[Rowing on the lovely Chicago River. WBEZ photo by Kyle Weaver]
Our Recovery on Water rowing team was featured on Chicago Public Radio today. Listen here.
The Trib wrote about us earlier this week.
[Tribune photo by Terrence James]
Showing posts with label rowing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rowing. Show all posts
Friday, October 1, 2010
Rowing on the radio
[Rowing on the lovely Chicago River. WBEZ photo by Kyle Weaver]
Our Recovery on Water rowing team was featured on Chicago Public Radio today. Listen here.
The Trib wrote about us earlier this week.
[Tribune photo by Terrence James]
Thursday, January 21, 2010
January 2010: Cancer Bitch discovers foot straps
Again I am clueless even though I get as much instruction as everyone else. At rowing practice recently I realized, O, the straps are supposed to be tight around your foot, O, you’re supposed to adjust the foot-holder so that the bottom part is snug around your ankle, O you’re supposed to push against the strap when you push off from the balls of your feet and from the ankles.
I’d made my strap loose before, I’d not known how to determine the length of the footholder. All of this is obvious and seems like it should have been obvious. But it was like I had the pieces but didn’t put them together right. I would make the strap fairly loose, wondering why exactly we had to strap our feet in. My time was really good today, our young coach J said the other day, you're flying, you’ll have to get a new 20-minute average.
What is it about me that takes so long to understand the obvious? There was a column some years back in the SF Chronicle by a woman who was unfit for the world or a failure at living. She would write about how daunting it was to renew her driver’s license.
Then there is the narrator of Deborah Eisenberg's short story Days: I have always wondered, up until this moment, whenever I have heard them mentioned, what tube socks are. Now I realize...They're SOCK TUBES, and they are the only sort of socks that make any sense, because you just stick your foot into one any old way and leave it there, and the sock, not your foot, has to adjust. The feelings of confusion produced by the term "tube sock" are not, I realize, due to the nature of the tube sock itself but rather to the term's implication that all socks are not tube socks and the attendant question of why they are not.
In high school we could paint on the walls of the Newspaper Shack. There were two young Surrealists who were a year younger than I was/am, and they wrote on the wall things like: Man discovers hand, 1936. Their trademark call-and-response was: Who is the Real Snake? Yes. One was Mormon and looked like an IBM employee from the early years and talked about the upcoming missionary work. The other was lanky and stooped with long blond hair and later had a girlfriend with curly blond hair and they spent all lunchtime on the old old couch, oblivious to everyone else. Causing us to chant: She offered her honor, he honored her offer, so it was honor, offer. This all relates somehow to the de-familiarization of the familiar and more importantly, vice versa. And to late discoveries.
I’d made my strap loose before, I’d not known how to determine the length of the footholder. All of this is obvious and seems like it should have been obvious. But it was like I had the pieces but didn’t put them together right. I would make the strap fairly loose, wondering why exactly we had to strap our feet in. My time was really good today, our young coach J said the other day, you're flying, you’ll have to get a new 20-minute average.
What is it about me that takes so long to understand the obvious? There was a column some years back in the SF Chronicle by a woman who was unfit for the world or a failure at living. She would write about how daunting it was to renew her driver’s license.
Then there is the narrator of Deborah Eisenberg's short story Days: I have always wondered, up until this moment, whenever I have heard them mentioned, what tube socks are. Now I realize...They're SOCK TUBES, and they are the only sort of socks that make any sense, because you just stick your foot into one any old way and leave it there, and the sock, not your foot, has to adjust. The feelings of confusion produced by the term "tube sock" are not, I realize, due to the nature of the tube sock itself but rather to the term's implication that all socks are not tube socks and the attendant question of why they are not.
In high school we could paint on the walls of the Newspaper Shack. There were two young Surrealists who were a year younger than I was/am, and they wrote on the wall things like: Man discovers hand, 1936. Their trademark call-and-response was: Who is the Real Snake? Yes. One was Mormon and looked like an IBM employee from the early years and talked about the upcoming missionary work. The other was lanky and stooped with long blond hair and later had a girlfriend with curly blond hair and they spent all lunchtime on the old old couch, oblivious to everyone else. Causing us to chant: She offered her honor, he honored her offer, so it was honor, offer. This all relates somehow to the de-familiarization of the familiar and more importantly, vice versa. And to late discoveries.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Triangle
Cancer Bitch is slightly traumatized (if that's not an oxymoron). She admits she did gain 30 pounds in her 40s, but she thought she was still sort of in the normal range. But today she went to the Y to meet for the very first time with a personal trainer and the trainer gave her that thing to hold in front of herself that looks like white binoculars except there's plastic where the lenses would be. It feels a little like a dousing tool but it supposedly sends out fat-seeking beams that report back to the device with a number. And that number corresponds to designations and according to the number, Cancer Bitch was designated as obese. How could this be?
[Bathsheba by Rembrandt]
Her friend G once said that women retain the image of themselves as they were at 30. Cancer Bitch wonders if this statement is accurate, first of all, and second of all, for the rest of someone's life. If you're 80, do you still think of yourself as you were at 30? When she was 30 Cancer Bitch had a very little bit of cellulite. When she was 28 she did aerobics and felt that she looked OK. But it has been a long time since she was 28. Does she think of herself as she was at 30? No. And she has a couple of items of clothing from yesteryear that she keeps around because she hopes one day to be able to wear them again. She will.
[Renoir]
CB has not had sugar (well, not had foods that have a lot of sugar, like candy, cookies, cake, muffins) since December 28 and she has been rowing indoors with her rowing team (which welcomes new members, with or without rowing experience). Shouldn't that count for something? CB also thinks that a person should get credit for the foods she's exposed to and does not eat. That, too, doesn't seem like too much to ask, but the problem is there is no one to ask because, in her lights, there is no god or divine Mind running things, things just are. So buck up, Cancer Bitch. This is not the best of all possible worlds.
Alas, during CB's travels in November (Omaha, Houston, Atlanta, South Florida) she carried suitcases up and down stairs, which put pressure on her knees so now she can't jog or even do the elliptical without her knees hurting some. But her new personal trainer says she will give her exercises that will strengthen surrounding leg parts and help her knees. CB also picked up her suitcase and stored it in the overhead bin a few too many times and has some muscle pain in her back. She hopes it is muscle pain and not metastasis in her ribs. Yet there is this terrible terrible part of her that wants what they call "mets." How could this be? Metastasis is one more step toward death. Is it the dark drama of it she wants? She knows that only this thanatos-loving part of her wants...thanatos, death. She heard on the radio that teens under 15 don't understand the finality of death. Maybe CB is so immature that she is like a 15-year-old. Yet she has thought about death all her life. She is tired of writing about how she has always thought of death. But she does not want that warm oblivion. Or cool. She imagines it dark like a deep deep purple, a forever-sleep.
Cancer Bitch knows that she is a Holocaust Girl, a person obsessed with the Holocaust. She coined the term and wrote the book. But she also wants to live and be strong (Hello, Lance Armstrong) and turn that fat into muscle or into nothingness. She wants the fat to disappear. How odd that parts of your body can disappear. She likes the flier that promises: Lose 150 pounds of ugly fat instantly. It's a flier advertising martial arts for women. (See, you push the guy away.)
For many years Cancer Bitch was tall and gangly. Her mother said she could be a model. Once where she was in her early teens she met with a modeling agent who looked at her and then ran her hands along her sides and said that she had the shape of a coke bottle. This was not a good thing in a model. CB was too short to be a model, too, but the agent didn't even bother with that. Over the years CB has become more triangle-shaped. A pyramid. A delta. This is not a good shape to be, even if we didn't live in a fat-obsessed society that oppresses women who do not conform to the unhealthily thin Hollywood ideal. Cancer Bitch will work on her muscles and cardio and she hopes one day to be a coke bottle again, but one with some umph to her. She will challenge you to an arm-wrestle, even.
[Bathsheba by Rembrandt]
Her friend G once said that women retain the image of themselves as they were at 30. Cancer Bitch wonders if this statement is accurate, first of all, and second of all, for the rest of someone's life. If you're 80, do you still think of yourself as you were at 30? When she was 30 Cancer Bitch had a very little bit of cellulite. When she was 28 she did aerobics and felt that she looked OK. But it has been a long time since she was 28. Does she think of herself as she was at 30? No. And she has a couple of items of clothing from yesteryear that she keeps around because she hopes one day to be able to wear them again. She will.
[Renoir]
CB has not had sugar (well, not had foods that have a lot of sugar, like candy, cookies, cake, muffins) since December 28 and she has been rowing indoors with her rowing team (which welcomes new members, with or without rowing experience). Shouldn't that count for something? CB also thinks that a person should get credit for the foods she's exposed to and does not eat. That, too, doesn't seem like too much to ask, but the problem is there is no one to ask because, in her lights, there is no god or divine Mind running things, things just are. So buck up, Cancer Bitch. This is not the best of all possible worlds.
Alas, during CB's travels in November (Omaha, Houston, Atlanta, South Florida) she carried suitcases up and down stairs, which put pressure on her knees so now she can't jog or even do the elliptical without her knees hurting some. But her new personal trainer says she will give her exercises that will strengthen surrounding leg parts and help her knees. CB also picked up her suitcase and stored it in the overhead bin a few too many times and has some muscle pain in her back. She hopes it is muscle pain and not metastasis in her ribs. Yet there is this terrible terrible part of her that wants what they call "mets." How could this be? Metastasis is one more step toward death. Is it the dark drama of it she wants? She knows that only this thanatos-loving part of her wants...thanatos, death. She heard on the radio that teens under 15 don't understand the finality of death. Maybe CB is so immature that she is like a 15-year-old. Yet she has thought about death all her life. She is tired of writing about how she has always thought of death. But she does not want that warm oblivion. Or cool. She imagines it dark like a deep deep purple, a forever-sleep.
Cancer Bitch knows that she is a Holocaust Girl, a person obsessed with the Holocaust. She coined the term and wrote the book. But she also wants to live and be strong (Hello, Lance Armstrong) and turn that fat into muscle or into nothingness. She wants the fat to disappear. How odd that parts of your body can disappear. She likes the flier that promises: Lose 150 pounds of ugly fat instantly. It's a flier advertising martial arts for women. (See, you push the guy away.)
For many years Cancer Bitch was tall and gangly. Her mother said she could be a model. Once where she was in her early teens she met with a modeling agent who looked at her and then ran her hands along her sides and said that she had the shape of a coke bottle. This was not a good thing in a model. CB was too short to be a model, too, but the agent didn't even bother with that. Over the years CB has become more triangle-shaped. A pyramid. A delta. This is not a good shape to be, even if we didn't live in a fat-obsessed society that oppresses women who do not conform to the unhealthily thin Hollywood ideal. Cancer Bitch will work on her muscles and cardio and she hopes one day to be a coke bottle again, but one with some umph to her. She will challenge you to an arm-wrestle, even.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
I don't wanna think about it.
I'm not talking about cancer.
I'm talking about rowing.
I started rowing on Thursday with the cancer rowers. The boat, as noted previously, is very skinny. Very very skinny, even narrower than the escalator at the North and Clybourn L stop. I got in the four-person scull, after being warned that if I put my foot on the floor of the boat, it would break through.
So I sat in position 3. I was terrified. Not that I would drown, because even if I caused the boat to flip, I wouldn't be in much danger. We were close to the dock, I can swim, the river ain't that big, and Coach J was nearby in her motor boat with a supply of orange life jackets. And it's summer. No need to fear hypothermia. I wasn't afraid of the river, which I should have been, because it is opaque and nasty and filled with debris. It was terror at being in this small boat and seeing the water just out there. Like right out there. Like an inch away, nothing but the walls of the boat separating water and Cancer Bitch. The uncanny, I've read, can be defined as a thing that should be inside being outside. I guess the river is far away all the time and now it was right there, all around me. How did early peoples invent boats, anyway? How odd odd odd it is that a boat can float. And that we can sit in a boat and it'll still float.
[ROW photo]
So I rowed and the coxswain yelled at me and I got confused. Watch S, in front of you, J said, do what she does. But I couldn't see what she was doing. Just her back. And her oar is on the port side and mine's on the starboard so I couldn't do exactly what she was doing. I would get into the rhythm (thinking about 1-2-3-4, pull, lean back, lean forward, bend knees, move the oar perpendicularly through the water, and then bring it back forward. I would time-out every so often, getting everything backwards and then I'd let the oar lay flat on the water, a neutral position, not hurting anything. Not helping, either. I was thinking about multiple intelligences and how I've always known that I don't have the athletic/coordinated intelligence. I was thinking about how A and I took ballet when we were in junior high--we were the big girls in a class of little kids--and how I could never memorize the sequences. I never remember what to do in step classes. Downtown Bobby Brown. Cha cha cha. I can do the grapevine with my feet when I'm part of a circle, and I remember step-shuf-fle-ball-change from gym class and the pronged taps we pushed into our tennis shoes. I kept getting out of sequence with my oar. The coxswain kept yelling that I needed to push the oar all the way out on the water, against the oar lock, not draw it back in. She kept saying Amy do this and Amy do that I thought that she thought my name was Amy and that I was supposed to do what she was telling Amy to do. And I probably even started thinking that my name was Amy, but Amy was a person behind me, toward the bow (back).
In my youth it took me so long to learn how to run into the jump rope when it was going going, slapping against the sidewalk. It was terrifying. You have to time it right. It seems like a door that opened just for a second.
There was a name for that running-into-the-rope-in-between-the-scoops-of-it but I don't remember what it was. And before I was able to do run into the jump rope and start jumping, it seemed impossible, and that's how it felt when I was sitting on the boat and trying to keep up. It seems impossible but everyone else is managing to do it.
And then Coach J said, Why don't you get out and let S take your place and I felt like I had failed. Someone else had to take my place. Besides yelling what I should be doing, Coach J had been yelling encouragement but then I heard her say to C, the high school rower in the boat with her, that you have to find something good that someone is doing, even if they're not doing it, and when I brought it up, she said, No, but you were good.
But back to the not wanting to think about it. I felt drawn, drawn to rowing and so I met up with S, who is Coach J's friend and maybe a coach, too, at the Lincoln Park Boat Club, which is hidden away between the zoo parking lot and the lagoon. We went into a workout room and did the ergs. That was Friday. And then I emailed S about meeting up today and she said, come around 7, and today I kept thinking, I'm going to go back there, and I felt drawn to the erg, and thought of the high school film we saw with Lorne Greene (born Lyon Himan "Chaim" Green) intoning, I must go down to the sea again and I was feeling that way about the erg. And I didn't want to think about it, analyze it because then I was afraid that I wouldn't feel drawn to it any more.
I did go there tonight and S gave me a workout (one minute of this, one of this, etc.) and I was less deliberate with my motions, not tracking 1-2-3-4, but going forward, bent knees, pull, lean back, recover. I'm getting the hang of rowing on the erg, and tomorrow, Monday, I will be back on the dirty water in the very skinny boat. And maybe I will see a Great Blue Heron again, which flew over the edge of the river last week, and we took it as a sign that the river still has life in it.
I'm talking about rowing.
I started rowing on Thursday with the cancer rowers. The boat, as noted previously, is very skinny. Very very skinny, even narrower than the escalator at the North and Clybourn L stop. I got in the four-person scull, after being warned that if I put my foot on the floor of the boat, it would break through.
So I sat in position 3. I was terrified. Not that I would drown, because even if I caused the boat to flip, I wouldn't be in much danger. We were close to the dock, I can swim, the river ain't that big, and Coach J was nearby in her motor boat with a supply of orange life jackets. And it's summer. No need to fear hypothermia. I wasn't afraid of the river, which I should have been, because it is opaque and nasty and filled with debris. It was terror at being in this small boat and seeing the water just out there. Like right out there. Like an inch away, nothing but the walls of the boat separating water and Cancer Bitch. The uncanny, I've read, can be defined as a thing that should be inside being outside. I guess the river is far away all the time and now it was right there, all around me. How did early peoples invent boats, anyway? How odd odd odd it is that a boat can float. And that we can sit in a boat and it'll still float.
[ROW photo]
So I rowed and the coxswain yelled at me and I got confused. Watch S, in front of you, J said, do what she does. But I couldn't see what she was doing. Just her back. And her oar is on the port side and mine's on the starboard so I couldn't do exactly what she was doing. I would get into the rhythm (thinking about 1-2-3-4, pull, lean back, lean forward, bend knees, move the oar perpendicularly through the water, and then bring it back forward. I would time-out every so often, getting everything backwards and then I'd let the oar lay flat on the water, a neutral position, not hurting anything. Not helping, either. I was thinking about multiple intelligences and how I've always known that I don't have the athletic/coordinated intelligence. I was thinking about how A and I took ballet when we were in junior high--we were the big girls in a class of little kids--and how I could never memorize the sequences. I never remember what to do in step classes. Downtown Bobby Brown. Cha cha cha. I can do the grapevine with my feet when I'm part of a circle, and I remember step-shuf-fle-ball-change from gym class and the pronged taps we pushed into our tennis shoes. I kept getting out of sequence with my oar. The coxswain kept yelling that I needed to push the oar all the way out on the water, against the oar lock, not draw it back in. She kept saying Amy do this and Amy do that I thought that she thought my name was Amy and that I was supposed to do what she was telling Amy to do. And I probably even started thinking that my name was Amy, but Amy was a person behind me, toward the bow (back).
In my youth it took me so long to learn how to run into the jump rope when it was going going, slapping against the sidewalk. It was terrifying. You have to time it right. It seems like a door that opened just for a second.
There was a name for that running-into-the-rope-in-between-the-scoops-of-it but I don't remember what it was. And before I was able to do run into the jump rope and start jumping, it seemed impossible, and that's how it felt when I was sitting on the boat and trying to keep up. It seems impossible but everyone else is managing to do it.
And then Coach J said, Why don't you get out and let S take your place and I felt like I had failed. Someone else had to take my place. Besides yelling what I should be doing, Coach J had been yelling encouragement but then I heard her say to C, the high school rower in the boat with her, that you have to find something good that someone is doing, even if they're not doing it, and when I brought it up, she said, No, but you were good.
But back to the not wanting to think about it. I felt drawn, drawn to rowing and so I met up with S, who is Coach J's friend and maybe a coach, too, at the Lincoln Park Boat Club, which is hidden away between the zoo parking lot and the lagoon. We went into a workout room and did the ergs. That was Friday. And then I emailed S about meeting up today and she said, come around 7, and today I kept thinking, I'm going to go back there, and I felt drawn to the erg, and thought of the high school film we saw with Lorne Greene (born Lyon Himan "Chaim" Green) intoning, I must go down to the sea again and I was feeling that way about the erg. And I didn't want to think about it, analyze it because then I was afraid that I wouldn't feel drawn to it any more.
I did go there tonight and S gave me a workout (one minute of this, one of this, etc.) and I was less deliberate with my motions, not tracking 1-2-3-4, but going forward, bent knees, pull, lean back, recover. I'm getting the hang of rowing on the erg, and tomorrow, Monday, I will be back on the dirty water in the very skinny boat. And maybe I will see a Great Blue Heron again, which flew over the edge of the river last week, and we took it as a sign that the river still has life in it.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Rowing
I went boating tonight.
It wasn't exactly like this. The picture on the left makes me think of You've come a long way, baby, which was an ad for cigarettes that strongly and delicately gave women cancer. As opposed to Marlboros and Marlboro men.
I was in a motorized rowboat or non-rowboat with the coach of about a dozen women who'd had breast cancer and who were rowing two skinny boats with long oars. Skinny skinny boats. I had no idea. There were coxswains facing them, giving instruction from the front of the boat while the women rowed and went backwards. This is crew. This is rowing. We were on the dirty Chicago River, with styrofoam cups and all kinds of jetsam floating on it. We were out in Nature, it seemed sort of, because there were trees lining the banks or at the banks, but there was unidentifiable trash hanging from the branches, and there were also walls along the banks, as in Don't hit the wall! There was the smell of gasoline (from our boat) and an industrial polluted smell from all the industry alongside the river--mounds of gravel, rusty bridges, smokestacks, a crane that was picking up pieces of metal and stacking them into a boxcar--but also you could see the Sears Tower and annoying cookie-cutter brick houses. It was quite wonderful. If I had been out in real nature, I don't know how I would have felt. Frightened of the void? Maybe. Here there was no void, really the opposite of void.
The women are part of Recovery on Water, which I found out about a week or so ago. I want to join it and the first thing you do is observe, then work out on an erg or ergometer, a rowing machine in a gym. Some of them were wearing compression sleeves over their arms to keep from getting lymphedema; one of them got lymphodema years after surgery, the coach said. That scared me, because I thought I was immune to it, that I had passed the danger zone. Apparently not.
The coach is a young woman who hasn't had cancer. She coaches at a Catholic school, and some of the boys on her team rowed with the women. They did it originally for community service points, but J the coach says she thinks they've gone beyond the required hours. One of the boys was the coxswain, facing the rowers and giving instruction with some electronic gizmo transmitting his words to all of them. From our boat, the coach yelled things, like Lean back, lean forward, push, don't get the black part of the oar in the water, keep your arms straight, and beautiful when someone did well. I thought of a man I know in the suburbs who goes out in a kayak every morning and the way he described it I could tell he loved it and found serenity and sublimity on the water in the early morning light. One Saturday years ago I was in a kayak with a friend who loved kayaking. We launched from the Rogers Park beach and lots of water got in the very tiny boat and I couldn't understand why the boat was so small. If it were larger we wouldn't have gotten all the water on us. These kayaks were in the lake, which is much cleaner than the river. Though with all the muck in the river there were still fishermen today standing on a bridge and I suppose planning to eat what they caught.
It looked more like this. Image (c) Ignacius Chicago Crew
I kept wanting to get into one of those crew boats and try out rowing and thought about some certificate I got in summer camp asserting that I had achieved one level or the other in Canoeing. I liked Canoeing and Fishing because you got to sit down. Everyone says now that kids are coddled and that every kid gets a trophy and they get inflated ideas about their worth, and it was never like that before, but back in the 1960s and 1970s at summer camp we got certificates for everything. I got one for having the funniest little skit on Titanic Night. (Why we sang the Titanic song and dressed as hapless passengers is beyond me.) That was my most successful experience at summer camp. My sojourn lasted two days. I got mumps and spent a lovely afternoon in the infirmary, waiting for my parents to pick me up while I read Pollyanna and watched the denatured skunk who lived there.
After that, camp was downhill.
It wasn't exactly like this. The picture on the left makes me think of You've come a long way, baby, which was an ad for cigarettes that strongly and delicately gave women cancer. As opposed to Marlboros and Marlboro men.
I was in a motorized rowboat or non-rowboat with the coach of about a dozen women who'd had breast cancer and who were rowing two skinny boats with long oars. Skinny skinny boats. I had no idea. There were coxswains facing them, giving instruction from the front of the boat while the women rowed and went backwards. This is crew. This is rowing. We were on the dirty Chicago River, with styrofoam cups and all kinds of jetsam floating on it. We were out in Nature, it seemed sort of, because there were trees lining the banks or at the banks, but there was unidentifiable trash hanging from the branches, and there were also walls along the banks, as in Don't hit the wall! There was the smell of gasoline (from our boat) and an industrial polluted smell from all the industry alongside the river--mounds of gravel, rusty bridges, smokestacks, a crane that was picking up pieces of metal and stacking them into a boxcar--but also you could see the Sears Tower and annoying cookie-cutter brick houses. It was quite wonderful. If I had been out in real nature, I don't know how I would have felt. Frightened of the void? Maybe. Here there was no void, really the opposite of void.
The women are part of Recovery on Water, which I found out about a week or so ago. I want to join it and the first thing you do is observe, then work out on an erg or ergometer, a rowing machine in a gym. Some of them were wearing compression sleeves over their arms to keep from getting lymphedema; one of them got lymphodema years after surgery, the coach said. That scared me, because I thought I was immune to it, that I had passed the danger zone. Apparently not.
The coach is a young woman who hasn't had cancer. She coaches at a Catholic school, and some of the boys on her team rowed with the women. They did it originally for community service points, but J the coach says she thinks they've gone beyond the required hours. One of the boys was the coxswain, facing the rowers and giving instruction with some electronic gizmo transmitting his words to all of them. From our boat, the coach yelled things, like Lean back, lean forward, push, don't get the black part of the oar in the water, keep your arms straight, and beautiful when someone did well. I thought of a man I know in the suburbs who goes out in a kayak every morning and the way he described it I could tell he loved it and found serenity and sublimity on the water in the early morning light. One Saturday years ago I was in a kayak with a friend who loved kayaking. We launched from the Rogers Park beach and lots of water got in the very tiny boat and I couldn't understand why the boat was so small. If it were larger we wouldn't have gotten all the water on us. These kayaks were in the lake, which is much cleaner than the river. Though with all the muck in the river there were still fishermen today standing on a bridge and I suppose planning to eat what they caught.
It looked more like this. Image (c) Ignacius Chicago Crew
I kept wanting to get into one of those crew boats and try out rowing and thought about some certificate I got in summer camp asserting that I had achieved one level or the other in Canoeing. I liked Canoeing and Fishing because you got to sit down. Everyone says now that kids are coddled and that every kid gets a trophy and they get inflated ideas about their worth, and it was never like that before, but back in the 1960s and 1970s at summer camp we got certificates for everything. I got one for having the funniest little skit on Titanic Night. (Why we sang the Titanic song and dressed as hapless passengers is beyond me.) That was my most successful experience at summer camp. My sojourn lasted two days. I got mumps and spent a lovely afternoon in the infirmary, waiting for my parents to pick me up while I read Pollyanna and watched the denatured skunk who lived there.
After that, camp was downhill.
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