The Boys in the Boat: Chapters 13-15

Pocock was ghosting over the water as if effortlessly, his boat ethereal looking in a light mist that had settled on the water.

And with all the cold-weather rowing interspersed with days when they couldn’t row at all, the boys’ morale began to erode.

That fall he moved to Seattle, registered as a geology major at the university, and then made a beeline for the shell house, where Tom Bolles and Al Ulbrickson quickly discovered that they had an extraordinary athlete on their hands.

The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted.

He had almost certainly read about the 16:20 three-mile time trial Ulbrickson’s varsity had turned in, but the news couldn’t have fazed him.

Guarding against complacency, Ebright allowed himself, when his crew reached the dock, only a gruff “You looked good out there for a change.”

Both boats were state-of-the-art shells—Pocock’s latest and greatest, sleek splinters of cedar, the Husky Clipper and the California Clipper. Both boats were sixty-two feet long and, within a pound or two, weighed the same. Both featured sleek cedar skins, five-thirty-seconds of an inch thick. Both had elegant yellow cedar washboards, ash frames, Sitka-spruce gunnels, fore and after decking made of silk impregnated with varnish.

As they flew down the last few hundred yards, their eight taut bodies rocked back and forth like pendulums, in perfect synchronicity.

It was by far the most brazen thing Hitler had yet attempted, his biggest gamble, and a major step toward the catastrophe that was soon to envelop the world.

By deliberately conflating wholesome images of grace and beauty and youthful vigor with the iconography and ideology of the Nazis, Riefenstahl would cunningly portray the new German state as something ideal—the perfect end product of a highly refined civilization descended directly from the ancient Greeks.

The film would not just reflect but in many ways define the still nascent but increasingly twisted Nazi mythos.

Ulbrickson learned that despite the break, four of his varsity boys still had incompletes and were just days away from being declared ineligible.

“We can’t tarry with scholastic laggards...any who fall behind are just out, that’s all.”

And by the end of May, the boys were again turning in phenomenal times on the water.

At mid-afternoon he hiked down the steep descent to the waterfront, where a U.S. Navy destroyer and two coast guard cutters had taken up positions among the usual flotilla of yachts, sailboats, launches, dinghies, and canoes assembling near the finish line.

Another deep guttural roar began to rise from the crowd. It seemed impossible for Washington to close the gap. They were a half mile from the finish now, still in third place, still two lengths back.

By the time the two boats crossed the line, in the last vestiges of twilight, a glimmer of open water showed between the stern of the Husky Clipper and the bow of the California Clipper.

When they got to the shell house, they found hundreds of exuberant fans jockeying for space on the wobbly float and milling around in front of the building, hooting and hollering.

Then, after retrieving him from the water, they formed a phalanx, forced their way into the building, and slid the doors closed behind themselves, letting in only a few Seattle pressmen.

As he made his way down the course, Moch might as well have raised over his stern a flag emblazoned with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” and the figure of a coiled rattlesnake.

None of them doubted anyone else in the boat. But believing in one another was not really at issue anymore. What was more difficult was being sure about one’s self. The caustic chemicals of fear continued to surge in their brains and in their guts.

Everything had converged: the right oarsmen, with the right attitudes, the right personalities, the right skills; a perfect boat, sleek, balanced, and wickedly fast; a winning strategy at both long and short distances; a coxswain with the guts and smarts to make hard decisions and make them fast.

It all added up to more than he could really put into words, maybe more than even a poet could—something beyond the sum of its parts, something mysterious and ineffable and gorgeous to behold.

And there was no chance any of these boys could contribute their own funds. These weren’t the heirs and scions of industry; these were working-class Americans.

By then Ulbrickson and the boys were blithely getting ready to sail for Germany on the SS Manhattan on July 14.

And, best of all, for boys from the fields, forests, and small towns of the Pacific Northwest, it was just a few miles from all the manifold mysteries and wonders of New York City.

He leaned over the low stone parapet and peered down at miniature cars and buses and swarms of tiny people scurrying along the streets.

The cacophony of honking horns and wailing sirens and rumbling streetcars that had assaulted his ears at street level were reduced up here to something gentler and more soothing, like the sonorous breathing of an enormous living thing.

The news was innocuous enough by twenty-first-century standards, but in the context of social attitudes in America in the 1930s it came as a profound shock.

Joe wandered off to study the geology of the island, discovering glacial striations etched in the granite.

Gingerly, they inserted the prow end of the shell into the chute.

None of them had ever been on a boat any larger than the ferries back in Seattle, and the SS Manhattan—668 feet long, weighing in at 24,289 tons, with eight passenger decks, and able to accommodate 1,239 passengers—was no ferry. She was in fact a full-fledged luxury liner.

Just before noon the athletes assembled on the sundeck, gathering around Avery Brundage and other AOC officials as they unfurled an enormous white flag with the five interlocking Olympic rings and began to raise it on the after mast.

The crowd on the dock, doffing their hats and waving them over their heads, began a thunderous chant: “Ray! Ray! Ray! For the USA!”

As the Manhattan sailed northeast that night and darkness enveloped her, she was ablaze with lights and loud with music, alive with the laughter of young people at play, having the time of their lives, venturing out onto the black void of the North Atlantic, on their way to Hitler’s Germany.