This summer I’ve been rowing on Lake Union. It’s been about two months now, and for about the first month, my biggest desire and concern was not tipping over the boat. I committed huge amounts of brain space to making sure my boat would not tip. I imagine most of my techniques were merely psychologically soothing. Until recently, when it started to occur to me that it might be nice to just tip the damn thing and get it over with, so I know what it will feel like falling from a boat and won’t have to wonder about it so much. I had even been considering asking a coach if I could purposely tip a boat, just to get that first time out of my system, under somewhat controlled circumstances.
As it happened, I didn’t have to voluntarily flip my boat. I flipped it this morning, involuntarily, along with my three crewmates, just off the dock. One minute I was in the boat, the next, slow motion, I understood that I was going into the water, and I let myself fall.
My feet didn’t touch bottom, but treading water is the one thing I mastered from years of swimming lessons as a kid. It occurred to me that it’s been ages since I’ve been swimming, and the urge to flip over and backstroke like a lazy otter while the sun blazed my cheeks was hard to fight.
Instead of leaving everyone in the dust and swimming until my arms ached, I let myself be summoned to the opposite dock and paddled my body out of the lake. “Woo-hoo, we fell in the water! Hell yeah!” I yelled, before I could remember I’m an adult and beatific displays make other adults feel awkward.
“Wow,” someone said, “you’re apparently the happiest person about this.”
And ok, ideally, we wouldn’t have tipped our boat. But if we were going to tip, which was sure to happen eventually, let it be near the dock, in the July sun, where the water, if not exactly warm, is indeed fine.
Blind inFlight 