms, friendly cows almost wading in to say hello, and narrower stretches bordered by 20’ granite walls. I had no fresh batteries for my radio, and the miles reeled by in a kind of languorous haze – lovely, really. I can’t believe I’m a day or two from a finish.

Well, between that last page and this page I dispatched a prodigious Chicken Parm. Don’t they say that you shouldn’t eat anything larger than your head?

I’m taking my chances sleeping (illegally) in a park tonight. I’m now out of the warm embrace of the lock system and will have to live by cunning and guile. The tent won’t go up until after dark – if it will go up at all – but it’s a lovely evening and if I’m under the stars, so be it.

Some industrial barges carrying stone and four or five chatty boaters were the extent of my social interface today … I will have to re-learn the art of conversation, perhaps? The discussions I have with myself on the boat, frequent and topically unpredictable, often end in a spat or one of us just leaving, but they do pass the time.  

When I last rowed this stretch – three or four years ago – sections of the canal hosted huge dredging barges and specialized equipment attending to the GE chemical waste mess near Fort Edward. Today, not a sign of any activity; all done, all clean? I saw a lot of people near the water and a lot of water toys and ladders on docks … but no one in the water. Is it safe?

Oh!! The TV here in the restaurant features a beaming OJ; a good day for him, too?

If I don’t get tossed into jail tonight, tomorrow I’ll head up the 20 miles or so to Ticonderoga … but I’ll camp across the lake in Vermont, at a boat ramp forever distinguished by Brian’s ‘Hasselhoff Moment’ as his fatigue compelled him to eat a cheeseburger while on all fours. (See ‘Row, Canada!’) Hasselhoff Point is a good starting point for the final push home on Saturday; Doug Livingston has consented to be my ‘wheel man’ as he’ll deliver the cart I’ll need to push my boat through Ticonderoga. Guys like Doug – unconditional and generous friends – make things happen!

Peg, thanks again for transcribing my sloppy journal; maybe post this page to remind the people of the magic of techno peasant and computer maven?

Sure thing, Al 

I’m going to pay my tab and go hang out in the park. Wish me luck?

Peace, love, and happiness  

And here's an adorable dog that wanted to join Al in the boat