The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation) Read online

  Then one rainy afternoon in November, the school bus dropped off Joe just as darkness was enveloping the house. Walking up the driveway, stepping over potholes full of rainwater, Joe noticed his father’s car, its engine running. Something was tied to the roof, with a tarp over it. The younger kids were sitting in the backseat, among suitcases, and peering at him through steamy windows. Thula was sitting in the front seat, staring straight ahead. Joe’s dad stood on the porch, watching him approach. Joe mounted the porch steps. His father’s face was drawn and white.

  “What’s up, Pop? Where are we going?” Joe murmured.

  Harry looked down at the boards planking the porch, then raised his eyes and gazed off into the dark, wet woods, looking over Joe’s shoulder.

  “We can’t make it here, Joe. There’s nothing else for it. Thula won’t stay, at any rate. She’s insisting.”

  “Where are we going to go?”

  Harry turned to meet Joe’s eyes.

  “I’m not sure. Seattle for now, then California maybe. But, Son, the thing is, Thula wants you to stay here. I would stay with you, but I can’t. The little kids are going to need a father more than you are. You’re pretty much all grown up now anyway.”

  Joe froze. His gray-blue eyes locked onto his father’s face, suddenly blank and expressionless, like stone. Stunned, trying to take in what he had just heard, unable to speak, Joe reached out a hand and laid it on the rough-hewn cedar railing, steadying himself. Rainwater dripping from the roof splattered in the mud below. Joe’s stomach lurched. Finally he sputtered, “But can’t I just come along?”

  “No. That won’t work. Look, Son, if there’s one thing I’ve figured out about life, it’s that if you want to be happy, you have to learn how to be happy on your own.”

  With that, Harry strode back to the car, climbed in, closed the door, and started down the driveway. In the backseat, Mike and Harry Junior peered through the oval rearview window. Joe could see Harry Junior mouthing the words, “But what about Joe? What about Joe?” Joe watched the red taillights fade and disappear into a dark shroud of rain. He was fifteen years old, and he was on his own.

  Joe with his banjo.

  7

  A Rare and Sacred Thing

  As the first weeks of crew season wore on and the boys continued to toil aboard Old Nero, the weather turned raw and cold. Rain pelted their bare heads and shoulders. Their oars slapped against the wind-tossed waves, spraying icy water back into their faces, stinging their eyes. Their hands grew so numb that they could never be sure they had a proper hold on their oars. They could not feel their ears or noses. The cold lake beneath them seemed to suck warmth and energy out of them. Their aching muscles cramped up the moment they stopped moving. And the colder the weather got, the more boys gave up on crew. Even with most of the rich kids gone, Joe still stuck out among the survivors. He showed up every day in the same rumpled sweater, and almost every day the boys continued to make fun of it. He began going to practice early to change into his rowing clothes before the others arrived.

  Joe and Roger slowly became friends. Most days Joe sat with him in the cafeteria. Occasionally they talked about their engineering classes. As often as not, though, they ate in silence. Roger didn’t always say much, but there was a strand of affection and respect between them that Joe didn’t feel with most of the boys in the shell house. It didn’t really require a lot of talking.

  For Joe and Roger, practice was only one part of a long, hard day. Roger walked two and a half miles to school each day from his parents’ house, then slogged home again after classes and practice to help with family chores. On weekends he played saxophone in a band at night for extra money. During the day he worked for his family’s moving business, hoisting heavy sofas and beds and pianos in and out of homes all over town. This was often sad work, as he moved families out of houses they’d worked a lifetime to acquire and lost because of the Depression. Too often men stood hollow eyed and women wept in doorways as Roger loaded the last of their possessions onto a truck. But with businesses failing all over the country, and so many fathers and sons left without jobs, Roger was thankful his family had work at all.

  After engineering classes each day, Joe hurried to crew practice, then on to his job in the student athletic store. He worked there until midnight, then trudged through the rain and the dark to the YMCA. In exchange for working as a janitor there, he was given a tiny, dark room in the basement. The room was part of what had been a coal bin, and it was just big enough for a desk and a bed. For Joe, the room represented little more than a place to do his homework and stretch out his aching frame for a few hours before heading off to classes again in the morning. It was not anything one could call a home.

  By the end of October the original mass of hopeful rowers had been whittled down to eighty boys competing for a seat in the first two freshman boats. There would be a third boat and a fourth boat too, but the young men knew that practically nobody sitting in them would have a shot at making the top team—the varsity—the following year. On October 30 Coach Bolles decided it was time to move the best of them out of Old Nero and into shell barges. Both Joe Rantz and Roger Morris were picked to move up. Joe was bursting with pride the first time he sat down in one of the new boats.

  The shell barges were easy to capsize and difficult to maneuver. Joe and Roger would have to learn an entirely new set of skills simply to remain upright. But these boats still weren’t the sleek, narrow racing shells they’d row if they made the final team. Those boats happened to be some of the finest, fastest, most beautiful shells in the world, and they were built by hand right there in the Washington shell house. The man who shaped them, George Yeoman Pocock, was the same mysterious figure who’d been watching the boys so closely since their first meeting. And the reason he’d been studying them was that he knew as much about the fine art of rowing as he did about the art of building shells.

  Pocock was all but born with an oar in his hands. Raised in England, within sight of some of the finest rowing water in the world, he was descended from a long line of boatbuilders. His father crafted shells for Eton College, just across the Thames River from Windsor Castle. Gentlemen’s sons had been rowing competitively at Eton since the 1790s. At the age of fifteen, George began working alongside his father, laboring with hand tools to maintain and add to Eton’s fleet. But he didn’t just build boats; he also learned to row them, and to row them very well. At Eton, the coaches taught the boys to use long strokes, but George came to prefer the quick, powerful rowing style of the men who worked carrying passengers and freight on the Thames River. He adapted their style, inventing a more efficient stroke. Soon George and his brother, Dick, were outracing the aristocratic Eton boys, then giving informal rowing lessons to them after their classes.

  When George was seventeen, his father entered him in a professional race and told him he could build his own boat for the contest from scrap lumber. He gave his son some advice that George never forgot: “No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it.” So George took his time, carefully and meticulously handcrafting a single shell from Norwegian pine and mahogany. He won the race, defeating a field of fifty-eight oarsmen, and bringing home a large cash prize.

  Late in 1910, his father lost his job at Eton. It was a crushing blow. The two brothers did not want to be a burden to their father, so they boarded a boat to Canada, where they heard it was possible to make a good living working in the woods. They traveled west to Vancouver and toiled at a series of dangerous jobs, one of which cost George two of his fingers. In 1912, the Vancouver Rowing Club heard of their reputation in England and paid them to build two single sculls, or boats for individual oarsmen. The brothers set up shop in an old, derelict shed floating out in the harbor. There, fifty yards offshore, they finally resumed what would be their life’s work.

  The shop was not ideal. Daylight showed through the roof. Rain shuddered through wide gaps between the wallboards. To bathe, every morning they dove out the window of their unheated bedroom and into the cold salt water of the harbor. At low tide the water receded and the shed sat on a mud bank. When the tide surged back in, the structure would remain stuck to the mud and gradually fill with water. Finally the mud would loosen its grip and the shop would burst back to the surface, water rushing out the doors at each end. Even in these conditions, the brothers built beautiful boats, and word of their craftsmanship soon spread in Canada and America.

  One blustery gray day, George looked out the window of the floating workshop and saw a gangly and awkward man with a shock of reddish but graying hair flying in the wind. He was flailing his oars, not making progress in any direction. He looked, George thought, “like a bewildered crab.” Dick thought he must be drunk. Eventually the brothers snagged the man’s boat and dragged it alongside the workshop. When they helped him aboard, he grinned, stuck out a large hand, and boomed out, “My name is Hiram Conibear. I am the rowing coach at the University of Washington.”

  Conibear had become Washington’s coach because nobody else was available to take the job, not because he knew the first thing about rowing. But he’d heard about the brothers, and he wanted a few of their long, sleek, elegant shells for the team, so he had made the journey to Vancouver. Soon the Pocock brothers moved down to Seattle and set up a new workshop at the University of Washington. George began to watch the Washington oarsmen on the water and quickly spotted problems in their technique. At first he held his peace. But when Conibear began to ask the Pococks for their opinion about his boys’ rowing, George gradually spoke up. He began to teach the coach the more efficient style he’d developed in England, and the changes soon resulted in Washington’s first significant victories. Before long, the other schools were taking note of the style, trying to figure out how something so different could be so successful.

  Conibear died just a few years later, in 1917, when he climbed too far out on a limb while reaching for a plum in a tree in his backyard, and plunged headfirst to the ground. By then, however, Washington had become a serious contender in the college rowing world, and the coaches that followed Conibear came to rely on George for more than his boats. His brother, Dick, moved east to build shells for Yale, but George remained at Washington. Over the years, he watched many powerful and proud boys try to master the sport. As he studied and worked with them and counseled them, he learned much about the hearts and souls of young men. He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope. He saw the power of trust, the strength of the affection that sometimes grew between a pair of young men. Or among a boatload of them striving honestly to do their best. And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust might lift a crew to another place, where nine boys somehow became one thing—a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that, as they rowed, effort was replaced by ecstasy. It was a rare thing, a sacred thing—and George Yeoman Pocock, the man who’d been watching Joe and the other hopeful freshmen, knew more about it than anyone.

  8

  Going It Alone

  Rain was still pounding the roof of the half-finished house in Sequim when fifteen-year-old Joe woke up alone the morning after his family left him. A wind had come up during the night, and it moaned in the tops of the fir trees behind the house. Joe lay in bed for a long time, listening, remembering the days he spent lying in bed in his aunt’s attic in Pennsylvania listening to the moaning of trains in the distance. The same fear and loneliness he felt then was weighing on him again, pressing down on his chest. He did not want to get up, did not really care if he ever got up.

  Finally, though, he crawled out of bed, made a fire in the woodstove, put water on to boil, fried some bacon, and made some coffee. Very slowly, as he ate the bacon and the coffee cleared his mind, the spinning in his head began to lessen. He found himself creeping up on a new realization. It surprised him, but he opened his eyes and seized it, took it in, understood it all at once. He was sick and tired of finding himself scared and hurt and abandoned and endlessly asking himself why. Whatever else came his way, he wasn’t going to let anything like this happen again. From now on, he would make his own way. He would find his own route to happiness, as his father had said. He’d prove to his father and to himself that he could do it. He wasn’t going to be a hermit and live completely alone. Friends, he knew, could help him push away the loneliness. But he would never again let himself depend on them, nor on his family, nor on anyone. He would survive, and he would do it on his own.

  He made some oatmeal and sat back down to think some more. His father had always taught him that there was a solution to every problem. But he had always said that sometimes the solution wasn’t where people would ordinarily expect it to be. You might have to look in unexpected places and think in new and creative ways. He could survive on his own, he figured, if he just kept his eyes open for opportunities.

  Over the next few weeks and months, Joe began to fend entirely for himself. He drove iron stakes into the ground to defend the chicken coop against future mink attacks and treasured the few eggs he gathered every morning. He foraged in the dripping woods for mushrooms, gathered the last of the autumn’s blackberries, netted the last of the fish from the pond. He picked watercress for salads. Watercress and berries would only go so far, though. He knew he was going to need some money in his pocket. So he drove downtown in the old Franklin car his father had left behind, parked, and sat on the hood playing his banjo in the rain, hoping for spare change. In 1929, though, there was no such thing as spare change. Jobs and money were hard to find in towns like Sequim. People held on to every penny they had. His only audience consisted of a few stray dogs who sat on their haunches watching him idly and scratching their fleas. The only human who paid him any attention was a bearded character everyone called the Mad Russian, a man who had been wandering Sequim’s streets barefoot and muttering to himself for as long as anyone could remember.

  Joe dug deeper into his imagination for another way to earn money. Months before, he and his friend Harry Secor had discovered a spot on the Dungeness River where huge Chinook salmon lay in a deep, green, swirling pool. Some were as much as four feet long. Joe found a gaff hook in the barn, hid it in his pocket, and ventured up to the spot one misty Saturday morning with Harry. They worked their way through a tangle of cottonwood trees lining the Dungeness, dodging the game warden who patrolled the river. The boys cut a stout pole from a tree branch, lashed the gaff hook to it, and then stealthily approached the swift, cold river. If they were caught, there would be big trouble. The rules of fishing were strict. You were only allowed to catch the salmon with a proper hook and a line. The pole and hook the boys had devised was illegal, but Joe was desperate.

  He took off his shoes, rolled up his pants, and waded quietly into the shallows upstream from the pool. When Joe was in position, Harry started throwing large river rocks into the pool and beating the surface with a stick. In a panic, the fish dashed upstream toward Joe. As they flashed by, Joe aimed the gaff at one of the largest of them, thrust the pole into the water, and deftly snagged the fish under the gills. Then he stumbled out of the water and dragged the thrashing salmon up onto the gravel bank.

  Joe feasted on salmon that night, alone in the house. Then he set about turning the snagging of salmon into a business. Each Saturday afternoon he hiked the three miles into town with one or more of the enormous salmon slung over his shoulder, their tails dragging in the dust behind him. He sold the fish for cash or traded them for butter or meat or gas for his car.

  Later that winter Joe discovered another way of making some cash. And again it wasn’t exactly legal. Under the Prohibition laws, selling alcoholic drinks was illegal in 1929, but men called “bootleggers” made a living by sneaking liquor into the country and selling it to their customers. Joe discovered that a bootlegger named Byron Nobel was making the rounds in Sequim every Friday night, quietly leaving bottles behind particular fence posts. Joe learned to follow Nobel’s big black car around town on dark, frosty nights and swipe the bottles before Nobel’s customers could get to them. In their place Joe left bottles of dandelion wine he and Harry Secor brewed up in Joe’s barn. Then Joe quietly sold the liquor to his own list of satisfied customers.

  When he wasn’t catching salmon or stealing booze, Joe threw himself into any kind of legitimate work he could find. He dug tunnels under tree stumps in his neighbors’ pastures and pried them out of the earth with long iron bars or packed dynamite under them and blew them sky-high. He stooped and scraped with a shovel, digging irrigation ditches by hand. With a long-handled, double-edged ax, he split fence rails from massive cedar logs. He dug wells and built barns, crawling around in the rafters pounding nails. He lugged 120-pound cans of milk and sweet cream around dairy farms.

  As summer came on, he labored under pale blue skies in the dry fields, cutting hay, forking it into wagons, and hoisting it by the ton into the lofts of his neighbors’ barns. Later, he found work helping his older neighbor, a logger named Charlie McDonald. Together, Joe and Charlie worked a seven-foot two-man saw back and forth across the trunks of immense cottonwood trees. Sometimes it took an hour or more for them to fell a single tree. Then they lopped off all the branches with axes and pried the bark from the logs with long iron bars. Finally they harnessed them to Charlie’s draft horses so they could be dragged out of the woods and sent to a pulp mill. Later, Joe found a more enjoyable way to make a few dollars when he and two of his school friends formed a band. With Joe on the banjo, they played during intermissions at the movie theater and at dances in nearby towns. They seldom made much money, but their performances got them into the theaters and dance halls for free.