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NFL Road Trip

by Michael Graham

I prefer to travel by book. Paul Theroux has taken me from Cairo to Capetown in Africa. With Jonathan Raban aboard his 35-foot sailboat, we navigated the 1,000-mile Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. There was a memorable journey years ago with Bruce Chatwin to “the far end of the world,” as the restless Brit described Patagonia, the vast, rugged territory at the tip of South America. Travel by book is the way to go, especially these days. It’s cheaper, whether going by hard-bound or paperback. You don’t need to mask-up. You avoid the TSA lines that snake through airports, the ubiquitous orange barrels on the interstate highways. You kick back in your recliner while the author deals with the linguistic barriers and sweats out the nasty microbial infections in foreign countries. Annoying tourists always seem to find Theroux. Chatwin, in Patagonia, hitched a ride with a Chilean truck driver whose feet, he reported, “smelled like cheese.”

So, in January when my wife Linda said our daughter in Georgia had called, inviting us to join her and her fiancé in Nashville for the upcoming NFL divisional playoff game between the Tennessee Titans and our hometown Cincinnati Bengals, I was not properly enthusiastic. Instead, I began finding reasons why we shouldn’t make what would be a quick weekend trip, the game just four hours and fifteen minutes down the road. Yes, but you know people drive too fast on the freeway. It’s the middle of winter, we’ll freeze our septuagenarian asses off. Our seats are field-level, we’ll have to stand the entire time. You know pro football fans — the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, the Jungle in Cincinnati, it doesn’t matter where — they’re intolerable. Yada, yada, yada.

The more excuses I made, the less convincing I sounded. Even I didn’t buy my argument for staying home, not after the Bengals had just defeated the Las Vegas Raiders in the opening round of the playoffs, touching off a week-long end zone celebration, if you will, in Cincinnati. “Act like you’ve been there before,” the late Paul Brown was known to say when one of his players would do a touchdown dance or spike the ball after scoring. Yet it had been thirty-one years since the club that Brown founded had won a playoff game. Bengals fans were understandably charged up, my spouse included. Linda would be going to Nashville, with or without her complaining, worry-wart husband. She hadn’t been this excited since the last time we attended a Bengals playoff game together — way, way back at Super Bowl XVI in Pontiac, Michigan, where Forrest Gregg’s squad lost to quarterback Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers. It was bitterly cold in Pontiac, too, but the 1982 game was played inside, under a dome, and as the Bengals beat reporter for The Cincinnati Post I had a comfortable seat in the pressbox, far from the madding crowd. The Post folded in 2007, a casualty of declining readership in afternoon papers around the country. I folded too, leaving the business in 1989. There would be no press pass this time.

We arrived in the Music City on Friday, the day before the game, a cold front blowing into town ahead of us. The forecast for Saturday called for highs only in the mid-30s, sunny skies, and a 100 percent chance of Derrick Henry. “The King,” as his loyal subjects in Tennessee bow to their all-Pro running back, would be returning to the field after being sidelined for two months with a foot injury. Bad news for the Bengals. For us, the news was all good. Our weekend stay at The Joseph, a Marriott boutique hotel within walking distance of Nashville’s honky tonks and the Titans’ stadium, would be fully comped by our daughter’s fiancé — much appreciated after the valet who parked my car said the rate was fifty-six dollars a day. When one of the beaming clerks who checked us in at the front desk offered Linda and me each a mini teacup of chai latte, I decided maybe it was finally time to lose my shamefully bad attitude and warm up a little to this experience I’d be sharing with family and Bengals fans. (Just don’t ask me to wear stripes. Silly as it seems, I try to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity, even if it was half a lifetime ago when I covered the club. I still can’t look at the expensive Waterford crystal bowl Linda and I received as a wedding gift from Paul Brown and not feel compromised in some way.)

The staff at The Joseph treated us like visiting dignitaries, so willing to be of service that when I decided I needed a softer bed pillow, I told Linda that management would probably dispatch a valet to Cincinnati to pluck mine off the bed in our townhouse and drive it back to Nashville if I asked them to do so. As it was, they sent up three different pillows for me to try. What our friendly, eager-to-please hosts couldn’t provide, unfortunately, was a hard copy of a newspaper—not even a print edition of the local Tennessean. When I asked the concierge where I could find the New York Times (other than on my Android), she shrugged and pointed across the street. “Try Dunkin’ Donuts.”

I woke up Saturday morning and decided to grab a cup of coffee at the Starbucks in the hotel around the corner. Maybe I could get my hands on a newspaper there. It was 6 a.m. when I left our room on the 16th floor and walked down the dark hallway to the bank of elevators, not a soul stirring. Cincinnati fans and Tennessee fans wouldn’t be putting on their gamefaces until later that afternoon, trudging elbow-to-elbow across the John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge over the Cumberland River for the three o’clock kickoff in Nissan Stadium. The half-mile-long bridge is named after the late editor of the Tennessean, who, as a young reporter with the paper, saved a suicidal man from jumping off the bridge — a leap the disconsolate might have considered taking after their top-seeded Titans were upset, 19-16, by the Bengals.

Waiting that morning on an elevator descending from the 20^th floor, I stared at the video art on the far wall. A tree toppled over in a forest, begging the question that philosophers have debated for centuries. The video, however, ran silently in a slow-motion loop, this tree not making a sound while I stood there watching it fall through the woods, nor would it have made a sound had I been back in my room and out of earshot. In retrospect, I now see the video as a portent, the falling tree a foreshadowing of the calamitous events on the field that day, events the Bengals somehow managed to overcome. Joe Burrow, their second-year quarterback, went down again and again under the Titans’ fierce pass rush — sacked nine times, a playoff record the Bengals’ permeable offensive line shared with the Titans’ defensive front. Burrow’s so-called pass protectors could only help their unflappable QB to his feet after each hit and hope he would keep making plays when the team desperately needed plays to be made. The game ended with a Burrow pass that set up placekicker Evan McPherson, who booted a 52-yard field goal as time expired. The rookie called his winning kick before launching it—a la Babe Ruth pointing to the centerfield wall at Wrigley Field before famously hitting a home run in the 1932 World Series—and thereafter his moniker was “Money” McPherson as the Bengals made their unlikely pilgrimage to the Super Bowl.

What I couldn’t stop talking about, though, after returning home from this trip I didn’t want to make, was another startling moment, a spooky encounter that Rod Serling could have introduced in one of his monologues from his 1960s TV series “The Twilight Zone.” There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. … a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity … the dimension of the imagination …an area we call the Twilight Zone. That’s where I seemed to be when the elevator door opened early that morning and standing in the corner, all alone, was Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the Tennessee Titans. All 6-4 of him. No mask. Stubby beard. He could have been a ghost, a swirling hologram. The valet, the front desk clerk, the concierge who sent me across the street to the donut shop, had not said a word — there was not a peep, in fact, out of anybody — about the Titans being quarantined in our hotel, if indeed Vrabel and his players really had spent the night there, segregated from the public as mandated by the NFL while the SARS-CoV-2 virus remained on the loose. Yet there he was, the Ohio State All-American, the New England Patriots linebacker, the NFL Coach of the Year in 2021, looking directly at me. I’ve seen that look of apprehension before, when VIPs are afraid you might accost them and ask for an autograph, or worse, try to make conversation.

“Good luck today,” I said, getting on the elevator.
Vrabel nodded.

The door closed. We began going down.
Elevator rides with strangers are always uncomfortable. This one was uncomfortable and weird.

“I’m from Cincinnati. I used to cover the Bengals in the Munoz and Collinsworth days,” I said, a remark that surely made no sense because I had failed to identify myself as a has-been reporter.

Vrabel nodded again. We stopped at the 8^th floor. What can I say before he gets off?
“I’m a big Ohio State fan.” Weak, Michael. Weak.
The door opened. With one last nod, Vrabel was gone.

When I returned to the room with my coffee, I told Linda I had ridden on the elevator with the Titans’ coach, just the two of us, and was so stunned to be face-to-face with him I sounded like a silly, awestruck fan. We joked about the one-sided conversation. I should have hit the emergency stop button, demanded Vrabel hand over the Titans’ gameplan. I should have told him I saw his running back in the hotel bar late last night and he appeared to be limping. (The King carried the ball 20 times, gained 62 yards, and scored one TD — yeoman’s work, but not spectacular.) I should have asked the question I’d been asking since I arrived. “I’m looking for a newspaper, Coach. Do you know where I can find one?”

 

Michael Graham is director of operations for Zeigler Financial, a financial services firm in Wilmington, Ohio. He resides in Cincinnati, where he was a staff writer for Cincinnati Magazine (1989-96) and a reporter for The Cincinnati Post (1976-85). His sportswriting portfolio includes five seasons as the Post’s reporter on the Cincinnati Bengals beat and a year as the paper’s sports columnist, traveling around the country to cover a wide range of events, including the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At Cincinnati Magazine, he specialized in profiles of the Queen City’s major sports figures, politicians, media personalities, entertainers, and business leaders.

 

 

 

 

 

Ritual

by Gerald C. Wood

The steel toe broke the skin
of clay and dirt as I slumped,
troubled at knowing Indians
chained, sold blacks in Charleston.

I stood among the shards,
overalls too tight in the
bottom, short at the shoes,
a harlequin farmer at rest.

I sighed as my son ran uphill,
breathless into the garden,
holding his left hand out,
as if expecting healing rain.

Cooling, his words fell on me,
“Dad, want to play catch?” as
I dropped the hoe, stood tall,
Believing time our best friend.

That field dissolves from garden
to dream, as the boy, grown a teen,
returns again a victor on the track,
his words seeking “a game of catch.”

Now with labored breath, I long to be
a homeless ghost, haunting this land
as our play and game grow still and
“a catch,” not ours, has a timeless pass.

Gerald C. Wood is co-editor of Northsiders: Essays in the History and Culture of the Chicago Cubs and author of Smoky Joe Wood: Biography of a Baseball Legend, recipient of the Seymour Medal (2014). His essays on baseball also have been published in NINE Journal. He is Emeritus Professor of English, Carson-Newman University.

Feeds

by Scott Palmieri

Our mantra was “Hope for the best, but know the worst is coming.” Deep down, we knew “the worst” wasn’t real suffering. At least, it wasn’t the suffering I read about in my English classes: Sylvia Plath’s despair, Flannery O’Connor always killing someone, and Shakespeare killing more. The first hour of my baseball first fall practice, we started our season of suffering in the form of groundballs. I know it was an hour because Coach was pacing back and forth behind the infielders, updating the minutes, one grounder after another after another.

That morning, I thought embarrassment would be the worst of my first day as I ran across campus, ten minutes late to my first class, Intro to Literature, an English major who couldn’t read a campus map, relieved to be received by a merciful professor. In a full sweat, I sat, panted, and nodded, trying to pick up, midstream, the discussion of the syllabus. But the morning mishap and everything in my life up to that point, especially the halcyon days of recruiting, were charming distant memories, replaced by the suffering of baseball basic training, which started with relentless groundballs. Field and scoot to the end of the line, a short rest in between, a stubborn September sun baring down, making every play more difficult, field and scoot again. Had there been a syllabus for our semester on the field, authored by Coach, the classroom policies would have included “Keep your head out of your ass” and “Hustle, or I will rip your fucking face off.”

Midway through the hour, a new level churned hotter in the form of “middle feeds.” A quicker torrent of groundballs began, fungo bats mercilessly slashing at the middle infielders. We fielded, shuffled, and tossed double-play flips, swirling from shortstop to second base. One line fielded, the other received, dropping the balls in a milk crate on the bordering outfield grass, our quads and hamstrings searing, our mouths gasping, as the crate filled, urged on by our diminutive, derisive young Coach with his bursts of encouragement such as “You’ll never play here!” every bobble or toss gone amiss feeding his insatiable rage.

These were the first grueling minutes of a grueling fall, our northeast college team on the heels of a disappointing season the spring before, after a conference championship the spring before that, with most of the stars and starters now graduated. At shortstop, my roommate Mike, whom I had known from our Long Island high school careers occasionally crisscrossing, endured, along with the same ceaseless onslaught, the full wrath of Coach, who, throughout the entire fall, tried to break him to bits, replacing the best player in school history and the best shortstop in the region. Our other roommate, Pete, a slugging catcher being converted to an outfielder, suffered his own long day of drills.

Every day thereafter, practices loomed like ominous New England clouds, which never opened for the rain we prayed for. We trudged to our morning classes, which served as hours killed until practice- Intro to Psychology, Western Civilization, Introduction to Literature. But no brain schematics, no history of suffering, no illuminating texts could ease the gloom of Coach’s body and mind gauntlet ever pressing upon us, like the soreness of my massive stress pimple, his teethy snarl and throat-scraping growl balled up, festering on my chin.

The only break in our routine came thanks to the field hockey team. In fall, our outfield was their field, our left and center converted into a gridded rectangle, so their home games pushed us out. Instead of a day off, though, we piled into vans and traveled across the city to a park to play intersquads, chances for the pitchers to show their stuff and for the coaches to better assess what they had to work with, as the vision of a final roster had to come soon.

After our scrimmages, topped off by sprints around the bases to drain excess energy, we loaded back into the vans, our cleats exchanged for sneakers, our bodies and minds at rest, having survived another day. One afternoon, as we exited the park, Mike and I sitting shoulder to shoulder in the packed cabin of the van, our mood lightened from avoiding the worst of Coach that day, we turned our heads to His voice: “Middle infielders, on the field when we get back!”

A protective cup for the soul might have lessened the blow, the order from the front seat a clean kick to the spiritual groin. The long day had reopened, the worst of the physical and mental exhaustion still ahead. Middle feeds. Asses down, glove out, reading the hops to cradle the ball into our leather pockets, lifting it back out to sweep a firm toss to the waiting glove aimed over the base. Over and over. “Double plays are hit, they’re not made!” Coach would yell, an occasional Zen-like exclamation, “Be quick but don’t rush,” roaring the word “awful,” more “aw” than “ful,” minced with physical threats. Once I escaped for a few minutes when, leaning for a backhander, both my calf muscles cramped, dropping me to the ground, knotting up as if two baseballs were pressed against the skin.

The unexpected missive from Coach would delay our cherished daily exit from the locker room. This included our rookie duty, a drop-off to the laundry room, when each day, my assigned senior gleefully handed me his dirty gear, his jockstrap dangling from a large nickel safety pin. The most memorable exchange was when he reassured me that his recent case of “the clap” had cleared. Mike, Pete, and I, in a pilgrimage of the team’s underclassmen, would then make our way across the small campus to the cafeteria, run by the tall, broad shouldered Uncle Lou, as he was called, whose silver pompadour and gold rimmed glasses, with the top couple buttons of his white dress shirt unbuttoned, said casino pit boss more than cafeteria general manager. Most nights, he greeted us at the door as we ambled in toward the end of dinner hours.

Still in the days of college mess halls, most nights we braced ourselves for what floated in the murky Salisbury steak gravy or the yellowish pool of the baked scrod. Only chicken patty sandwich night could lift our spirits. But no matter the entrée, practice was over. We teetered our trays, rattling them onto a long table, as we climbed into the space between bench and tabletop, a feast celebrating our survival. Our small glasses filled with soda, we savored our sips, clinking the ice at the bottom, crunching and laughing in the fading autumn light. Between scanning the room for girls, we conducted a post-mortem of each practice. Pete f-bombed the coaching staff, and Mike denounced the merciless daily regiment, declaring, “That’s it. I’m going to say something to Coach,” both empty protests tilting me over with laughter.

After dinner, we retreated to our dilapidated dorm, a convent decades before, befitting our austerity: high ceilings and gritty faucet water, hard tiled floors, and rumors of a mysterious tunnel behind a basement door we opened once but never entered. Our legs spent, we swung open the rusty scissor-gate elevator doors, clattering to the top third floor for a shower and an evening respite. Mike flipped on our small television and climbed to the top bunk, while I fell into the bottom. Pete, sitting on his single, rubbed his wood bat with a cow femur, the streaking sound soothing him while he hardened the grain.

Later, leaving the room for a study hall, Pete popped on his Walkman headphones, clicking on what we learned later was Christmas music, the yuletide songs, along with his bat treatment, his coping method, even in the mild air of fall, yearning for home and the distant semester break. One day, I noticed Frank Sinatra in the teeth of the cassette player, our first non-baseball bond when I revealed my healthy CD selection of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Mike, rightfully concerned, felt relieved that my father also raised me on John F. Kennedy. Studying to be a high school history teacher, Mike led our charge to a conspiracy theorist who visited campus. With our worn down, psyches, we embraced the wholesale government plot. Many nights, as a strange lullaby, Mike’s copy of the Oliver Stone movie played in our VCR, the comfort of “back and to the left” somehow easing the prospect of the grassy knoll that awaited us each afternoon.

But on that van ride of despair, upon hearing our Coach’s command to return to the field, those nightly solaces stretched far from us. It was the horror of finding an unexpected set of calculus questions on the back of a test’s last page, a failure to remember our “worst is coming” philosophy. Soon, Mike and I would be suffering, winding around the infield dirt in our two lines, fielding and tossing, above the soundtrack of Coach demanding perfection. One grounder after another.

We rattled in the van in silence. I could only mutter to myself, from my recent reading of Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not to” or contemplate the carnage from Western Civ: Roman prisoners ushered to the Coliseum lions. But then a small yet predictable miracle, as we merged onto the modest stretch of highway we needed to cross. Traffic. Visibly perturbed, Coach watched each ebb of movement, leaning to the windshield, as if he could will away the congestion, peering through the modest spaces between cars, with the frustration of watching his pitcher walk the bases loaded.

As we crawled deeper into the six o’clock hour, bumper-to-bumper, there was a mention from the front seats of “cafeteria,” confirmed by an upperclassman, who whispered something about the meal plan, that Coach would have to give us enough time to make dinner. Without saying a word, we shared the surprise that this man, whose looming presence followed us through every hour of our waking days and some of our sleeping ones, could be brought to his knees by the dining hours of Raymond Hall Cafeteria.

As the van trudged on, we stared hard at the dashboard clock and did the math that Coach was surely doing, too. The Goddess of Rush Hour answered our prayers, and the Saint of Fender Benders threw in rubbernecking for good measure. The green digits neared and then crested 6:30, and by the time we ramped off the highway, the imminent 7 o’clock closing of Raymond Hall made middle feeds impossible. Still, Coach waited, as we turned street corners, which, with each trip, were becoming more and more familiar, as were the backs of the campus buildings that bordered the grounds. We pulled into the fieldhouse parking lot, the vans clunking into Park. Defeated, he uttered, “OK, guys. You’re all set. Go catch dinner.”

Exultation.

We hurried into and out of the locker room, down the stairs to the laundry chute to push through the soiled pins, then out of the building, darting away from the vacant infield and the white lined outfield emptied of field hockey players, one of whom I would meet just months later and marry years after that. But there was so much ahead of that: the rest of the fall season, the winter break, four baseball springs, until suddenly, graduation. Then there were weddings and all the bests we could hope for and the inevitable, terrible worsts that were much harder to see coming. Before all of this, we had to make dinner.

Through the dusk shadows crossing between the dorms and classroom halls, we quickened our pace, relief overtaken by the dread of losing the meal. From the distance, we could see, leaning on an open door, the large figure of Uncle Lou. What a sight we must have been, how beautiful, right then and there, running, lucky with our sufferings, at the start of our civilization- the eventual school superintendent, the Major League Baseball bat maker, and the college professor. We entered the cafeteria, one after another, inhaling the redemptive smell of chicken patty.

Scott Palmieri is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and The Result Is What You See Today: Poems About Running. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching Little League, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.

Slow on the Uptake

by Sydney Lea

At 60 — almost, Lord God, 20 years ago! — I took up the sport of flatwater kayak racing, my back and knees having started to protest too vigorously about my running through the woods to stay in shape. But the coronavirus shut down my paddle races in 2020.

Just as well. I’m talking about the races, Lord knows, not the virus. In middle June, I’d had an operation on my right hand, one designed to rectify a botched earlier carpal tunnel procedure. I was cautioned to treat my thumb and first two fingers delicately for six weeks, so I’d never have gotten in shape anyhow for the 12-miler scheduled for early August. But there’d be other races in other places.

Immediately after my first post-surgical workout on our beloved Maine lake, my wife took a picture of me. One of our granddaughters saw it and said, Look! Grandpa’s smiling! My face was contorted, but I wasn’t smiling.

I can dwell on doom sometimes, not blessings like the sweet child’s unique and beautiful smile. Like how on whitecap days such as that one the west wind striates the surface with parallel lines of foam. Like the half-grown eagle that struck the water’s surface twice, fishing its way to a tree, from which it now screamed.

I idled below the big raptor’s perch. I needed the break, though I lied to myself that I just wanted to check on its fortunes. They had been less than mine. I saw that I should feel privileged simply to be there, rocking side to side.

Tax your old muscles and bones like this, I told myself, every day if you can, as strenuously as you can. Extend your years as far as possible. But I was an old man now, and Mother Nature would remain undefeated. I’d be gone before long, the way new grass withers and dies — a notion from Scripture, which may mean nothing to you. That’s none of my business.

My die-hard spirit dies hard, but after that snapshot was taken, it struck me that a month without exercise would have weakened anyone, even a young man. As my mother used to say when stubbornness blinded me to my own ample advantages, You’re slow on the uptake, pal.

I felt I had little time — and all the time in the world. I could be here now, as one 60s icon advised after he went from Harvard professor Richard Alpert to aspirant Buddhist monk Baba Ram Dass. I was in my twenties then.

I remember the would-be monk’s father, a corporate lawyer, calling him “Baba Rum-Dumb.” Even then, I shared some of his cynicism, but staying in the present is a worthy aim. No, it won’t free the poor and oppressed in our time any more than in Ram Dass’s salad days and my own, for all our idealisms. Nor, to quote a song from that era, have we found the way we put an end to war. That’s a truth we’ve been confirming and reconfirming since humans started to farm and, in the process, conceived of property.

I still long to demolish injustice, but at my age it’s worth being diverted by what’s left of wonders — like that salmon, bright as a jeweler’s gem, 15 feet deep in the cove beneath the eagle’s perch, in water so clear I could look right through it, so pure I could drink it.

 

Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of his home state Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. (Past winners include luminaries from Galway Kinnell to Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Rudolf Serkin, and many others.) A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015).  He is the author of 23 books, the latest Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life,” essays (Green Writers Press, 2021). The mock-epic graphic poem, “The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy“ (Able Muse, 2020), was produced in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka.  Four Way Books (NYC) published Here, poems, in late 2019.

The Referee

by Terri Kirby Erickson

In memory of my father, Tom Kirby, 1934 – 2019

How long ago it seems when my middle-aged
father stood in our living room, practicing his
moves. He had a test to pass, signals to learn.
I sat on the couch, holding the local high school
football referee handbook, calling out words like:
delay of game, pass interference, and personal
foul. I would make up ways for him to memorize
motions, like naming one signal the two-handled
teapot and yet another, the back off, buddy. He
would work through the whole list after spending
eight hours at his day job. Still, I, a teenager who
had no knowledge of paying bills and feeding the
family, found it funny to see my father, once he
aced the test, wearing his new uniform—the stiff
white pants, his striped shirt, the shrill whistle that
hung around his neck. But I loved the hours we
spent together, laughing—how there was this thing
his daughter could do for him instead of the other
way around. Although I never saw my father on
the field, I can picture him there, his face lit by the
stadium lights as teams of fierce young men zoomed
back and forth across the yard lines, fans cheering
or jeering from the bleachers when Dad turned into
a two-handled teapot, full to the brim with fair play.

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including A Sun Inside My Chest, winner of the 2021 International Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in “American Life in Poetry,” The Sun, The Writer’s Almanac, and many others. Her awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Nautilus Silver Book Award. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and his extensive collection of Loudmouth golf pants.

 

Babe Ruth Hits First Professional Home Run,
Fayetteville, North Carolina, March 7, 1914

by Philip Gerard

This was the summer the Orioles come to town—
minor leaguers, but plenty of pep and banter.
And this one kid—green, but knows his stuff, see?
Swaggers around, joshing with the kids,
so limber for a big man, the flannels
tight over his bulky chest and
muscled arms, cap ready to fly
right off his big tousled head.

Always grinning, whatever the score,
like maybe falling behind was just a dare
to do something about it, something
those bleacher rats would remember
and tell their own kids about someday.
Now, this ain’t Orioles Park or Ebbets Field
or even beat-down Shibe Park,
just the old Cape Fear Fairgrounds,

a sun-burned infield and some wooden stands.
He loiters at the plate, loose as a grifter,
waving a scarred little bat—skinny
as a broomstick in his thick hands.
“Look at him waggle that pole,” says one of the scribes,
“like a baby with a rattle.” And it sticks, you know?
Babe. That’s what the papers start calling him,
that day forth and forever.
He don’t look like much, till he reaches out

and slaps Mr. Spalding like swatting a fly—
and boy it is not only gone, it is gone
into the middle of next week.
Some sport measures it out—
four hundred feet and counting.
He trots around like no big deal
and the bleacher rats are cheering him on,
already dreaming of their own swat at glory
on a field that stays forever green
and always belongs to the babes.

 

Philip Gerard is the author of 13 books of fiction and nonfiction, including
Cape Fear Rising and The Last Battleground, as well as numerous essays and
short stories, 11 documentary scripts for public television, and an award-winning
radio drama. He has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Weekend
Edition,” CNN, CSPAN, and the History Channel, along with numerous national
podcasts. He teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington
and with his wife Jill Gerard co- edits Chautauqua, the literary journal of
Chautauqua institution in New York. In 2019 he received the North Carolina
Award for Literature, the highest civilian honor conferred by the state.

James Thurber, Devotee and Scourge
Forgive him for inventing the football cliché, for he was still a fan.

by John Baskin

James Thurber was an odd duck, very much bred in Columbus, Ohio, but also not of it. This fact accounted for a wonderful tension in his work, whereby the temperament of a Midwestern foozle lay beside a fellow reading Henry James, someone equally at home in Paris or Parma but not really from either. He was also one of Ohio State’s biggest fans, except when he wasn’t.

Thurber once explained Ohio as “a region steeped in the traditions of Coxey’s Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.” When he went off to Ohio State in 1913, the university’s primary function was still vocational training and most of its 4,000 students were solidly grain-fed Ohioans. It was the kind of place, Thurber observed, where it was dangerous to be found with a copy of Shelley in your pocket. A German teacher of Thurber’s time contended that “any stirring of the mind” on campus was considered high-brow and undemocratic. Still, there was a good English department and a small, lively band of students, and Thurber always acknowledged both.

Midwestern to the core, Thurber could never quite make up his mind about football. On one of his typing hands, he wrote that Ohio State was a college “for football players, Boost Ohioers, and stock-judging teams.” On the other, he wrote, “We give place to no man in our ardor for the game as it is played at Ohio State.” And he said football “has more beauty in it than any other competitive game in the world, when played by college athletes.”

So he vacillated, scheduling trips back from New York to coincide with Ohio State’s home games and illustrating the front cover of the official program for the Ohio State–University of Michigan homecoming game in 1936, but also fretting over the emerging big-time nature of the football program, which, he thought, was diametrically opposed to any equal fealty to the arts. (He was fond of quoting his old professor, Joseph Denney, who’d said of the university, “Millions for manure, but not one cent for literature.”)

Because of his national platform, he helped give rise to the notion that Ohio State was a “football factory.” By the 1940s, Thurber had established himself as a literary lion, first at The New Yorker, where he’d written “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” his most famous short story, and several books, including the autobiographical My Life and Hard Times, which catalogued the deeds—and misdeeds—of his Columbus relatives. It’s generally regarded as his masterpiece, a portrait of a particular Ohio world soon to be overrun by modernity: his grandfather, who wasn’t sure the Civil War had concluded, his Aunt Sarah who lived in nightly fear of a burglar blowing chloroform under her door, and a grandmother who thought electricity leaked out of the empty light sockets. Biographer Charles Homes characterized the events of the book as representing “What Ought to Have Happened, if only the world were a little more artistically organized.”

It was Thurber’s essay, “University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times that gave America an enduring picture of the dim bulb football lineman, personified by the Ohio State tackle Bolenciecwcz, whom Thurber described as “while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter.” When the economics professor asks Bolenciecwcz to name any means of transportation, the ensuing colloquy among Bolenciecwcz, his classmates, and Professor Bassum is classic Thurber:

“You may choose among steam, horse-drawn, or electrically propelled vehicles,” said the instructor. “I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land. ” There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr. Bassum.

Mr. Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. “Choo-choo-choo,” he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room. All of us, of course, shared Mr. Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics. For the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off.

“Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!” some student with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr. Bassum himself rounded off the little show. “Ding, dong, ding, dong,” he said, hopefully.
Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red.
“How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwcz?” asked the professor. “Chuffa chuffa, chuffa chuffa.”
“M’father sent me,” said the football player.
“What on?” asked Bassum.
“I git an ’lowance,” said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed.
“No, no,” said Bassum. “Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?”
“Train,” said Bolenciecwcz.
“Quite right,” said the professor.

Did he really create the vacant-minded Bolenciecwcz with his boyhood friend Chic Harley in mind? Hard to believe, but his college chum Elliott Nugent says he did. Thurber also wrote an epic poem about Harley that went, in part:

There’s a thousand other stories of the games of other years,
But one from out the thousand like a flash of light appears,
And there’s nothing half so thrilling from the first year to today,
Like the glory of the going when Chic Harley got away.

Easier, of course, for the world to remember Thurber’s portrait of poor, laboring Bolenciecwcz over his Harley-induced iambic pentameter, and therein the Thurber dichotomy in which he was at once university devotee and scourge. In 1940, he had added more parody to Ohio State football, this time in the play he’d written with his Elliott Nugent, The Male Animal. (Nugent, a man-about-campus and future actor-playwright of note, had taken the fledgling Thurber under his wing, made him get a haircut and a new suit, and got him into Phi Kappa Psi. The two men would remain lifelong friends.)

By the mid-century, The Male Animal was regarded as “a small classic of the American theatre.” It was in a Midwestern college town (read: Columbus) on the eve of The Big Game (Michigan, of course), and the play involved a professor; his winsome wife, Ellen; and a returning jock who in his own spangled university days had been Ellen’s boyfriend. The dominant theme is the romantic triangle and its resolution, with a backstory of whether or not Professor Turner—who plans a classroom reading of a letter by the executed anarchist Niccolo Vanzetti—will buckle under the pressures of censorship.

Another of Thurber’s several biographers, Burton Bernstein, said the play was “like a tipsy midget at a teamsters’ outing, its academic-freedom theme bravely, absurdly, asserting itself in an otherwise conventional Broadway romantic comedy.” Reviewers generally agreed it was “a palatable way for the theatregoer to take a dose of social conscience.” Thurber blanketed Ohio with tickets, admonishing visiting firemen from Columbus that the play’s setting could be any Midwestern campus town, but no one was having any of it. (Thurber and Nugent wouldn’t publicly admit the setting was Ohio State until years later, “to avoid libel and mayhem,” as Nugent put it.)

In 1942, the play moved from Broadway to Hollywood. The local references in the film rendered “Midwestern University” even more clearly as OSU, to wit: the Neil Avenue gate, the scarlet-and-gray school colors, and, of course, the team fight song—“We Don’t Give a Darn for the Whole State of Michigan.” Speculation was that the relatively innocent audiences of the 1940s were not yet accustomed to such immodesty as “damn,” even though Clark Gable had famously used it a couple of years before when he walked away from Vivien Leigh at the end of Gone with the Wind. Ohioans, though, had no such reservations. It was, first of all, Michigan they were talking about, and they’d been not giving a damn about Michigan since the 1920s.

According to local lore, it was sometime in the 1920s when an inebriated fan wandering through the old Deshler-Wallick Hotel lobby had yelled, “We don’t give a damn for the whole state of Michigan.” That was followed by a wonderful impromptu moment in which a musical combo in the lobby—and several dozen well-lubricated OSU fans—spontaneously set the phrase to the music of “The Old Gray Mare.” And thus a legend was born.

 The Male Animal, with its serious underlying note of an unpalatable censorship, made Thurber seem terribly prescient in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy burst onto the national scene, infecting the country with the specter of a communist under every bed. Thurber wasn’t happy with McCarthyism, of course, but he was also unhappy with Ohio State because the university in 1951, after a “faintly socialistic Columbia University professor” gave a talk on campus, instituted a gag rule for speakers.

Thurber’s position was that no communist could sway an Ohio State audience and not allowing them to speak forewent a splendid occasion “to heckle and confound such speakers.” A few months after the gag order, the university decided to award Thurber an honorary degree. Both the timing and the manner of it—the university hinted Thurber didn’t actually have to be present—was insulting, and he declined, rather graciously but pointedly.

The gag rule eventually went away (as, thankfully, did McCarthy), but it left a dent in both the university and Thurber, further provoking his contradictory feelings about Columbus and Ohio State. As usual, though, his Buckeye DNA held sway, bringing him back home in 1959 to receive the Distinguished Service Award of the Press Club of Ohio. In 1960 he made the dedicatory speech for a new OSU Arts and Sciences Building named after his old professor Joseph Denney. Thus his affections swung back and forth, for he was at heart an artist with an artist’s concomitant aesthetic liberality, and he was also bedrock Columbus, bound by the same conservative fetters as his mid-century Ohioans. The truth was, he never really got far from home. Once, traveling through Carcassonne in the south of France, he was delighted when he spotted an automobile with a Cleveland license plate.” You just can’t outrun Ohioans,” he said proudly.

What Ohio State fans should remember about Thurber was that, first and foremost, he was an Ohioan and, in his own way, one of them. His early life was suffused with sports, particularly baseball, because Columbus in those days was a baseball town and Thurber, as a 12-year-old kid, saved his nickels to go to Neil Park and watch the Columbus Senators. Ohio State, having lost to Michigan 86–0 when Thurber was eight years old, was still a work-in-progress. That would be changed, in part, by the ministrations of a young man named Chic Harley—Thurber’s classmate at East High who’d played baseball on a team captained by Thurber’s brother.

Thurber was a couple of years ahead of Harley; he looked on while Chic helped establish Ohio State’s national presence. He would later write the quintessential description of Harley on the football field, for the New York newspaper PM, and it went like this: “If you never saw him run with a football, we can’t describe it to you. It wasn’t like Red Grange or Tom Harmon or anybody else. It was kind of a cross between music and cannon fire, and it brought your heart up under your ears.”

It isn’t difficult to see why Columbus—and Ohio State—figured so prominently in Thurber’s writing. One, he was born into a family so inventively moonstruck they begged to be herded onto the printed page where they could be consumed at leisure. (Personal favorites: Aunt Mary, who survived until the age of 93 on what seemed to be copious amounts of chewing tobacco, and Thurber’s mother, Mamie, an inveterate showoff who once appeared on the stairs in her dressing gown, her hair awry, and announced to guests she was being kept in the attic against her will because of her hapless love for Mr. Briscoe the postman.) Two, at Ohio State, he was known for cramming four years into five and still getting away without a degree. He managed to noodle through most of his course work but biology (where his faltering eyesight kept him off the microscope) and military drill, which he hated unreservedly and complaining that the uniform made him look like a streetcar conductor. (“You’re the main trouble with this university,” the ROTC commandant told him. “Either you’re a foot ahead or a foot behind the company.”)

Thurber lived at home and ferried himself back and forth on the streetcar, a somewhat spectral figure floating about the campus, awkward and dreamy. His was the frequent picture of the artistically-inclined loner who combats isolation with a rich imaginative life (the salon of the mind holds many a lively event where the bashful introvert is the life of the party).

In the 1920s, Thurber landed a reporting job at the Columbus Dispatch, where he stymied the old hands with his approach to the news. “He was a scribbler, a writer,” sniffed one of them, with the superiority in which the profession held the suspiciously literate among themselves. Thurber, who was addressed as “Author” by his city editor, bemoaned what he said was the paper’s perfect lead for every story: “John Holtsapple, 63, prominent Columbus galosh manufacturer, died of complications last night at his home, 396 N. Persimmon Blvd.” The city editor, a man named Kuehner, who’d trained on the police beat, hated departures from journalistic rigor, especially flowery introductions, and whenever he spied one, he shouted, “This story is in bloom!”

Thurber’s experiences with the city desk lent him a recurring anxiety dream in which the editor races over to his desk carrying a shoe and barks out, “We’ve got just ten minutes to get this shoe in the paper!” His basic job was covering city hall, but his fertile imagination overrode the beat’s minimal qualifications. It sometimes caused him to ignore important numbers, such as his story on the municipal debt, in which he overstated it by $6 million. That incident was followed by a bulletin board directive at the Dispatch forbidding Thurber to write any story that dealt with sums above five figures.

He was not inspired by the prosaic dramas of city hall, his interests gravitating naturally to the collection of oddballs wandering in and out of the mayor’s office. (They included a man who could receive a local radio station on the rims of his spectacles and a woman who predicted earthquakes by a twinge in her left side.) Thurber’s working day was a brief office appearance after which he took off, “a sheaf of folded copy paper in my pocket and a look of enterprise in my eye,” heading for Marzetti’s, a restaurant whose main population seemed to be newspapermen who sat around drinking coffee and doodling on the tablecloth.

In 1922, he covered the dedication of Ohio Stadium, and he wrote his college chum Nugent about the event. “Too bad you can’t be here to whiff the football air and to see the stadium dedicated,” he said. “It is nearly completed now, a wonderful structure, set down in the pastoral back eighty of the OSU like a modernized Greek temple or a Roman coliseum born of mirage. Michigan plays here October 21, dedication day…”

There he was again, a fan. He remained one, too. Even as an adult he could still recite Columbus line-ups and batting averages, and at The New Yorker, when the magazine’s vaunted proofreaders spelled Chic Harley’s first name as “Chick,” he threw a fit. “It was an error no Ohio State man could ever live down,” said biographer Bernstein. When Thurber died in 1962, E. B. White, one of his closest friends, wrote, “There were at least two, probably six Thurbers. His thoughts have always been a tangle of baseball scores, Civil War tactical problems, Henry James, personal maladjustments, terrier puppies, literary rip tides, ancient myths, and modern apprehensions. Through this jungle stalk the unpredictable ghosts of his relatives in Columbus, Ohio.”

And his Columbus always featured Ohio State at its center. Because he hadn’t concluded his university stay with a proper graduation, it was as though he’d hang around in perpetuity, awaiting resolution to some vague and unfinished hometown business. Even with his typical ambivalence, there’s little doubt he’d have been pleased when in 2016, as Ohio State played Nebraska, the Buckeyes unveiled replica uniforms from the famous undefeated 1916 Chic Harley team. They featured red jerseys with gray vertical stripes and the look was called “music and cannon fire,” after Thurber’s famous description of Harley running.

The fans may have only dimly recognized Thurber’s name, but they surely knew Harley’s. It’s unlikely many would have recognized the commonality of the two men, though. They were classmates at Ohio State when Chic almost single-footedly ushered in its first golden age. They were present at the creation, you might say. Thurber’s depiction of Harley running is still the single quote everyone uses when Harley’s name comes up. From a relatively young age, they both suffered physical debilities; Harley began a descent into dementia, Thurber into blindness.

Thurber, of course, was no athlete—he once said his most notable accomplishment was “hitting empty ginger ale bottles with small rocks at a distance of thirty paces.” He was the afflicted American male, slight of build, awkward, so unathletic that he passed gym only by enlisting another student to masquerade as him and swim across the pool in his place. Harley, of course, owned the gym. Yet even such disparity bound them together, for Thurber envied Harley’s easy grace and converted the idea of it into his writing. Even today, Thurber’s mid-twentieth century essays are the epitome of grace. They appear to be effortlessly tossed off when they’re nothing of the kind—deceptively simple declarative sentences that in their quiet rhythms blend both humor and, to use Thurber’s own phrase, “the damp hand of melancholy.”

Thurber’s athleticism was an inner one, given voice in a story like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” where Mitty’s alter ego—as with Thurber’s own—became the athlete. No one understood better than Thurber that life was an obstacle course. Like his boyhood hero on the football field, Thurber slipped past many of the obstacles with Harley’s own dexterity. Only the expression differed. Then one day, there they were, both Ohio State immortals. Chic Harley and James Thurber: two peas in an Ohio pod.

John Baskin is the author of New Burlington: The Life and Death of an American Village and The Cincinnati Game (with Lonnie Wheeler), and has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The Yale Review, and other publications. This essay comes from Lords of Smashmouth: The Unlikely Rise of An American Phenomenon, his recently released book.

Dream Deferred: Schooled by the “World Serious”

by Ken Hogarty

A high school student for about six weeks at Sacred Heart near Civic Center in San Francisco, I anticipated playing hooky for three days. On the fourth day, I did. And my Dad — upstanding citizen,  WW II veteran, beloved parishioner — conspired with me.

He lived up to his “Hustler” nickname given by fellow Most Holy Redeemer Men’s Club members for selling parish raffle and crab feed tickets to everybody. Although a modestly paid warehouseman, he scored tickets to 1962’s sixth World Series game pitting my beloved, newly christened San Francisco Giants against the juggernaut New Yorkers.

First Out
The sixth game, with the Bronx Bombers leading the Series 3-2, got rained out three straight days. Since pundits regarded the day after that Series the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it would be apt to say that for this 13-year-old baseball diehard, game six would be all or nothing.

The Giants won my game six, 5-2. All Series games took place in daytime in 1962. Luckily, my last class ended early enough the next day to allow me to cram together in the class closest to the school’s office with about 80 others to watch game seven’s last two innings on a little television with rabbit ears.

Later in the decade, Altamont, literally my 21^st birthday, got called the death of the Woodstock era. And in the early 1970s, Dan McLean’s American Pie mourned the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens as “the day the music died.” The 1959 and 1969 “game-changers” sandwiched, in this boy’s mind, another deadly day — the Richardson last-out catch of the McCovey liner that would have won the 1962 World Series.

I was sure, nevertheless, that we’d be back in the Series the next year — sure before the palpable fear the next days that the world could end during the Russian missile stalemate.

Subsequent near-misses and, more often, utter failures, magnified that 1962 loss. I, nonetheless, felt blessed seeing great players and games in person over the years.

Second Out
In 1989, after a threatened Toronto move and before another similar relocation to St. Petersburg got halted at the last moment, the Giants returned to the World Series against Tony La Russa’s Bash Brothers, Rickey Henderson, and a notable Oakland pitching staff.

The A’s quickly dispatched the Giants 5-0 and 5-1 in Oakland, but the A’s would need to play the next three games at the ‘Stick. By then, an English teacher at my alma mater, just renamed Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep, I had tickets for Game Four for myself and daughter, almost the same age as I had been in ’62.  

For the third game, October 16th, I hurried home across the Bay Bridge to my Oakland home by the 5:00 game time. At 5:04, I felt and watched the Loma Prieta earthquake wreak destruction that, among other things, cancelled game three. It was eerie seeing a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed – an hour after I had commuted across it.

Eleven days later the A’s won their third game in a row, 13-7. A father of my daughter’s friend had arranged transportation to game four on October 28^th on a restored 1920’s boat that held sixteen fans, half Giants and half A’s fans. The game wasn’t as close as the 9-6 final score.

With the A’s fans finishing their celebration that started when their team took a 7-0 fifth inning lead, our “Captain” offered a couple stranded fans a ride south before recrossing the Bay to our cars. I felt crushed, just as I had in ’62. My daughter, however, literally sick, was crushed in the prow of the little vessel.

It sputtered and stalled mid-Bay. A couple of the A’s fans passed out on the deck. We bobbed in the Bay for hours with bigger boats streaming past, our flickering running lights meekly alerting our presence. The smell of gas overpowered. We barely restarted in time to get our car before the parking lot closed at 1 a.m. I thought the chance to enjoy a World Series victory also had closed.

Third Out
By 2002, a gem of a ballpark had replaced the ‘Stick. In 2002, even with steroid accusations hovering around Barry Bonds like the cloud floating around Pig-Pen in a Peanuts’ comic strip, the Giants made it as a Wild Card to the Series against the Angels. I attended games three and five. The fifth game, in which the Giants crushed the Halos, 16-4, provided the iconic image of J.T. Snow scooping up Giants’ batboy Darren Baker (the manager’s son), who had strayed to home plate as Snow romped home.

And though what would hopefully be clinching game six would be played in Anaheim, I would enjoy it watching concourse projections and the huge centerfield scoreboard while roaming the Club Level at the newly christened PacBell Park. A school administrator then, I had applauded S.H.C.’s booking the stadium the year before for that night (with no idea who would be playing in the Series) for an all-class reunion.

Colleagues, former classmates and students, and current parents anticipated a joyous night. Game six played out perfectly — through six innings. The Giants 5-0 lead had fans heading to us to congregate outside PacBell to celebrate. My Series drought would end at the perfect place, the Giants’ home, though my team was playing 400 miles away in Anaheim.

That was the game in which Dusty Baker handed starter Russ Ortiz the ball as a souvenir of his impending clinching win when everything unraveled. The Angels won 6-5. My World Series drought unexpectedly continued for at least one more day.

The next day, my wife and I drove to L.A. for game seven. A former student with Hollywood connections, had tickets for us.

Thunderstick noise, rally monkey sightings, and an inept Giants’ offense choked off any chance of experiencing a Series celebration. The Giants fell, 4-1. The drive home Monday was the most dirge-like 400-mile ride since when I had driven a girlfriend home from school to L.A. the day after Sirhan Sirhan assassinated RFK. Once again, the World Series gods had rained out my Giants’ victory parade.

New Inning,Over Triples Alley: Walk-off Home Run
Finally, 52 years of misses melted away with three 2010-2014 World Series crowns. I beam remembering those three wins: The Misfits winning in 2010; the back-against-the-wall 2012 victory (escaping from six “loser go home” playoff games before sweeping the Tigers in the Series); and the Bumgarner-fueled 2014 triumph. I attended three Series games in the stretch.

After many misses, the 2010 Series assuaged years of frustration. I gloried in an announcement I made to 1300 students that November, one of the most pleasurable moments I had as Principal of my alma mater. The announcement: “School is dismissed so you can attend the Giants’ first-ever San Francisco victory parade. Enjoy yourselves, stay safe, and treasure a moment that may last forever.”

Ring Lardner called baseball’s championship the “World Serious.” Over my lifetime, the World Series seriously schooled me about delayed gratification, persistence and hope.

Ken Hogarty was a long-time English teacher and high school principal. Since, he has had two prior pieces that appeared in Sport Literate, as well as short stories, a couple memoirs, news features, and over 20 satires and comedy pieces published. He lives with his wife Sally near Oakland. He is an avid reader and writer about sport and his long-ago MA thesis explored “The Metaphor of Baseball.”

 

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.