The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation) Page 3

  Joe turned and bellowed at him in rage.

  Mike unleashed a long, wailing scream.

  A moment later, Thula ran down the steps, red faced and seething. She snatched Mike up from the ground, whisked him into the cabin, and slammed the door behind her.

  When Joe’s father came home from work later that evening, Thula was waiting for him in the doorway. She demanded that he take Joe out back and whip him with a belt, but Harry merely took him upstairs and gave him a good talking-to instead. Thula exploded. She declared that she would not live under the same roof as Joe, that Harry must choose between him and her. She said Joe would have to move out if she were to stay in such a godforsaken place. Joe was only ten years old.

  Early the next morning, Joe’s father led him up the wagon road to the schoolhouse at the top of the hill. He left Joe sitting outside on the steps and went in to talk to the male schoolteacher. Joe sat and waited in the morning sunlight. He drew circles in the dust with a stick and stared sadly at a Steller’s jay. The bird had perched on a nearby branch and begun screeching at him. It seemed to Joe that even the bird was scolding him.

  After a long while, his father and the teacher emerged from the schoolhouse and shook hands. They had struck a deal. Joe was to chop enough kindling and split enough wood to keep the school’s huge stone fireplace stoked day and night. In return, he would have a place to stay. From now on, he was going to sleep at the school.

  So began Joe’s life in exile. His stepmother would no longer feed him, so every day he trudged down the wagon road to the miner’s cookhouse for breakfast and dinner. The meals weren’t free. Joe worked for the company cook, Mother Cleveland. He carried heavy trays of steaming food from the cookhouse to the dining hall next door, where workers in dirty coveralls sat at long tables covered with white butcher paper. The plates were heaped high with hotcakes and bacon in the mornings and with slabs of meat and potatoes in the evenings. The men talked loudly and ate ravenously. As they finished their meals, Joe hauled their dirty dishes back to the cookhouse. In exchange for his efforts, Joe could eat all the bacon and hotcakes and meat and potatoes he wanted. In the evenings, after dinner, he trudged back up the mountain to the schoolhouse to chop more wood, do his homework, and sleep.

  The Gold and Ruby mine cabins.

  The work and the food proved good for Joe in one way. He continued to grow rapidly in size and strength. The long treks up and down the mountain built up his legs. Swinging the ax at the schoolhouse sculpted his arms and shoulders. He ate all he could at the cookhouse, yet he still always seemed to be hungry for more. Food was never far from his thoughts. When the schoolteacher taught him how to find edible mushrooms out in the woods, Joe was thrilled at the notion that he could find food that others might walk by without even noticing.

  Still, his world had again grown dark, narrow, and lonely. There were no boys his age in the camp. His best friends had been his father and Harry Junior. Now, living alone, he pined for the times when the three of them sneaked out behind the cabin to toss a ball around among the pine trees or to roughhouse in the dust. He missed how they used to pound out their favorite songs on the piano when his stepmother wasn’t around. He missed the times he’d spent alone with his father, playing cards or tinkering with their big Franklin touring car. Most of all he missed the times he and his father would sit out at night on the cabin’s porch and stare up into the astonishing swirls of stars shimmering in the black Idaho sky. They’d sit there, together, saying little, mostly just being together, breathing in the cold air, waiting for a falling star to wish upon. Sometimes his father would whisper, “Keep your eyes peeled. The only time you can’t see one is when you stop watching.” Sitting on the schoolhouse steps alone at night and watching the sky just didn’t seem the same.

  Freshmen on Old Nero, the training barge.

  5

  Making the Climb

  After the first meeting at the Washington shell house, the real practices began. Every day after classes, Joe made the long trek down to the lake. He donned his jersey and shorts. He weighed in, like all the boys, so the coaches could make sure they weren’t gaining too many extra pounds or training so hard that they lost too much weight. Each shell held eight rowers, along with a coxswain (pronounced kok-son), a smaller boy who’d direct their pace and steer the boat. At every practice, the boys were split into training crews, so Joe checked a chalkboard to see which group he was assigned to for the day. Then he joined the others on the wooden ramp in front of the shell house, to hear what Freshman Coach Bolles had to say.

  Tom Bolles was slim and young, with a bland, pleasant face. He was a former rower himself, and thanks to his habit of wearing wire-rimmed glasses, some sportswriters had nicknamed him “the professor.” The name was appropriate, since he had to do as much teaching as coaching with these newcomers. In those first few weeks, Bolles began each session with a talk. He changed his topic each day, but Joe had begun to notice two common themes. First, the boys heard time and again that rowing was difficult almost beyond imagining. In the months ahead, Bolles said, their bodies and moral characters would be tested. Only those who possessed near-superhuman physical endurance and mental toughness would prove good enough to wear a W on their chests. By Christmas break most of them would have given up, Bolles said, perhaps for something less demanding, like football.

  But it would not be all pain and difficulty. Bolles also spoke of life-transforming experiences. He said the boys had a chance to become part of something larger than themselves. The best of them would tap into a strength and power they did not yet know they possessed. They’d grow from boys to men. At times Bolles dropped his voice a bit and talked of near-mystical moments on the water—moments they would remember, cherish, and recount to their grandchildren when they were old men. Moments, even, that would bring them nearer to God.

  To achieve that level of brilliance, however, they would first have to train their bodies and minds to endure brutal punishment. The major muscles in their arms, legs, and backs had to be strong enough to propel the boat forward through the water, against the wind. At the same time, the smaller muscles in their necks, hands, wrists, and even feet would have to fine-tune their movements, adjusting their balance, controlling the oar, and ensuring that each motion was in tune with the seven other rowers in the boat. They’d risk injuries to their shoulders, knees, backs, and more. Their palms would blister and bleed from pulling those long oars until their hands developed tough calluses.

  And all that was merely what they could expect in practice. The competitive races would be the most brutal of all. There were no chances to cool off or drink water during a crew race. There were no time-outs. Their bodies would burn energy at a furious rate, a rate unlike that in almost any other sport. A single two-thousand-meter race was just as exhausting as playing two basketball games back-to-back. Yet all that effort would be packed into only six minutes. There was no question of whether they would hurt, or how much, Bolles said. The question was what they would do, and how well they would do it, when that pain struck.

  During those first days, as the boys listened to Coach Bolles, they occasionally noticed a figure standing in the background. He was tall, in his early forties, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses. He spoke with a crisp British accent and his hair was dark and wavy, long on top, but cropped high around the sides and back, so that he seemed to be wearing a bowl atop his head. Many of the boys knew that he built racing shells in the loft upstairs, for Washington and also for rowing teams across the country. Typically he wore a carpenter’s apron covered with red sawdust and curls of wood shavings. In time, they would find out that he was far more than a builder of boats. In fact, the heart and soul of much of what Coach Bolles was saying, the talk of those mystical moments on the water, had come from that mysterious figure in a carpenter’s apron.

  But the boys didn’t have much time to wonder about the man. Once Coach Bolles finished talking each day, they wrestled the long, white-bladed oars from their racks, carried them down to the water, and prepared to row. They were not remotely ready to step into a delicate, sixty-two-foot-long racing shell. They would have capsized it and ended up in the lake. Instead they waited turns to board the school’s training barge, Old Nero. The vessel was wide and flat-bottomed, with a long walkway running down the middle and eight seats for novice oarsmen on either side. All the rowers faced the back of the boat and sat on small seats that slid back and forth along greased runners. Since 1907, hundreds of hopeful freshman at the University of Washington had learned the basics of rowing in that old barge. Now it was Joe’s turn.

  As Joe and the boys flailed at their oars, Bolles and Ulbrickson strode up and down the walkway in their gray flannel suits and fedora hats. For now, Ulbrickson, the head of the rowing program, was just there to watch and look for potential talent for his Olympic dreams. He hardly said a word, but Coach Bolles barked at them continuously. He corrected the way they gripped the oars. He urged them to straighten their backs, to bend their knees, to straighten their legs. One moment he’d tell them to pull harder, the next he’d order them to ease up. It was bewildering and backbreaking.

  Training in Old Nero was not meant to be fun. The coaches used the heavy barge partly as a way to drive out the boys who lacked the toughness for crew. The boys strained and heaved and gasped for breath, but for all their efforts, Old Nero hardly moved through the ruffled waters of the lake. As they tried to absorb the lessons, they lived in constant fear of making any of the many mistakes Coach Bolles kept pointing out to them. One was particularly frightening. If the blade of their oar entered the water too deeply, at the wrong angle, or out of time with the others in their crew, or if it remained in the
water too long, the oar would suddenly become stuck. This was known as “catching a crab.” When it happened, it felt as if some gargantuan crustacean had reached up from the depths and seized the blade. The boat kept moving, but the oar didn’t. The boy who “caught the crab” might be smacked hard in the chest with the handle and knocked out of his seat. Or if he held on to the oar too long, he might be catapulted into the water. Every stroke he took offered each boy the possibility of a wet, cold, and spectacularly public form of humiliation.

  Out of all the freshmen, the only one who’d ever rowed before was Joe’s friend Roger Morris. As a boy, he’d spent his summers rowing a small boat in Manzanita Bay, a lovely blue cove in western Washington. When he was twelve years old, he once rowed fifteen miles from his family’s cabin outside Seattle to their house in the city, all because he had a terrible toothache and wanted to get home and see his mother. But aboard Old Nero, Roger Morris discovered that his experience was no help. His freewheeling style of rowing was nothing like the precise racing stroke that Coach Bolles was trying to teach.

  None of the freshmen found the technique easy to master. The days grew shorter, the October nights colder, and still the workouts went on for three hours every afternoon. By the time the boys came in off the water, their hands were blistered and bleeding. Their arms and legs throbbed. Their backs ached and they were soaked with a mixture of sweat and lake water. They racked their oars, hung their rowing clothes up to dry, dressed, and began the long walk up the hill to campus.

  Each evening, Joe noticed that fewer boys were making that climb. And he noted something else. The first boys to drop out were the ones with the fancy clothes and polished shoes. As Joe made his way to the shell house every afternoon, he saw more and more of those same boys lounging on the grass in front of the library. The hurting was taking its toll, and that was just fine with Joe. Hurting was nothing new to him.

  Portrait of young Joyce Simdars.

  6

  Another Chance at a Home

  Joe’s schoolhouse exile ended in November of 1924. When Thula gave birth to her first daughter, Rose, she demanded that the family leave Boulder City for good. So they picked up Joe at the schoolhouse, drove to Seattle, and moved into the basement of Thula’s parents’ home. With another infant to tend to, Thula was no happier in their cramped quarters here, though. Once again Joe always seemed to be in her way. So when Harry got a new job with a logging company a half day’s journey west of Seattle, Thula said Joe had to leave too. Harry took his son, still ten, to live with a family near the camp.

  By 1925 Harry had saved enough money to buy an auto repair and tire shop in Sequim (pronounced skwim), a small town northwest of Seattle. Sequim sat on a wide expanse of prairie between the snowcapped Olympic Mountains and the broad, blue waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The weather was dry compared to rain-drenched Seattle, so dry that early settlers had found cacti growing on the open prairies. Harry’s shop was right downtown, and the whole family moved into a small apartment above it.

  The school Joe and Joyce attended in Sequim.

  Joe enrolled in the Sequim school and spent his weekends tinkering with the cars in his dad’s garage. When the mayor of Sequim accidentally smashed up Harry’s car one day, he replaced it with a newer model, and Harry gave Joe his old Franklin so he could learn by repairing it. Another little girl arrived—Joe’s half sister Polly—and Harry bought some farmland outside town and began building a new house by hand.

  The farmland was rough and raw, covered by hundreds of stumps from the forest that had recently been logged off. Joe and his dad began to dig up the stumps. They dug a ditch to divert water from the nearby Dungeness River to a waterwheel that Harry built. The waterwheel powered a sawmill that Harry also built. Then he felled some of the few trees still standing on the property and used the lumber to frame a two-story house. He and Joe collected smooth river rocks from the Dungeness and erected an enormous stone fireplace. The house was still only half completed when Harry sold the shop and moved everyone out to the farm. Over the next two years, the work continued. Joe and his dad built a wide front porch, a woodshed, and a ramshackle henhouse that soon became home to more than four hundred chickens. They constructed a rickety milking barn for half a dozen dairy cows. Joe’s dad even figured out a way to use the waterwheel in the sawmill to generate electricity for lights in the house. On dark winter nights the lights flickered on and off depending on how much water was flowing through the waterwheel.

  They never quite finished the house, but that made little difference to Joe. Once again he felt like he had a home. And he had a new world to explore. The meadow behind the house was covered with sweet wild strawberries in summer. The water flowing from the waterwheel formed a deep, wide pond, which became home to salmon and steelhead and trout that swam down the ditch from the Dungeness. Whenever Joe wanted fish for dinner, he simply took out a net, picked one out, and hauled it in. At night, as he lay in bed, he could hear bears splashing in the pond for fresh salmon and trout of their own. Sometimes he could hear cougars shrieking out in the dark woods.

  At school, Joe became a popular and successful student. He was a particular favorite of Miss Flatebo, the music teacher. As the years passed, he acquired a collection of old, used stringed instruments, including a mandolin, several guitars, a ukulele, and two banjos. He’d play on the front porch after school, patiently mastering each instrument one by one. Soon he took to carrying one of the guitars onto the school bus. He’d sit in the back and play and sing as the other kids gathered around. There was one student in particular, a pretty girl named Joyce Simdars, who seemed to enjoy the music more than the rest. She had blonde curls, a button nose, and a fetching smile.

  Joyce was a bright, intellectually curious girl brought up in a severely strict household. Her father was cold and distant, more likely to cuddle the family dog than one of his own children. He believed that hard work meant more than anything, and that no amount of it was too much. Yet it was her mother’s unusual religious views that had the most powerful effect on Joyce. Her mother believed that there was only a “good Joyce.” To her mother, the Joyce who misbehaved on occasion was actually an impostor. So, when Joyce did something wrong, she ceased to exist for her mother. This “bad Joyce” was made to sit on a chair in a corner and then was ignored completely until, mysteriously, the “good Joyce” finally reappeared. Confused, young Joyce would sit there in the corner, sobbing and checking on herself over and over again, thinking, “But I’m still here. I’m still here.”

  When Joyce first laid eyes on Joe Rantz, strumming his guitar in the back of the school bus, singing some funny old song and flashing his big white toothy grin, she was drawn to him immediately. And the first time Joe glanced up the school bus aisle and noticed this pretty girl coming toward him, his heart lit up. Soon she was sitting by his side every day, singing along with him in perfect harmony.

  Joyce Simdars at sixteen.

  Before long, though, life in the Rantz family began to sour once more. One winter morning Thula accidentally tripped and dropped an iron skillet full of hot bacon grease, potatoes, and onions. Harry Junior was lying on the floor and the skillet landed square on his chest. He and Thula screamed simultaneously. He ran out the door and threw himself in a snowbank, but the damage was done. His chest was hideously burned and blistered. Confined to bed, he soon came down with pneumonia, and by the time he was well he had missed a year of school.

  In the fall of 1929, Joyce Simdars’s family home burned to the ground, while the family was away. Joyce was sent off to live for a time with family in Montana. The loss was a great one for Joe. All at once his morning bus ride to school was not what it had been. But much worse trouble lay ahead. A month after Joyce left, disaster struck Wall Street, the financial capital of the business world. The stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression. Companies were destroyed across the country. Businesses and family farms collapsed. In Sequim alone, dozens of families simply walked away from their homes and farms, many leaving their dogs behind to fend for themselves. Just a week after the stock market crash, packs of these dogs began appearing daily on the Rantz family farm, chasing the cows, nipping at their legs. Soon the cows were too tired to give milk. Two weeks later, minks stole into the henhouse and slaughtered dozens of chickens, leaving their bloody corpses piled up in the corners. Joe’s family had survived mostly by selling milk and eggs. Now they had little of either.