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.