Novels & Memoirs – Small Boats
Early last year (2024) I accidentally took up rowing. Since March 2020 I had been working (writing, mostly) from my home, but I missed my aerobics classes, which seemed inadvisable during the height of COVID-19. I found “erging” (what was that?) and “learn to row” classes listed among the Community School programs run by the local Parks & Recreation Department here in our leafy suburb of Portland, Oregon. The time, 7:30 am twice weekly, and venue, the gorgeous but not overly intimidating Willamette River, tributary of the mighty Columbia, fit my exercise parameters. I imagined a small fleet of summer camp style wooden rowboats… By the time I understood that we’d be using minimalist, low on the water, carbon-fiber reinforced plastic racing shells and sculls, it was too late; I was hooked. To see how the water appears in the morning at different times of the year, visit the site of a fellow Masters rower at <https://www.sightings-photography.com>.
Recently I was given a used copy of Boys in the Boat. After reading it, I realized that over the past few years I’d happened upon several stories of people in small boats. All of the protagonists had more extreme physical adventures than I aspire to, but they make for compelling reading. For those who enjoy vicarious challenges/danger salted with introspection, I recommend:
Aebi, Tania. Maiden Voyage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. A high-achieving single father from the old country, despairing of his 18 year old daughter’s apparent aimlessness in New York City in the mid-1980s, offers her either full college tuition to the school of her choice — or a sailboat, with the provisio that she circumnavigate the globe or else she must repay him. Of course, she chooses the boat. (Memoir.)
Brown, Daniel James. Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. New York: Penguin, 2014. (True story, including interviews from the surviving participants from the University of Washington team.)
Doig, Ivan. The Sea Runners. Boston: Mariner Books, 2006. Four Swedish indentured laborers at a remote Russian-Alaskan militarized fur-trading outpost near Sitka in the mid-19th century regret leaving their farms. They slip out of the fort, steal a war canoe from the local tribe, and flee down the Pacific Northwest Coast, sans map, seeking sanctuary at Astoria in the Oregon territory. (Mostly invention, but a gripping story, loosely inspired by a bare-bones official report from 1853.)
Jones, Brendan. The Alaskan Laundry. Boston: Mariner Books, 2016. An angry young woman from Philadelphia escapes her old life to seek work in commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. (Fiction, but the author knows the locale and how to convey tangled human emotions.)
Youngson, Anne. The Narrowboat Summer. New York: Flatiron Books, 2020. Two late middle-aged women impulsively decide to pilot a narrowboat (cum houseboat) through England’s network of narrow canals & locks, originally built in the 17th C to accommodate horse-drawn freight barges. (A memoir, lazy and charming, but never insipid.)