August 2021

Baseball and Tech: A Lost Frontier?

by Ken Hogarty

America’s frontier experience succumbed to technological advances which initially expanded its horizons. Unsurprisingly, because baseball links American life to the frontier romance it keeps alive, it too finds itself threatened by technology once promising boundless opportunity.

Agricultural technology, epitomized by the spread of barbed wire, commandeered the need for cattle drives. Innovative firearms, such as the Colt revolver, enabled settlers to tame nature and Native Americans in their path. Mobility and communication too — technologically manifest in stagecoaches, the railroad, and telegraph — made Western expansion viable, hastening the frontier’s demise.

Baseball, birthed in a frontier experience, evolved into America’s national pastime because of the telegraph and railroad. Though other sports, especially football, found a better marriage with technology, the telegraph bequeathed radio and television, and rail travel bequeathed air travel to usher in baseball’s Golden Age.

Baseball reenacted the epic life of the West — a shifting concept throughout America’s expansion — and provided what Henry James called a “continuity of things.” Hawthorne’s New England Puritans, Melville’s whalers, Twain’s Mississippi raftsmen, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County denizens fictionalized particularized myths embodying essentials about the frontier experience.

Baseball does so through a democratic, national drama, at once realistic, romantic, and accessible. Donald Hall claimed, “Baseball is a place where memory gathers.” The memory of the revelatory frontier myth it perpetuates makes abstractions in the American experience concrete.

Modern technology, robbing us of reflection and anticipation essential to play and watch baseball, points it toward a trajectory mirroring the fate of the Western experience it kept alive. Jacques Barzun said, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Is that true today?

Baseball emerged as the national game when the frontier became myth or morality tale, the staple of dime novels and romantic narratives. The Growth of the American Republic asserted, “The cowboys and their liege lords developed a unique culture, folklore and society, and then passed away forever.” Baseball, however, evolved to perpetuate Western characteristics and values, most significantly defining heroes as rugged individualists acting for communal good.

Baseball’s setting, objective, play, rhythm, characters, and history reveal its cultural derivation connecting Americans to a frontier past, real and romanticized, that molded national character.

Ballparks’ traditional sights, sounds, and smells conjure what Eric Solomon called “pastoral familiarity,” in opposition to urban reality. Thomas Wolfe noted wooden bats, leather balls and gloves, and an expanse of grass spoke to a shared experience with the land.

Not always a pastoral idyll, the West became backdrop for dangerous clashes with hostile forces. American character sustained such opposition through acceptance of diversity and endurance of underlying tension, hallmarks of baseball.

Contradictions in the game’s layout also emphasize opposition. The outfield — a sparsely populated wilderness — contrasts with the inner diamond — compact, regularized, and densely populated — where the community’s main business unfolds. This fulcrum of action, with rigid dimensions, sits in a corner of the playing surface. Like Western settlements, land spreads from it to a remote frontier.

Idiosyncratic outfield diameters and shapes flout restrictions, just as varying Western locales bred peculiarities while promulgating common habits and values. In baseball, diverse venues dictate specific action, though within a general pattern.

Frontier success meant territorial possession. In baseball, action emerges from the duel to control a nebulous territory, the strike zone. What reenactment replicates the scenario of high noon duels better than baseball’s hitter/pitcher confrontation? Mark Kram noted that territory, at the core of many games, is never so maddingly understated as in the “gamesmanship of this conflict.” In the West, duelists also fought over psychic as well as physical territory.

Geoffrey C. Ward said “at the heart of the game lie mythic contradictions [and] tensions. It is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope — and coming home.” So too, the frontier experience.

Frontiersmen pursued dreams, new homes, and better lives as productive adults. A batter too starts at home but seeks a different home, rewarded for his mobility. Blair Fuller emphasized this significance: “[Returning home when scoring a run] is the second, creative home of man, the home that he establishes for himself. This is the story Americans love best, . . . our preoccupation due to the pioneer experience.” Despite Thomas Wolfe’s assertion “you can’t go home again,” batters aim to do so.

The aggressor suddenly becomes the defender or vice versa in baseball. Players change sides every half inning. After facing the other team alone when batting, players work with teammates on defense, though the designated hitter rule subverts this to an extent.

Western expansion surged as pioneers followed trailblazers, akin to baseball’s lead-off men. Thus, Western experience featured a rhythm of stops and starts. Though today’s sluggers strive to launch homers to return home immediately, teams historically advanced runners in stops and starts. Roger Kahn wrote, “Baseball’s inherent rhythm, minutes and minutes of passivity erupting into seconds of frenzied action, matches an attribute of the American character.” Traditional baseball reenacts the rhythm of frontier expansion.

Action in baseball, not clock-driven, often takes place in the imagination. Conversely, time, for us speeded-up in a complex society, manifested itself on the frontier in a lazy, seasonal rhythm, romanticized in a cattle-drive. In baseball, a game theoretically could, before recent rule implementations, last forever.

Baseball also replicates the seasonal Western notion of time. During spring training, players band together like hopeful wagon train settlers. The dog days of summer test ballplayers, just as long drives did cowboys. Baseball’s winter “hot-stove season,” rebirthing expectations, calls to mind frontiersmen hunkered down in log cabins. The mandated offseason inaction of both promotes storytelling and tall tales.

Baseball players, like cowboy-heroes, enjoy instant resolution and gain accomplishment based on action. Players get rewarded or dinged statistically, not only in comparison with peers, but also predecessors, legendary and mythic. When no longer productive, they get sent packing like non-producing cowboys.

The cowboy-hero, defined by skills and adaptability, belonged to a male cult with its unwritten code of honor. Baseball heroes similarly cite an unwritten code to condone beanballs, hard slides, and charging the mound. The frontier’s pragmatic, violent nature, even muted by civilizing society’s encroachment, perpetuated a survival-of-the-fittest ethos. Beneath a surface gentility, baseball ritualizes pragmatic actions, bent rules, and violent reactions. The batter charging the mound followed by his posse epitomizes vigilante justice.

Historically, frontiersmen argued with power. Baseball extended a similar democratic resistance to authority. Bruce Catton observed, “One of the stock tableaux in American sports history is the aggrieved baseball player jawing with the umpire.” The rugged individualist sees himself as the ultimate authority, and fans often follow in concert. “Kill the Ump” echoed in stadiums when umpires had the last word before instant replay.

Merritt Clifton noted that baseball has always appealed to immigrants, in part because many came to America in rebellion against authority: “They could identify with the ambitious batsman/gunslinger who takes ’em all on. And, as they gradually gained property and responsibilities, they could identify with the home-team defense, too, . . . [not wanting] to be outcasts forever.”

People who play, watch and manipulate baseball mirror stock Western characters. Baseball phenoms replicate gunslingers, while managers playing hunches are “riverboat gamblers.” Pitchers taunting batters with off-speed stuff, or fielders “in the neighborhood” on tags, act like Western con-men.

Effete Easterners morphed into early baseball’s few college-educated players. Recently, they become Sabermetrics adherents, taking over front offices. Conversely, old-school managers and coaches perpetuate caricatures of crusty Western characters.

As in any romance, stories of the Old West defined villains as totally evil. They wore black to contrast with the “good guys.” Reaffirming this, baseball traditionally garbed home teams in white and visitors in grey.

Opponents using corked bats or pitchers throwing spitballs typify outlaws. Western saloon keepers become baseball clubhouse overseers.  Ranchers? Farm system development personnel or the groundskeepers? Batboys serve like youngsters fawning over Western heroes. The umpire, the sheriff/deputy/marshal of baseball, upholds the law with his crew, his posse. Drifters in the West become multi-traded MLB veterans, deadline signees to win a pennant. And the Hatfields and McCoys had nothing on the Red Sox/Yankees and Giants/Dodgers, baseball’s feuding families.

Baseball even had its own hanging judge, the Commissioner, made legendary in the person of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis who rode to the rescue after the Black Sox scandal, but also blocked integration.

Novelists and poets, like the Zane Greys who commemorated the West, celebrate baseball. A plethora of storytellers, from writers to announcers and colorful characters within the game. emulate Western myth-making tradition. Vin Scully, waxing poetic, might have been telling tales around a campfire. Moreover, dime novels that kept the West alive morphed into sports stories, with baseball heroes such as Frank Merriwell, Chip Hilton, and the aptly named Bronc Burnett. Baseball, like the West, invites narrative, poetic Homers.

Roger Kahn noted, “There is action for perhaps fifteen minutes of the time [in baseball]. The rest is either inaction or suspense, depending on imagination and point-of-view.” The pauses invite personal interaction, paralleling porch gatherings in Western communities, with other fans, in the stands or in front of a TV, more than other sports. Baseball exchanges can also echo Western one-upmanship within a saloon camaraderie, mimicked in contemporary sports talk shows.

Just as baseball attracts many female fans, numerous unchronicled women civilized the West. Often emerging as hero-worshipping groupies in baseball or frontier romances (Bull Durham’s Annie, The Natural’s Memo Paris, or Miss Kitty from “Gunsmoke”), women have historically been relegated to “a league of their own,” until recent progress on and off the field.

Baseball’s owner/manipulators, motivated by money, power, or promises of legitimacy, simultaneously act as competitors and partners. The blatant anti-monopoly status ceded in 1922 to baseball’s owners granted them a similar status as Western cattle, land, and railroad barons.

The 50 years after baseball obtained its Anti-Trust Exemption found the sport replicating the country’s earlier push to new frontiers during “Baseball’s Golden Age.” Regardless, owners held players as property “on the hoof.” Curt Flood’s 1972 Supreme Court challenge paved the way for player salary arbitration and free agency, analogous among owners to the worst cattle stampede.

History justifiably acclaims baseball’s role integrating American society. Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier tells a quintessential American story. Still, baseball outlawed players of “Black African descent” from the high minors and major leagues from 1887 for 60 years. In the interim, some players ironically “passed as Indian.” Many historians consider subjugation of Native Americans on the frontier genocide. The exclusion of African Americans in baseball similarly exterminated hope for oppressed people.

The game’s manipulators historically include gamblers, administrators, businessmen, advertisers, agents, media honchos, politicians. Similar character types, personified by Eastern speculators, contributed to the ruination of the frontier, even while paving the way for the emerging civilization. On both the frontier and in baseball, profiteers often have used technology to gain advantage.

Train travel and radio spread the sport’s hold before yielding to air travel and television as baseball cultivated national audiences. Television, squelching the expanse of the game and stressing big-event viewing rather than seasonal narrative, most augurs a fall. The building of modern stadiums, the uniform stitching of baseballs, the crafting of bats, and recent innovations such as instant replay and analytics promised innovation. But, at what price? Recent technology has also birthed burgeoning gambling, gaming, and fantasy sports industries that promote entrée to a new demographic, but a demographic completely adrift from the frontier experience baseball recreates.

Baseball players, like Westerners, pragmatically seek an edge. Baseball’s most recent cheating scandal, however, crossed a line BECAUSE it, even with drumbeating garbage cans, was technologically driven. Baseball has reacted by implementing changes that, sadly, often bury its frontier roots.

In the movie Bang the Drum Slowly, the appropriately named Piney Woods sang about a dying teammate. Woods lamented, “I’m just a young cowboy, and know I done wrong.” Baseball can’t get its reaction to its recent scandals wrong by looking toward tech solutions that bury the lost frontier it so long reanimated.

 

Ken Hogarty recently retired as a high school English teacher and principal. Since, he’s had two short stories, three news features, a memoir and over 20 satires and comedy pieces published. He lives in the East Bay with wife Sally. He’s attended World Series games every year (starting with Game 6 in 1962) his San Francisco Giants have participated in and loved, after waiting 56 years to attend himself, dismissing 1,300 students early for the 2010 victory parade. The connection between baseball and the frontier experience germinated as part of the introduction to his MA English thesis, “The Metaphor of Baseball.”

Tool Town Left to its Own Devices

by Dave Fromm

The greatest sporting event you’ve probably never heard of happens on a Saturday afternoon every April in the hardscrabble North-Central Massachusetts town of Athol. It is called the Athol-Orange River Rat, it’s a five-point-two mile canoe race on the Millers River between Athol and the Orange Dam, it comes right at the beginning of spring when people are feral and the water’s freezing and sometimes there’s still snow on the ground and they’ve been holding it for 57 years. It is one of a kind.

*          *          *

Athol is a proud, mostly-post-industrial town of about eleven and a half thousand people that sits just north of the haunted Quabbin Reservoir on Route 2 between Greenfield and Fitchburg. The skyline is dominated by the smokestacks of the L.S. Starrett tool company, which has produced “precision tools, gages, measuring instruments and saw blades for industrial, professional and consumer markets worldwide” for over 140 years. Originally a Native American fishing village called Pequoiag, Athol was repurposed in 1735 by settler families and subsequently incorporated in 1762. Its name means “New Ireland” and is pronounced “Ath-all.”  In the 1800s, Athol was a thriving manufacturing center, the surrounding waterways powering saw mills and grist mills and cotton mills. A trolley system connected it to its regional neighbors and a southwestern rail carried goods to Springfield and beyond. The bandstand at Brookside Park hosted big names like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Tool-Town, that’s what they called Athol back in the day.

The trolley system was wiped out by a hurricane in the 1930s and then the railroad disappeared when the Commonwealth flooded the Swift River Valley for the Quabbin. Route 2 (now 202), which runs from Boston to Greenfield, bypassed the handsome downtown. As it became cheaper to make things elsewhere, Athol’s mills and factories started shutting down. Millworkers lost jobs. In the 1980s, the Union Twist drill factory shuttered and Athol had the highest unemployment rate in the Commonwealth. A decade later, grassroots revitalization efforts took a hit when longtime Main Street shops lost a battle with a Wal-Mart Super-Center outside of town.

And yet.

Starrett still sits at the east end of downtown, along a curve of the river, and in the morning the shadows of the stacks stretch down over the credit union and Kellie’s Cafe and Tool-Town Pizza.

*          *          *

The River Rat began on a spring night in 1964, when a couple of guys from Athol were drinking with a couple of guys from Orange at what was then the Silver Front Café and is now the Steel Pub on Exchange Street. There was a fishing spot they wanted to get to down by the Orange Dam and why not a friendly wager as to who could paddle there first?  Sounded like a good idea, as many things do while drinking. So they raced. And the next year they raced again. And over time the race grew into a staple – the staple – of the local calendar, loosely organized at first but fun and contagious, and what else was there to look forward to during the long winter months?  Gradually they added a carnival and a parade and, in 1981, an after-party so large and raucous that it had to be broken up by the state police. Shortly thereafter the Athol Lions Club stepped in to chaperone. Now the River Rat weekend attracts up to 20,000 visitors and pumps $1 million dollars per year into a local economy sorely in need of it. Grown and flown natives of the area, given the choice to come home for Easter or the River Rat, return for the River Rat. There’s a spaghetti dinner and a pancake breakfast. One year a canoeist flew in from Alaska. Another year the race featured 418 boats, which is a lot of boats for a small river.

*          *          *

Despite growing up at one end of Massachusetts and going to school at the other, I’d never heard of the River Rat. One obvious reason was that I’m not a serious canoeist and while I’ve done the requisite for a Berkshires native it was all on lakes, where the option of starting and finishing at the same location removes much of the need for effort or logistics. The Berkshires have rivers, of course, but the vibe is pretty placid. The other reason I’d never heard of the River Rat was that I’d barely heard of Athol, except once when a columnist at my college newspaper suggested that it was named by “a disgruntled person with a lisp” – a quip which brought an immediate and pugilistic rebuke from the school’s proud Athol alums. For a lot of us from the (relatively) more cosmopolitan edges of the Commonwealth, North-Central Massachusetts, between Greenfield and Leominster, was a blank space on the map – indeed on a popular novelty illustration of the state the area bears the legend “Here Be Dragons.”  (The Berkshires are labeled, not inaccurately, “Cultured Hill-Folk.”)  I hadn’t spent much time in the area, never really knew anyone from there, never had a reason to go there. The closest I’d been was a summer basketball camp at Holy Cross in Worcester, whose hilltop campus seemed positioned in part to keep an eye on the wild communities to the north.

*          *          *

My wife and I had moved back to Massachusetts from California in 2008 to start a family and once we finished unpacking it was 2016, we had two kids under ten and I was desperate for distractions, the riskier the better. My dad, a psychologist, says that every expectant father dreams about motorcycles – perhaps it follows that every parent of elementary school kids dreams about getting into a small boat in a current. One day, searching the internet for age-appropriate outdoor activities, I came across a Facebook page for the River Rat, where people would upload videos from previous years’ races.

These videos looked insane.

Most of the videos were of the start of the race, which (I learned, Googling feverishly) begins on a narrow bend of the river near the Alan E. Rich Environmental Park, a grassy haven for damselflies and ticks and wildflowers in July – but not in April. In April, the meadow is haggard and the river is bare and swollen, with a fast-moving current courtesy of snow-melt enhanced by thousands of gallons of water pouring through the Tully and Birch Hill dams. Planning goes on for months beforehand. The Army Corps of Engineers is involved. Sponsors are lined up, safety teams assembled. Main Street is blocked off to traffic. Then the river rats show up.

Imagine, on average, three hundred canoes lined up along both banks, bows pointing out like the quills of a porcupine, the six hundred canoeists within those canoes clinging to roots and tree branches and each other to avoid getting sucked into the current and thereby disqualified for a false start.

Imagine that among those six hundred canoeists are probably sixty nationally-ranked paddlers, another hundred serious local athletes, legacy entries, tourists, thrill-seekers, father-son teams, grandparents, newlyweds, newcomers, people in costumes, people with large foam hats, people in fishing canoes, people with coolers.

Imagine that the canoes are seeded along the banks according to a blind-draw lottery conducted in the town hall the night before, right after the spaghetti dinner, a lottery that might result in dozens of the serious paddlers starting the race toward the back of the pack, while people with plastic rats on their heads start closer to the front.

Then imagine banks lined with spectators made gaunt and punchy by winter, drones buzzing through the air, smoke from backyard grills and food trucks hanging over the river, vuvuzelas, air-horns, backyard bands, police lights flashing.

Finally, if you’re so inclined, imagine within this madness a moment of tension, a moment in which the previous six months of winter and sixty years of racing and maybe even the previous two hundred years of hardscrabble survival curl taut around the river like a spring. And then a cannon goes off and all the boats surge toward the middle at once.

Here’s one video, if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/XR4a9r7S8sM. It’s like Pamplona with a chance of drowning.

*          *          *

I asked my childhood pal Chris if he wanted to do the 2018 River Rat with me. Chris comes from a skiing family and in 1989 he’d been the best high school cross-country skier in the Commonwealth. Even in his late forties, with little appreciable effort involved, he was still a freak of an athlete. I was a basketball player in my youth and Chris and I had never done anything like the River Rat together except for once, one long-ago September Sunday, when we were fourteen-year-olds on a Josh Billings triathlon team. I rode a bike from Great Barrington to Lenox. He ran around Stockbridge Bowl. We met at the finish line and never did it again. After high school we’d lost touch – I’d gone to Boston, then law school in D.C. and then married life in California, he’d gone off to ski at St. Michael’s in upstate New York before embarking on something of a nomadic life. He’d restored houses in Baltimore, worked in bars in Denver, poleaxed through Alaska, barnstormed across the great flatlands of the West. He’d been in Europe, met someone, then was back in Baltimore without her. In 2017, he’d returned to our hometown to look after his aging parents, driving into town in an enormous backcountry firefighting jeep equipped with a rooftop axe. He had braids in his hair and a foot of unruly beard. It was a disguise.

When I asked him if he wanted to do the River Rat, he said something like “Hmhmhmmm, it doesn’t sound fun.”  This wasn’t a no, though – this was in fact the way Chris said yes to things – so I showed him the videos. He remained noncommittal. I sent in our $42 registration fee and waited to see if things would fall into place.

They did. Chris had a clear schedule on the weekend of the race and no legitimate excuse. My parents’ Nordic neighbors had a canoe we could borrow. My wife agreed to let me go if I promised to not drown. The weather looked good, with highs in the low 50s and a mild chance of rain. We were in.

*          *          *

The Saturday morning of the race I got up at 6:30 to pack a bag and meet Chris in the parking lot of a 91-adjacent Barnes & Noble. I had two paddles, two life jackets, a change of clothes and my bike. Our plan was to drive to Orange, lock up the bike near the finish line, then go to the canoe start in Athol, park the car and unload the canoe. That way, when the race was over, one of us could ride the five miles back to Athol from Orange, get the car and drive it down to the canoe.

Chris pulled in at 7:45 a.m. but instead of bringing the backcountry jeep he was driving a white van with plywood over the rear windows. He had an assortment of vehicles. This one looked like the van of a man who could both remodel your kitchen and abduct your neighbor. Our borrowed canoe was cinched to the roof.

Chris was wearing glasses and cargo shorts and tennis sneakers without socks. He’d cut his hair short and shaved his beard, code-switching from Juggalo to accountant-on-vacation. As we drove northeast around the Quabbin, he reminded me that as kids we’d once come up to the Athol area to attend a culturally misappropriate Boy Scout-like camp called Indian Guides. This must have been in the late seventies. I didn’t remember Indian Guides but talking about it brought back a memory of a photo I’d seen in a bin in my childhood closet: a group of six or seven white kids, wearing arts-and-crafts headdresses, standing in front of our dads. We’d all gone by Native American names for the weekend. Chris was Little Red Feather. I was White Eagle. I don’t remember what my dad’s name was but Chris’s dad was Brown Beaver and another dad was Big Wind. It was a good weekend and I’d totally forgotten about it until Chris brought it up. We decided it was an omen. Of what, we weren’t sure.

*          *          *

As part of the River Rat festivities there was an early-Saturday road race called the Big Cheese 5k that raised money for the local Meals-on-Wheels program. After locking up the bike and parking in Athol, we figured we could run a 5k and feel good about ourselves no matter what happened on the river. Registration was in the basement of the Athol town hall, a stately building at the top of Main Street with curved stone staircases and a large auditorium where they held the seeding lottery. We got lanyards with badges that said Double Duty that were supposed to get us free stuff but we never figured out what and didn’t try that hard. I asked a lady at the start of the 5k how hard the course was and she said, “one hill,” which was not true. Chris ran in his cargo shorts and tennis sneakers and finished 23^rd out of 500. I finished closer to 300th, but we saw a lot of lovely neighborhoods and parks and the atmosphere was festive. There was a parade, people lining the streets. Happy faces and brisk spring air.

Afterwards, we went looking for the offices of the Daily News, the newspaper that handled race logistics and could tell folks who missed the Friday night seeding lottery, as we had, what their pole position was. The maps on our phones led us to a one-story brick building on Exchange Street, next to a vacant lot and across from a fire station. The front doors were locked but the words “River Rat” were written on a sheet of notebook paper that was taped to one of the windows.  We followed an arrow on the sheet to a small annex off of the building’s flank and went inside.

Two men and one woman were behind a counter folding race t-shirts. They were older, looked local, and regarded us with something between bemusement and skepticism. I felt a little like the college kids at the start of American Werewolf In London, when they enter the pub on the moors and the music stops.

“First-timers,” I said, stating the obvious. “Looking forward to it. What do you recommend as far as strategy?”

The race folks looked at each other. Finally the oldest one of them shrugged and said, “Stay out of the river.”

He started laughing.

The other man shuddered. “I went in the river one year,” he said.

“Never been the same,” said the woman.

Now they were all laughing.

“Got life jackets?” the first guy asked.

We nodded. Life jackets were mandatory.

“Zip ‘em up!” he said.

Chris and I had discussed the possibility of capsizing on the drive up. The videos made it seem like a possibility. I did not want to capsize. It was still mid-April. It had snowed fairly recently and would in fact snow again before the end of the weekend. Going into the river – a river with a two-hundred-year-old industrial history – and having hundreds of canoe paddles sweep down like scythes toward my head was not how I wanted to spend a Saturday.

“I’ve never capsized in my life,” Chris had said in the car.

“Don’t jinx it,” I’d said, too late.

We looked ourselves up on a race list on the wall. We were seeded 86^th, in the top third of the boats.

“Can we get t-shirts?” Chris asked the laughing officials.

“Sure,” one of them said, tossing us t-shirts. “Don’t get ‘em wet.”

We walked back to Chris’s van and drove over to where some canoes were loading into the river, on the side of a residential street near a bridge on the west end of town. The river was maybe fifty feet wide at this point. The water was high and copper-colored and, my fears notwithstanding, after years of mitigation efforts it’s clean enough to eat the fish you catch out of it.

We got our Nordic neighbors’ canoe off of Chris’s van. It was a perfectly fine canoe, suitable for an afternoon of leisure on Laurel Lake. We carried it down onto a sandy launch. Then we watched as sleek boats, each one thinner and more polished than the next, lined up on the boat launch like it was a car show. Not every canoe, but enough of them. These were racing canoes. Some bore scars. Some people wore wetsuits. Some people had GoPros mounted to their helmets. Some talked about the water height three years ago. Everyone was in a good mood.

Chris and I looked at the helmets and started making nervous jokes, reassuring our canoe that it was fine just as it was.

A guy near us said something like “you going to Seeger’s after the race?”

“We don’t know who that is,” Chris said.

“We’re not from here,” I said.

“Seeger’s having a big party,” the guy said. “You should go.”

We shrugged.

“Hey,” the guy said. “Can I borrow some duct tape?”

He didn’t say why and we didn’t ask. Duct tape could be for anything. Chris went to the back of his van and got some duct tape.

The guy thanked us.

“I’ll give this back to you at Seeger’s,” he said.

“Or you can just leave it on the van,” Chris said.

“White van?” the guy asked.

We nodded.

“One or the other,” the guy said.

He left to do whatever he had to do with the duct tape. We stood on the bank, watching the boats line up and getting more and more anxious. These people were serious. Even the ones in costume.

Eventually, it was time to get in the boat.

We carried our canoe down to the water’s edge. We had a debate about which position was the power position and which position steered. Chris seemed pretty sure but I didn’t believe him. Eventually he got in the front with the better paddle. I pushed the nose out into the current and climbed in the back. We eased into the middle of the river and made our way across to the far bank, where small wooden posts demarked the seeding corrals – 1-25, 26-50, and so on – and the canoes were layered like shingles. We executed a dainty little pirouette and I grabbed a root sticking out from the bank to hold us in place. There was a downed tree angling out of the water directly in front of us; it was treated as part of the race. The canoeists around us seemed substantially more experienced. They strategized – who was going full-bore at the gun, who was cutting out wide, who was holding back to see how the pack shook out. Chris and I took this all in silently. In the near distance we heard someone singing the National Anthem. The canoeists around us fell quiet. Things got tense.

“I love you, man,” I said to Chris. “Just in case I don’t get another chance to tell you.”

Then the anthem ended and a cannon went off.

*          *          *

The boats directly around us fired out into the middle, trying to get ahead of the masses. Paddles chopped at the water and spray flew through the air. We hung close to the shore for the first fifty yards, taking a wide curve under the bridge. Families waved flags and yelled at us as we slid under them. Canoes banged our sides and paddles clipped our blades. Fast boats went by us like barracuda, their paddlers synced up military-style, baseball hats and mirrored shades, the Seal Team Sixes of canoe racing. “Hut!” they chanted. “Hut!”

We were not like that. We had not agreed on a cadence or a rhythm other than a generalized “when I switch, you switch” strategy. Still, we were sort of killing it for two guys in a borrowed boat who’d never canoed together before. We were passing people, steering around wrecks, charting a course. A canoe near us t-boned a slower boat that had listed sideways. A boat floated upside down under the bridge as its paddlers scrambled for the shore. Another boat floated sideways along the far bank. It was empty. There was no time to look for its occupants. Then we cleared the bridge, the river opened up a little and we relaxed.

That’s when our bow brushed against the bow of another canoe on our right, just as a fast boat came from behind us and tried to split the gap. I couldn’t get my paddle into the water because the fast boat was pushing against our stern. Chris couldn’t get his paddle into the water because the slower boat was in the way. The thing to do would have been to lift our paddles out of the water and center ourselves in our boat, perhaps even to reach out to their boat for stabilization, but we weren’t experienced enough canoeists to feel comfortable grabbing someone else’s canoe. Instead, we each leaned slightly away from contact, slightly towards the left. The right side of our boat came up, the left side dipped. There was a moment when I thought we could get it back, shift our weight and re-settle. I saw Chris glance back at me and smile. It was a rueful smile, the smile of a man who’d jinxed himself – and, by association, his canoe partner. Then we went into the river.

It was cold. A cold slap. An electrical cold, if that makes sense. A copper wire shoved up your spine.

I surfaced, feeling like Ishmael, feeling like holy shit is this real?  Am I alive?  Will I stay alive?  Boats flew around us. I heard a passing canoeist say, “You guys okay?” and I said yeah before I knew if it was true or not. Our Nordic neighbors’ boat was drifting sideways down river, its slick hull the carcass of a whale. For a second I thought maybe we could right it and climb back in, but the water was deep and I couldn’t feel the bottom. Chris was holding onto the bow. While we had discussed not capsizing, we hadn’t discussed what we would do if we did. I realized – it seems like slowly but it probably wasn’t – that we had to swim. Actually swim, holding the canoe, or we’d just float on down the river. We kicked our legs and tried to push the boat towards shore. I was aware of the other boats racing past us – so many boats we’d just passed ourselves, plus all the others from the back. I know they were there even though I don’t remember seeing any of them.

A river safety guy in a red dry-suit leapt from the banks and swam out to us. He was tethered to a tree and pulled our boat toward the edge. By then it was completely submerged. When I could, I stood up, felt my feet sink into river mud, and was surprised to find my paddle in my hand.

“I’m freezing,” said Chris, waist deep. He was holding a paddle too. It must have been instinctual.

The crowd along the shore screamed at us with un-tempered glee. We were what they had come for. They cheered when we waved to them. We tilted the boat over and the river safety guy said, “You want to keep going?”

Did we want to keep going?  I looked at the canoes gliding by us on the water, then at Chris. He nodded.

The safety guy held the boat steady for us. The crowd cheered louder.

“Wanna come with?” I asked, climbing back in.

“Good luck,” he said and pushed us out into the current. We yelled to the crowd and they yelled back.

The rest of the race was less eventful – how could it not be? – but as the worst had already happened we could chase down stragglers without remorse. We’d been baptized, we had scalps to take. The middle miles were serpentine, looping up and down and back on themselves. We sailed through flooded meadows and between shoreline rocks. Around mile two-and-a-half we saw a nice boat get crushed against the piles of a low bridge. The river safety guys jumped into action there too. At mile four we passed a huge party on a shorefront lawn. Seeger’s?  Maybe, but maybe not. People lobbed Bud Light tallboys to the canoes around us. They landed like mortars. Mile five was a windy straightaway flanking an Orange industrial corridor. We stopped talking and Chris set us to a martial rhythm, heads down, chests bent, four paddles a side before switching. Boats around us slowed to a crawl. Canoeists lamented. The river seemed to flow in both directions at once.

We weren’t keeping track of time, but eventually we reached the Orange Dam and executed a sharp U-turn to pull up alongside the Billy Goat boathouse, finishing in 90^th place, only four positions behind where we started but light years behind the fast boats. Watermen from Orange held our prow as we stepped out onto the cement embankment, then we carried the boat up to the boathouse. There was a street fair along the riverbank, with bands and fried dough and fortune tellers. An enormous policeman was standing in the road, the crowd flowing around him. I asked him where a guy could get a beer and he said, “Follow these knuckleheads and bring me one.”  We walked down the road to a ranch-style bar with a firepit in the back. Seeger’s?  Still not Seeger’s. Children frolicked. A cover band played Aerosmith. Canoes crowded the parking lot like seals on a dock. Our clothes became cool and stiff. We got two beers apiece – Shock-tops, manageable – and cheeseburgers from a backyard grill. A guy we’d joked with at the start – not the duct tape guy – grabbed my arm and said, “hey, what did you think?” and I could only shake my head at him. He nodded like he understood. Eventually, we left the firepit and found my bike. Chris rode back to Athol to get the van. I dragged our canoe through a field as the sun sank and hypothermia crooked a finger. Then Chris pulled up. We changed clothes in the van, strapped the canoe to the roof and headed west towards the mountains. They cancelled the pro-am on Sunday because overnight temps dropped into the thirties and snow fell.

*          *          *

We did the River Rat again in 2019 and watched a boat get split in two. We watched the safeties fish out other upended canoeists. We brought friends, family. I brought my mother-in-law, who took one look and got back in the car. We’ve eaten the fried dough, dodged the tree-stumps, pushed wayward paddles back towards disarmed paddlers. We’ve heard the cheers from the banks and the wind through the spring reeds, felt the suck and catch of the shoreline mud, the heedless joy of a river released from winter. COVID cancelled the race in 2020 and again in 2021 but when COVID’s gone Athol will still be there, tuned up and ready to go. The race is a part of the community, a metaphor for the whole thing – spring, grit, the rebirth, the resurrection, all that. Or maybe it’s just a canoe race in April?

Maybe it’s all those things. Chris is heli-skiing in Alaska right now. He sends me videos of snow twirling into vortices beneath the blades of the copter he’s in. He demurs whenever I mention the River Rat, he’ll grumble when it’s time to sign up, but he’ll come along. We’ve gone into the river and will never be the same. Plus, we never did get his duct tape back. I’m sure it made its way to Seeger’s, though, so I expect we’ll find it eventually.

Dave Fromm is the author of a sports memoir called Expatriate Games and a novel called The Duration. His basketball essay,”Give and Go,” was featured in Sport Literate‘s “25th Anniversary Issue.” He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and kids.

Gridiron Glamour

by Alice Lowe

You went to football games in high school to hang out with friends. You cheered when they cheered but didn’t know a first down from a fumble. Still ignorant and indifferent years later, newly married, you and your husband joined two of his former college buddies and their wives to watch a championship game between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers. “It’ll be fun,” your husband said.

Locked down with five football-crazy Texans, you decided to stir things up and cheer for the other team. Your husband looked at you quizzically, “what the …?” reflected in his eyes. His friends feigned annoyance, called you a traitor.

Green Bay scored first. And again on a fumble. “Go Packers!” you yelled. You got into it. “Didja see that run?” Your companions scowled. Green Bay won, and you declared yourself a Packer Backer, cheering them on to victory two weeks later in the Super Bowl.

The following year, housebound with an infant daughter, you did temp secretarial work, intermittent and undemanding short-term jobs as a bridge until you were ready for full-time work again. An assignment with the San Diego Chargers Football Club came as a refreshing change from your last two gigs, a bank and a defense contractor. And maybe there would be free game tickets.

The club’s headquarters inhabited the old Lafayette Hotel, once a popular getaway for Hollywood celebrities, now in seedy disrepair. You worked for the business manager, whose secretary was out on medical leave, handling leases, travel arrangements, and other practicalities that had little to do with football. The coaches’ gruffness, the players’ bigger-than-life physical presence—like buffalo lumbering down the halls—and the sheer otherness of it all were intimidating at first, but after you got to know everyone you thrived in the supercharged atmosphere. And you got tickets.

When the temp assignment ended you were hired fulltime as secretary and minion to the assistant coaches, a bunch of foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, pot-bellied, salt-of-the-earth, mostly southern, mostly lovable, over-the-hill former jocks and good ole boys. Typing rosters, play notes, and scouting reports meant decrypting six varieties of illegible handwriting. When the coaches were on the field or out of town you emptied overflowing ashtrays, washed muck-encrusted coffee cups that multiplied in corners and on windowsills, sprayed woodsy air freshener into their dank windowless caves. A year later you became executive secretary to the new head coach/general manager and gained privy to contract negotiations and top-secret game plans, moved into an office with a window in the new stadium offices.

You attended every home game, knowledgeable about the strategies and nuances of the game as well as the team’s inner workings, personality rifts, last-minute crises. There were road trips, social events, celebrities, envy and admiration. The glamour of the job and an excellent rapport with your boss kept you going for five years, but when he exited under a fog of defeat and scandal, you were ready to move on. The glamour was gone. The brutality of the game, the big egos, and the second-class status of women now cast a pall on what once had been so thrilling.

You went back to school and into a challenging career. In your new incarnation—educated, professional, feminist—you suppressed your stint with the Chargers as you would a criminal past. It was years before you could look back on those days and your former self with acceptance and humor. Now you like to surprise people. “No!” they say. “You?” And often, “How cool!” You’ve lost all interest in football, but yes, it was fun. And very cool.

 

Alice Lowe writes about life and language, food and family. Her essays have been published in numerous literary journals, recently or forthcoming in Burningword, Anti-Heroin Chic, ellipsis, Epiphany, and Gold Man Review. Her work has been cited in the Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. In addition she’s had two essays published in Hobart’s annual baseball issues, one of which was included in a “best of” anthology. Alice lives in San Diego, California and posts at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Tribal Warfare, or The Wrestling Tournament

by Kathleen Williamson

The small boy lunges, grabs his opponent’s ankle,
flips him on his back. His father rasps, Fuck yeah.

 Fuck yeah, he says again, his fingers pressed against
damaged vocal chords, the cost of constant encouraging.

My fingers touch my throat in twisted solidarity.
For the entirety of the next match, a mother

kneels on the edge of the mat shouting
Anthony, Anthony, Anthony, over and over again —

her voice a jackhammer, no action on the mat
changes her inflection. The coaches sit back,

unable to make themselves heard over the mother’s
insistence. She only ceases when her son is helpless

on his back. We’ve been in this windowless gym
for half the day already. The boys’ faces are rubbed raw

and they look hungry although they’ve been eating
since weigh-in. We sit in the bleachers with our team,

their bags and coats and food wrappers strewn around us.
Some sleep on the steps. They smell like antifungal cream.

Sometimes they’ll add their voices to the cacophony,
Go inside! Shoot, Shoot, Shoot! Just as often they’ll play

games on their phones. A few pull their singlets down
to show off six-pack abs and flirt with the few girls there.

Our team’s 119-pounder won’t wrestle today. Claims he was
concussed last week. When the referee asks where the boy is,

our coach says, Out with a vaginal infection, and his wife sniggers.
During the next match, she lambasts the opposing coach,

her voice piercing the racket. She experiments with different
insults and settles on Midget when she sees the short man grimace.

Self-satisfied she continues the tirade, Midget, Midget, Midget.
We sit still and quiet, unwilling to exchange a sidelong glance.

If we dared speak, we would have said, We’ve got no dog in this fight.
But then our son takes the mat and we rise together, fists pumping.

We have not voiced this, but deep in our hearts, we wish harm on the other
beautiful boy on the mat. We shout our son’s name again and again.

Kathleen Williamson’s chapbook Feather & Bone was a finalist in both Poetry International and Slapering Hol chapbook competitions. She won runner-up prize in the SLAB poetry contest and was a winner in the Poetry in the Pavement project in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Her work has been published in Ponder Review, Newtown Literary, and Lunate as well other literary journals. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and takes classes at Sarah Lawrence College. After spending countless hours watching her son wrestle, she wrote a young adult novel about high school wrestling and published a short story about that subject in Inkwell Journal.

 

 

Run

by Maureen Sherbondy

7

The flag waves in the breeze. It’s October in New Jersey. I challenge a second-grade boy to race me around the half-circle in front of Campbell School. No one can run faster—this is my early pride I carry to school every morning, along with my notebooks and colorful pens.

We start at the flagpole. Someone yells, “Go!”

My thin legs, my wiry body, my brain come alive. If I arrive at the halfway point on the sidewalk before my challenger, then I know it’s a win

My fast-moving feet reach the flag. Kids cheer. The school bell rings. We scamper like squirrels in the autumn air.

Girls never want to race me; I don’t know why.

In homeroom, the other students obediently place a hand on their chest and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I do not. It is my small rebellion. Flag only means starting and ending point.

12

In middle school word gets out that the popular girls are forming a track team. They’ve already selected the members.

With shoulders squared, I approach the captain at recess, say, “How come I can’t be on the team?”

Her kiss-up squad members smirk and shake their heads. I slump down, deflated, but hold my ground.

This is after my parents’ divorce. For years I hide in my room with piles of books and emotional neglect. Before the divorce, I held my hands over my ears trying to block out the screams from my parents’ bedroom. There is nowhere to run away from these walls.

The refrigerator and pantry are bare. My stomach growls with constant hunger. After years of hearing my father hitting my mother’s face or  punching their bedroom wall, I’ve turned quiet and sad. At school, I wear too-short hand-me-down pants from my older brothers. Meek is how other girls see me. These girls who have already developed and have confidence. Not me.

My brothers tease constantly with the refrain, “you’re flat as a board.” I cry in my room.

But when I run, I am fearless.

I look at the mean girls and their judging expressions. The captain says, “You’re not good enough to be on the team.”

The other girls laugh.

“Race me,” I say.

One of the pretty girls who will later become a cheerleader, marry a football player, and never leave this town, holds up her arms to the gray sky. She lowers them as if starting a hot-rod race and yells, “Go!”

The captain runs beside me, but not for long. I pump my arms and my legs faster and faster. My body knows motion and speed. It escapes hunger, loneliness, rejection. I become the wind, then a bullet train whizzing beyond the captain.

At the pre-determined finish line, a fence in the distance, I wait for the sweetness of the words to come. She arrives seconds later, out of breath. Bending over, hands on her hips, she softly says, “Okay, you can join the team.”

I stare at her dark eyes, shake my head, say, “I don’t want to be on your damn team.”

I walk away from the fence, from the gaggle of girls, a smile spreading on my face.

14

In ninth grade I run three miles around the track with the other high school girls. We also practice sprints. My body is changing. I’ve grown several inches since middle school. My hips widen, my arms and legs get longer. Though my body is strong, when I race fastest top girls, I’m not even close to their speed.

That’s when I discover the javelin and shotput. It’s fun to throw things. I can’t forget the blender flying across our kitchen. Did my father hurl it at my mother, or was it the other way around? Throwing the javelin is blissful, like releasing every bad thought and memory into the sky.

I still run around the track for practice, but begin weightlifting too. My unfamiliar, constantly changing body grows stronger by the week. I am no longer shy. I make friends with the other weight-team girls. They are kind and easy to talk to. In the sun beneath the blue April sky, we stand in the grassy field together. I run up to the foul line, release the long metal spear, then watch it travel across the air and land point-down in the ground. Here, I too become firmly planted. My new identity—spear-thrower, teammate.

In front of Metuchen High School, the flag blows. Those stars.

Out of habit, the pledge still doesn’t find my tongue. I have a best friend now. She asks, “Why don’t you ever say the pledge?”

Shrugging, I answer, “Freedom of choice.”

She doesn’t understand. Neither do I, really.

 

18

After years of empty pantries, I make up for it as a freshman at Rutgers. My financial aid allows three meals a day. This is new to me and quite shocking.

By the end of first semester, my body carries an extra 10 pounds from too much fraternity party beer, late-night pizzas, and heavy cafeteria food. My clothes are tight. Since I can’t afford a new wardrobe, once home for summer break I dust off my sneakers. Wearing my Sony Walkman, I run three miles a day. The sore muscles at night remind me of the strength my legs once held. Every day I circle my neighborhood, pounding feet against concrete over and over again. The sweat drains my body of excess from the college cafeteria. Cookies, ice cream, pasta. Eventually, my pants become looser, my hips slimmer, my belly flatter.

By the time I begin sophomore year, all my clothes fit again. A cute guy stops me in the parking lot the first week back. He says, “You look fantastic. What did you do over the summer?”

“I ran,” I say.

 29

I’ve had three sons in 34 months. Too busy to exercise, I add 30 pounds to my 5’8” frame. There are stretch marks on my thighs and hips, a horizontal C-section scar across my lower belly. I bathe babies, change diapers, wipe spit-up from my clothes, cook meals, clean an entire house. Wake up and start all over again. Wheezy. Exhausted. Sweatpants and oversized shirts become my daily wardrobe.

My body is not my body. It is a milk-filling station for baby boys. I breastfeed for years. One child after the next. The feeding stations balloon three bra sizes. My arm muscles are strong from carrying babies around all day, but my leg muscles have lost their firmness. Flab appears in places I never had flab. Merely walking in my neighborhood at night feels like an alien has descended into my body and taken up residence.

 

32

We move to North Carolina. I join a great YMCA with a day care center. Every day I lift weights, walk on the elliptical trainer, pace around the small circular track. Small steps, I tell myself.

For five years I work on finding my body again. It hurts. Parts ache that I did not know could hurt. Neck, shoulder, ankle, butt, wrist. Eventually, power replaces pain.

37

On 9/11, a flag waves to me on the way to the gym. It’s pretty against the Carolina blue sky. A crisp day, I breathe in early autumn air. My three sons are now in elementary school. My body is firming up. The baggy sweatshirts and pants have given way to yoga pants and V-neck cotton shirts.

While exercising on the Stairmaster, I watch the television up on the wall. A plane hits the Twin Towers. I stop moving. We all stop. The machinery halts. Silence.  Images of smoke and crumbling buildings. I think of death. Of the body turned to ashes.

 

55

My sons are adults. One moves to Singapore for a job. One lands in Charlotte, North Carolina. One relocates to California.

A pandemic begins. Gyms close. Everything shuts down. People are dying. Thousands and thousands of people are dying. They can’t breathe. As though in empathy for them, I begin wheezing badly. My inhaler provides relief for me. What about them?

I can’t sleep, but when I do, I dream of running. For months, I dream-run and wake up happy as if endorphins found me during the night.. I have not run since college.

My running dreams haunt me. The COVID-19 extra 10 has found my hips. If I don’t start running, I may never be capable of running again. Ever. My blood pressure and cholesterol are high already. What if I am unable to run at 60?

I find my sneakers and take a walk in my neighborhood. Then I run. Walk, then run. Little bursts of speed. A week of this, then longer runs. It feels familiar like an old friend. At first, my breathing is heavy, so heavy I have to turn up the volume on my pink iPod. I take breaks. Holding onto a pole, I nearly vomit. This is my body. My 55-year-old body.

It hurts terribly—knees, feet, thighs, hips. Everything hurts. I take long salt and lavender- infused baths at night. Get up. Do it again. Uphill. Downhill. Straightaways. I run until I can’t run, then I trick myself, say, “Just go as far as that stop sign.” Then I go beyond it.

Muscle remembers how to move. The pacing of the legs, the pumping of the arms, the hands gently holding invisible eggs. Forward motion. I wave to my neighbors along the way.

Sometimes I think about how terribly this country is doing. When my knees hurt, I think about football players taking a knee. About people refusing to wear a mask. About people dying daily.

Passing flag after flag and signs for Black Lives Matter, I hold up my chin and move forward. In California, where my oldest son lives, the state is burning. Yesterday, the sky turned orange there. My face is on fire with anger. I am worried about America, about every single person I know.

But I keep running, putting miles behind me. Ahead is a hill and my legs keep climbing. I am still that seven-year-old girl in front of the flag, but this time the only person I am challenging is myself.

 

Maureen Sherbondy’s work has appeared in Calyx, Prelude, The Oakland Review, and other journals. Her most recent poetry book is Dancing with Dali. She has also published a YA novel and 10 other poetry books. Maureen lives in Durham, North Carolina.