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Outside Magazine, July 2004
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Out There
Blackburn and Blue (Cont.)

BACK IN 1987, at the inaugural Blackburn Challenge, all 45 of the entrants were oar-powered rowing craft. Of the 167 boats that entered last year, 131 were paddle-powered. No one's complaining, exactly, but still—is paddling really Blackburnesque?

"The kayaks have really proliferated, and we've sort of grudgingly accepted them," Henry Szostek, a 60-year-old machinist who builds his own boats and has never missed a Blackburn, told me. "But I don't understand it. I wouldn't get in any boat you have to know how to operate with your head underwater."

Of course, when it comes to rowing, paddlers have their own questions. A friend of mine put it best. As I explained the mechanical advantages of rowing—the oar as lever, the oarlock as fulcrum, the sliding seat as a tool for harnessing leg power—he nodded, then frowned. "But how do you know where you're going?" he said.

You don't, always, but maybe that's part of rowing's appeal. Paddlers, if I may generalize, are forward-looking people, bouncy and optimistic—literalists who focus on their destination the way an ape focuses on a banana. Rowers are backward-looking, complicated, and wistful—romantic grinders who pull for a goal without ever quite seeing it clearly. Face away from what you want, the sport teaches. Put your back into it and pull hard, and someday you'll get there.

For me, the essential difference between the two disciplines was driven home the night before the race, when the Cape Ann Rowing Club hosted a talk by two ocean rowers, Tom Mailhot, 44, and John Zeigler, 54. A year earlier, the two had raced 35 other crews 2,900 nautical miles across the Atlantic, from the Canary Islands to Barbados. Something about the way Mailhot recounted their time—"58 days, three hours, and 54 minutes"—made the crowd laugh. But the venture had clearly exacted a steep price, wiping out Mailhot's bank account, wrecking Zeigler's marriage, and, they freely admitted, taking them right to "the psychological edge." "Will you do it again?" someone asked. "Next question," Mailhot snapped.

In a bow to the paddling contingent, the Rowing Club had also invited a kayaker to speak, a 44-year-old flatwater star named Greg Barton. At the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, he'd won two events in one day, the 1,000-meter doubles and the 1,000-meter singles, each by a margin of less than a foot. Barton preached the gospel of positive thinking, spiced with the occasional sarcastic zinger. "A lot of people came up to me after the second race and complimented me on my good luck," he said, "and I was like, ‘Yeah, after 18 years of training, today's my lucky day.' "

I should not have been surprised, then, to discover that the kayaker bearing down on me the next day, as I flailed my way south from Halibut Point, was the legendary double gold medalist himself. Yet I was surprised enough that I lost track of the waves now rolling in on my beam—a dangerous blunder in a narrow boat. Before I quite realized what was happening, one rose up in an oddly shaped peak and slapped me on the side of the head. The boat rolled to starboard and I pitched face first into the green Atlantic.

When I surfaced, Barton was a few feet away. "Is everything all right?" he asked. "Do you need any help?" "Maybe a few lessons," I said, trying to remember the approved technique for hoisting myself back into my boat. "But no, really, I'm fine... . Please, keep going." "Well, OK," Barton said doubtfully. "There's a chase boat right behind me."


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