Plying the Currents

I’m not sure exactly how old I was the first time I rowed a boat. I was young, I know that. The craft was a banged-up aluminum jonboat. The venue was Brockway Lake — actually a lily pad-choked pond — just down the road from my childhood home in western Michigan.

Early evening, the smell of irrigated corn, a bass chorus of bullfrogs. My dad casting a Jitterbug from the stern while I gave it a go. The oars were pine, silver with age, warped and splintery. They, along with generations of mice, lived under the boat, which we stored overturned behind the garage. The boat fit in the back of my dad’s pickup. There were no seats or life jackets, just two aluminum benches that got blistering hot in the sun. Our anchor was a Maxwell House can filled with cement, an eyebolt sunk in before it had set. A tangled, yellow, nylon rope tied off to the bow eye.

I don’t remember rowing instruction, although there must have been some. I do remember the oar grips rough in my hands, sunscreen in my eyes. Trying to make even strokes, wanting to track cleanly across the pond the way my dad could. I don’t imagine I was quite 10 years old. Waiting for a red-and-white bobber to dunk. Pulling on one oar, then the other to get the hang of turning, the angles, eventually learning to pull with one and push with the other to make the boat spin faster. Putting my back into it. Rowing from one side of the pond to the other trolling a Dardevle, hoping for a pike but happy with a nice largemouth.

Maybe I was strange in that I don’t remember longing for a motor. Even way back then, I recognized in rowing a certain measure of quiet dignity, a graceful economy of motion, some essential purity that ripping the pull start of an outboard could never approach. To be a rower of boats. Of all the things in the world a person could aspire to be. It’s funny what sticks.

Moving water entered the picture when I was in my late teens. My dad had never been a huge fisherman. A carpenter by trade, he had the tools and the know-how, not to mention the patience, to help me build a small driftboat from plans. This project occupied the garage for the better part of a year, and when we finished, I received a pair of 9-foot Sawyer Light oars as a birthday present. Beautiful, laminated fir blades, varnish like honey in the sunlight. Black rope wraps, tip protectors, the Sawyer logo on the blades. True to name, they were light and not too stiff, with a satisfying flex when you pulled really hard on them.

With these and my homemade boat, I learned — pinwheeling down the narrow, deadfall-choked streams of my youth. Most rivers in Michigan are better suited to a canoe or a sleek Au Sable river boat, but if nothing else, these tight streams honed my ability to make quick, small adjustments, to finesse my way carefully around sweepers and slip between overhanging branches. When it came down to it, though, a driftboat wasn’t designed for the small, slow-moving rivers of the Midwest, and it increasingly seemed, neither was I.

Rowing as a pursuit has many disciplines. There are those who enjoy racing shells over flat water, those who live for running extreme rapids and those, like me, who’ve dedicated a large part of their life to the relatively obscure practice of using two pieces of expensively shaped wood to steer people toward catching fish.

Rowing in pursuit of fish is an endlessly complicated practice, one that still, season after season, engages and challenges me in ways that fishing itself often doesn’t. The variables are infinite — wind, client ability, river level, current speed — not to mention the different rowing strategies for different fishing tactics. For instance, I row differently for an angler pitching a streamer toward the bank than I do for one trying to get a drift with a nymph. When you have the angler in the front using a streamer and the one in the back using a nymph, or vice versa, you have a whole different set of concerns. How about if you’re on the perfect line and your angler gets a tangle or breaks off? Can you tuck the oars and tie the knot on the move with that midriver boulder fast approaching? It goes on and on. The nuance is actually quite remarkable, and the corresponding conversations guides have about it at the bar in the evening can get esoteric, philosophical, downright metaphysical — to the continued annoyance of spouses, bar staff and other civilians.

Athletes of all kinds talk about the “flow state,” and I think this melding of mind and body and environment is something that a master rower sometimes manages to achieve. I want to pause here for a radical notion, to appreciate guides who row for what they are: athletes — beer-drinking, fried chicken-eating, chew-spitting athletes, but athletes nonetheless. While certain guides I know wouldn’t outright say that they are the Michael Jordan of rowing the Yellowstone River, they wouldn’t necessarily disagree with the comparison, if someone were to propose it.

While it’s true that when I’m rowing well, I’m flowing, hardly thinking about it at all, I do actually think about rowing a lot at other times. For many years, I’ve helped instruct a guide school, and a large part of the curriculum is teaching folks the ins and outs of rowing a boat down a river for fishing. The act of articulating a rowing maneuver like the cross-stroke, or the crab, or a proper ferrying angle, is a process that forces me to think about my own rowing in ways that many guides probably don’t. If rowing for fishing is like some kind of advanced calculus, then teaching someone to row for fishing has to be like quantum mechanics — mixed with the occasional moment of sheer terror that only a driver’s ed teacher can truly appreciate. Even on a mellow stretch of river, it’s amazing how quickly things can get out of hand with a neophyte rower in the middle seat.

I’ve learned to never make assumptions about who will take to rowing. I’ve seen plenty of young, muscle-bound CrossFitters flail helplessly, and frail-seeming older folks achieve rapid fluidity. As with many skills, brute strength takes a back seat to technique. One of our regular guide school instructors, Marya, can’t be more than 5-foot-3 and 125 pounds soaking wet. It’s always funny to watch the students’ amazement as they watch her maintain perfect position in a stiff crosswind, or haul ass across the current in fast water to hit a particularly fishy-looking bank.

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While strength isn’t the most important facet of rowing, it is obviously a part of it. Over the course of a season, the physicality of rowing, especially on a big, windy river like the one I work on most, can be brutal. As middle age looms, I more often find myself pondering the notion that I’m only one shoulder or wrist injury away from being out of a job. Already it seems like I spend my entire winter trying to yoga my body back into shape for another season behind the oars. I still love it, though, and maybe now more than ever because there’s a bittersweet tinge. Every athlete spends the waning days of their career wrestling with how and when to call it quits. This reality is something I think about increasingly, but even so, worries of all sorts recede when I’m on the water — probably part of the reason I do this stuff in the first place.

I remember a particular day from early last season. I had two beginners, and it was during that slow period in midsummer, after the salmon flies but before the trout really start to key in on hoppers. We were struggling, and I’d resorted to running two heavy stonefly nymphs under a strike indicator. Eventually our fortunes improved, and we started getting the rods bent, mostly whitefish but the occasional trout, as well.

It was a classic day in southwest Montana — warm, not too windy, and the Absaroka Range still had hints of snow clinging in the shaded slopes, beautiful. My anglers were pleasant and having a great time now that they were sharing some success. At one point, we hit a slow stretch of water; the Yellowstone flattened out around us, the current almost imperceptible. We stared at the indicators, intently, silently. For a disconcerting moment, I found myself transported back to a muggy Michigan summer afternoon on Brockway Lake. Here I am, all these years later, still just sitting in a rowboat, waiting for a bobber to drop. Have my goals — my obsessions — in life been fundamentally unchanged since I was 10 years old? Is it possible that I have wasted my life?

The current began to pick up, and I made a few easy crab strokes toward the bank so my guys didn’t have to recast. Their flies swung right through the bucket, and when their bobbers dipped on cue, it was the same old, perfect jolt of excitement. Only a simple pleasure can reach this degree of distilled purity, can be this enduring. My 10-year-old self recognized it all the way back then.

Now, 30 or so years after the first time, I occasionally wonder how many oar strokes I’ve made in my lifetime. And of course, how many of my allotted number do I have left? Someday in the not-so-distant future my body will wear out; my head knows this even if my heart doesn’t want to admit it quite yet. Inevitably, that day will come, but until then, for better or worse, I’ll be a rower of boats. Sometimes the truths you instinctively grasp as a child have to be painstakingly relearned as an adult. We call this process finding meaning, but really it’s just remembering, in this case, something as simple as a nursery rhyme. I consider it to be a long-term practice. A beautiful pursuit. Something you hum under your breath. Merrily. Life is but a dream.