The Boys in the Boat Read online

  The workouts went on for three hours every afternoon, and as the days grew shorter they stretched into the dark and increasingly chilly October evenings. By the time the boys came in off the water each night, their hands were blistered and bleeding, their arms and legs throbbed, their backs ached, and they were soaked through and through with a clammy mixture of sweat and lake water. They racked their oars, hung their rowing clothes up to dry in a steam-heated locker in the shell house, dressed, and began the long trudge back up the hill to campus.

  Each evening, Joe Rantz noted with mounting satisfaction, there were fewer boys making the climb. And he noted something else. The first to drop out had been the boys with impeccably creased trousers and freshly polished oxfords. At a time when images of successful oarsmen appeared on the covers of Life and the Saturday Evening Post, varsity crew had seemed to many of them to be a way to build up their social status, to become big men on campus. But they had not reckoned on the sport’s extreme physical and psychological demands. As Joe made his way down to the shell house every afternoon, he saw more and more familiar boys—boys who had abandoned their boats—lounging on the grass in front of Suzzallo Library, casting him quick glances as he passed. The hurting was taking its toll, and that was just fine with Joe. Hurting was nothing new to him.

  Downtown Sequim

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It is hard to make that boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy, of course, is resistance of the water, as you have to displace the amount of water equal to the weight of men and equipment, but that very water is what supports you and that very enemy is your friend. So is life: the very problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming them.

  —George Yeoman Pocock

  On a stormy night in November 1924, Thula Rantz went into labor in her cabin at the Gold and Ruby mine. As she lay moaning in her bed, Harry set off for Bonners Ferry, Idaho, eighteen miles away on twisting mountain roads, to fetch a doctor. He promptly came to a washed-out bridge on the only road out of town. With help from some of the miners, he rebuilt the bridge, made it to Bonners Ferry, and returned just in time for the doctor to deliver his first daughter, Rose. But it had taken all night.

  That was the last straw for Thula. She was done with the cabin, done with the mine, done with Idaho. A few weeks later, they packed up the Franklin, picked up Joe from the schoolhouse, drove to Seattle, and moved into the basement of Thula’s parents’ home on Alki Point. For the first time in a year, they all lived under one roof.

  It didn’t go well. Thula, with yet another infant to tend to, was no happier in their cramped quarters in the basement than she had been in the cabin. Once again Joe in particular seemed to be always underfoot. So when Harry got a job as a mechanic with the Hama Hama Logging Company out on the Hood Canal—a half day’s journey west of Seattle by car and ferry—Joe had to leave too. Harry took his son, still ten, to live with a family, named Schwartz, near the logging camp.

  By 1925 Harry had saved up a bit of money from the Hama Hama job and used it to put a down payment on an auto repair and tire shop in Sequim, on the north side of the Olympic Peninsula. The shop was located right downtown on Washington Street, the main thoroughfare through town, squarely on the route of anyone traveling from Seattle to Port Angeles or farther out onto the peninsula. It seemed a good location, and it got Harry back to doing what he loved most, tinkering with cars. The whole family moved into a small apartment over the shop. Joe enrolled at the Sequim school. He spent his weekends helping his father work on cars, tinkering with carburetors and learning to vulcanize rubber, partly out of eagerness to exercise his own expanding mechanical aptitude and partly out of eagerness to stay out of Thula’s way upstairs. When the mayor of Sequim smashed up Harry’s Franklin while ogling a passing girl—breaking its wooden frame—he bought Harry a newer model, and Harry gave Joe the older Franklin so he could learn by repairing it. A second daughter, Polly, was born that year, and as his business took root Harry bought a stump farm—160 acres of recently logged land southwest of town. There he began to build, with his own hands, a large farmhouse.

  Sequim sat on a wide expanse of prairie between the snowcapped Olympic Mountains to the south and the broad, blue Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north. Vancouver Island was just visible on the horizon. Nestled in the lee of the mountains, sheltered from the storms that rotated in off the Pacific from the southwest, the area was far less rainy than most of western Washington, and the skies were blue more often than gray. The weather was so dry, in fact, that early settlers had found cacti growing in places. It was the kind of town where people got together on weekends to build a new church, to hold Sunday-afternoon ice cream socials, or to kick up their heels at Saturday-night square dances. In Sequim your butcher might also be the volunteer firefighter who saved your house or barn, as well as the neighbor who helped you rebuild it. It was a place where native women from the nearby Jamestown S’Klallam tribe might share recipes with a Protestant minister’s wife over a cup of coffee at Dryke’s Café, where old men sat in front of the post office on Saturday afternoon spitting brown arcs of tobacco juice into strategically arranged spittoons, where boys could sell melons purloined from local vegetable patches to Honolulu Pete at his fruit truck parked on Seal Street, where children could wander into Lehman’s Meat Market and be given a free hot dog in a bun just because they looked hungry, or where they might stop by Brayton Drug Store and be handed a piece of candy just because they said “please.”

  The farmhouse that Harry set about building amid the tree stumps outside of town became a work perpetually in progress. With Joe’s help, he dug a ditch to divert water, illegally, from an irrigation canal flowing out of the nearby Dungeness River. He rigged up a sawmill powered by the water he had diverted. He felled the few crooked trees left behind by the lumber company that had recently logged off the property, and then milled enough rough-cut lumber to frame the two-story house and apply cedar siding to part of it. He and Joe collected smooth river rocks from the Dungeness and laboriously erected an enormous stone fireplace. The house was still only half completed when he decided to sell the car repair shop and move his family out to the stump farm.

  Over the next few years, Harry and Joe kept pounding nails when they had the time. They built a wide front porch and a woodshed, a ramshackle henhouse that soon became home to more than four hundred chickens, and a rickety milking barn for half a dozen dairy cows that grazed among the stumps. Harry rigged a flywheel and generator to the waterwheel that powered his sawmill, ran electrical wire into the house, and dangled lightbulbs from the rafters. As the supply of water from the irrigation ditch waxed and waned, the lights flickered on and off and glowed with varying degrees of intensity. But he never quite got around to finishing the house.

  To Joe the condition of the house made little difference. Once again he had the semblance of a home and a new world to explore. Behind the house there was a meadow of nearly an acre, carpeted in summer with sweet wild strawberries. During the spring, water flowed over his father’s waterwheel with such force that it excavated a pool nearly ten feet deep and twenty-five feet long. Soon salmon and steelhead and trout from the Dungeness made their way up the irrigation ditch and gathered in schools in the pond. Joe rigged up a net on a long pole, and whenever he wanted fish for dinner he simply took the net out behind the house, picked out a fish, and hauled it in. The woods just beyond the property were full of bears and cougars. That troubled Thula and made her understandably nervous about her flock of small children, but Joe thrilled at night when he heard the bears splashing as they fished in the pond or the cougars screeching as they met their mates in the dark.

  Joe was a good and popular student. His classmates found him outgoing, freewheeling, handy with a joke, and fun to be around. A few who got to know him better found that he could suddenly and unexpectedly turn somber—never nasty or hostile, but guarded, as if there was a part of him he didn’t
want you to touch.

  He was a particular favorite of Miss Flatebo, the music teacher. Through barter and the generosity of a few friends, he soon owned a ragged collection of old stringed instruments—a mandolin, several guitars, an old ukulele, and two banjos. Sitting on the front porch every day after school, working at it again at night when his schoolwork was finished, he patiently and painstakingly taught himself to play each instrument proficiently. He took to carrying one of the guitars onto the school bus every day. He sat in the back, playing and singing the songs he loved—boisterous tunes from vaudeville acts he had heard on the radio, long comical ballads, and sad, lilting cowboy songs—entertaining the other students, drawing groups of them toward the rear of the bus to listen and sing along with him. It wasn’t long before he found that he had one particular devotee, a pretty slip of a girl named Joyce Simdars—with blond curls, a button nose, and a fetching smile—who more and more often sat next to him, singing along in perfect two-part harmony.

  To Joe, Sequim was shaping up to be near paradise. For Thula, though, it was yet another disappointment, not much of an improvement over Boulder City, her parents’ basement, or the apartment over the tire shop. Stuck in a half-finished house surrounded by rotting stumps and wild animals of all sorts, she felt as far removed as ever from the sophisticated life that she envisioned for herself. Everything about farm life appalled her—the daily milking of cows, the ever-present stench of manure, the relentless collecting of eggs, the daily cleaning of the cream separator, the always flickering light fixtures hung from the rafters. She despised the endless chopping of kindling to feed the woodstove, the early mornings and the late nights. And she was perpetually irritated by Joe and his teenaged friends and their makeshift bands, out on the wide front porch, making a racket day and night.

  All these miseries seemed compounded into a single horrific moment one misty winter morning when she turned from the woodstove with an iron skillet full of hot bacon grease, potatoes, and onions and tripped over Harry Junior, who was lying on his back on the floor. She dropped the skillet and its contents directly onto the boy’s neck and chest. She and her son screamed simultaneously. Harry ran out the door, tore off his shirt, and threw himself into a snowbank, but the damage was done—his chest was hideously burned and blistered. He survived, but only after contracting pneumonia, spending weeks in a nearby hospital, and missing a full year of school.

  After that, things began to sour once more for the whole family. In the fall of 1929, a hole opened up in Joe’s life. Joyce Simdar’s family home burned to the ground on the night of September 29, while the family was away. Joyce was sent off to live with an aunt in Great Falls, Montana, until the house could be rebuilt. All at once, the bus ride to school was not what it had been.

  A month later came a much more serious calamity. The rural economy of the United States had already been in desperate straits for some time by that fall. Huge surpluses of wheat, corn, milk, pork, and beef produced in the Midwest had caused the price of farm commodities to crash. Wheat brought in only a tenth of what it had nine or ten years before. In Iowa a bushel of corn fetched less than the price of a packet of gum. And the price collapse began to spread to the Far West. Things in Sequim were not yet as hard as on the Great Plains, but they were hard enough. The Rantz farm, like countless others across the country, had so far barely managed to remain profitable. But when they picked up the Sequim Press on October 30 and read what had happened in New York over the last several days, Harry and Thula Rantz knew with cold certainty that the world had utterly changed, that they would not long be sheltered from the storm on Wall Street, not even in Sequim, out in the far northwestern corner of the whole country.

  Over the next few weeks, things continued to unravel at the Rantz house on Silberhorn Road. A week after the financial crash, wild dogs began to appear daily on the farm. Dozens of families had simply walked away from their homes and farms in Sequim that fall, many leaving dogs behind to fend for themselves. Now packs of them began chasing the cows all over the Rantz property, relentlessly nipping at their legs. The bellowing, distressed cows lumbered among the stumps until they were exhausted and stopped giving the milk that was the farm’s principal cash product. Two weeks later, minks stole into the henhouse and slaughtered dozens of chickens, leaving their bloody corpses piled up in the corners. A few nights later, they did it again, almost as if for sport, and now the egg money dwindled away. Harry Junior would later say of events that fall, “Everything just stopped dead in the water. It was almost as if someone said to God, ‘Go after them!’”

  Then late one rainy afternoon in November, the school bus dropped off Joe just as darkness was enveloping the house. Walking up the driveway to the house, stepping over potholes full of rainwater, Joe noticed his father’s Franklin, its engine running, plumes of white exhaust billowing from the tailpipe. Something was tied to the roof of the car, with a tarpaulin over it. As he drew nearer, he saw that the younger kids were sitting in the backseat, among suitcases, and peering out at him through steamy windows. Thula was sitting in the front seat, staring straight ahead, looking at the house, where Harry stood on the porch, watching Joe 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 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 watched the red taillights recede and disappear into a dark shroud of rain. He turned and walked into the house and closed the door behind him. The whole thing had taken less than five minutes. The rain was thundering on the roof now. The house was cold and damp. The lightbulbs hanging from the rafters flickered on for a moment. Then they flickered off and stayed off.

  • • •

  Rain was still pounding the roof of the half-finished house in Sequim when Joe woke up the next morning. 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 had spent lying in bed in his aunt’s attic in Pennsylvania listening to the mournful sound of trains in the distance, with fear and aloneness weighing on him, pressing down on his chest, pushing him into the mattress. The feeling was back. He did not want to get up, did not really care if he ever got up.

  Finally, though, he did get up. He 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 diminish and he found himself creeping up on a new realization. He opened his eyes and seized it, took it in, comprehended it all at once, and found that it came accompanied by a fierce determination, a sense of rising
resolution. He was sick and tired of finding himself in this position—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, 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 wouldn’t become a hermit. He liked other people too much for that, and friends could help push away the loneliness. He would never again let himself depend on them, though, nor on his family, nor on anyone else, for his sense of who he was. He would survive, and he would do it on his own.

  The smell and taste of the bacon had stimulated his appetite mightily, and he was still hungry. He got up and rummaged through the kitchen to take inventory. There wasn’t much to be found—a few boxes of oatmeal, a jar of pickles, some eggs from the chickens that had survived the mink attacks, a half a head of cabbage and some bologna in the icebox. Not much for a fifteen-year-old boy already approaching six feet.

  He made some oatmeal and sat back down to think further. His father had always taught him that there was a solution to every problem. But he had always stressed that sometimes the solution wasn’t where people would ordinarily expect it to be, that you might have to look in unexpected places and think in new and creative ways to find the answers you were looking for. He remembered the mushrooms on the rotten logs in Boulder City. He could survive on his own, he figured, if he just kept his wits about him, if he kept his eyes open for opportunities, and if he didn’t allow his life to be dictated by other people’s notions of what he should do.