Oh, Water-Rat you are so right. Well, the whole quote of what Ratty said to Mole is: “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” I was brought up with this quote from Kenneth Grahame’s book Wind in the Willows, and I still live by it – and I am lucky as I can still indulge in such messing about. As I write this, just before the Canadian Labour Day weekend, which is the traditional time when we pull out the docks from the lake and put the boats away, I feel it is a good moment to express gratitude and appreciation for the gentle art of rowing that has come back into my life.
A calm river works best, but a Canadian lake does very well too. A few years ago I got back to the real joy of messing about and what Water-Rat was really talking about: rowing in a row boat! But I have to say, if there is ever an archaic lake activity on many Canadian lakes, it has to be rowing in a row boat. I am the only person on our rather large lake that I have ever seen in such a craft. I specify row boat as I don’t mean sleek racing shells with 1,2,4, or 8 people and with maybe a coxswain to keep everyone in sync. That is an honourable and noble Olympic sport. What I take delight in, is a modest little rowboat with two oars and rowlocks. This allows me to go out for a charming evening row, or a daytime row and to take the grandkiddies along.
I say archaic as most of the boaters on our lake, dash around with the help of an engine on various vessels: pontoons, speed boats, and the speed hogs of all – the Sea-Doos (in the Window in the Willows theme, this is what Toad would use today!) They swirl around and around in circles, showing off, almost as if using an engine somehow is a mighty deed! So there I am, enjoying the swish as I glide along with the sound of the water rippling off the oars and flowing around and under the hull. All these things you can hear when there is no engine.
Many of my fellow lake people have rowing memories. They tell me about it. Last weekend I stopped to chat with a couple sitting out on the very end of their dock enjoying the evening light, me in my little craft. “I used to row” explained the husband. “When I was a boy my mother would row me along so I could fish.” But he summed up his experience by saying “that was before we had an engine.” Oh dear, but I could hear the nostalgia in his voice. Was it for Mummy, his boyhood, the rowing – a combination of it all probably?
I am amazed how fast my Tubby-Tender goes when I am alone, well named, quite wide and only 7 ft long. But a new rowing boat has appeared in my life, well she appeared as my new–me-this-season sailing boat, aka Mystère-Mistral! When she was delivered in June, she came with a very fancy pair of oars. The blades are lovely fine wood and beautifully curved. As I have been so busy getting the sailing sorted out and sailing, I only got around to taking her out for a row this past weekend. Wow, we just skimmed along. What fun, a true joy.
I learned to row as a young child. Other kids had bikes, I had, what the rest of my family, rather insultingly called ‘The Bath Tub’. A little aluminum row boat. And at age five or so I would skim around in this very light craft (the rivets would pop out sometimes and there would be a leak that I would plug up with chewing gum). So, like the book Wind in the Willows, it is nostalgic for me to get back to rowing and so charming and so correct in this age of climate change.