Carnegie Currents: March/April 1999, Vol. XIII, No. 2
Rowing Against the Current
New Book by Visiting Scholar – and Laker – Barry Strauss
"Rowing came to me by surprise," said Barry Strauss to the crowd gathered at Micawber Books on Nassau Street in Princeton on a recent Tuesday evening. They were there to hear Strauss, a visiting fellow at Princeton University and a Laker in residence, read from his new book, titled Rowing Against the Current, On Learning to Scull at Forty. "Shortly before I turned 40," he explained, "I was in the market for a new sport, after suffering injuries in other sports. My academic research had to do with oared ships and I was stuck on a problem and didn’t know how to figure it out. Then I saw a learn-to-row course advertised in Ithaca, where I live."
That small advertisement led to an odyssey that is still unfolding. "I quickly discovered that rowing was very hard. I also discovered that it was fun. Then, ouch, I discovered that I was middle aged. I had always seen myself as a sort of superannuated college student. I learned the true meaning of the expression, ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ And before I knew it, I was writing and the result is this book."
Strauss is a visiting fellow at the University for Human Values at Princeton University for the 1998-99 school year. "Rowing got me to Princeton," he explained. "It gave me the idea for the scholarly project I’m working on." That idea came while he was learning to row in Ithaca, where he is the Director of the Peace Studies Program and Professor of History and Classics at Cornell University. "Rowing in the tanks one day I realized that it was all about the group. It sounds simple, but in ancient Greece rowing served as an education for very poor people. It taught them how to work together as a group. Although it was not the origin of democracy in Greece, it was a very important part of civic education."
Strauss’s work at Princeton extends this idea by studying citizenship — how we can make room for citizen service, both in civilian and military life. For insight, he looks to classical Greece, with a special focus on the Athenian Navy, which he calls "the real people’s military" because it involved all kinds of people, including the very poor.
While in Princeton, Strauss has continued his rowing career with the Lakers. "Before I left Ithaca my friend said, ‘You’re going to Princeton? You’re really lucky. They have a great club.’ Having had a lot more experience sculling, I thought this would be a great chance to learn sweep rowing."
At the reading, Strauss shared three short excerpts from his book — one about the story of how he started to row (reprinted in part below), another about the process of learning to row and the third about his first race as a sculler, a hilarious account that involved some unforgiving weeds in Seneca, N.Y.
Copies of Rowing Against the Current are available at Micawber Books and other area bookstores. A copy is also available through the LakerLibrary. Contact Georgie Skover, librarian, at 609-497-0254.
"I remember the precise day, time, place. It was an overcast midday in June, and I was on my feet running an errand in the warren of boutiques, restaurants, and hangouts that spills downhill southward from campus. I passed a Xeroxed poster in a storefront window announcing LEARN TO ROW, which set off the sound of a slight hmm in my mind. At the signal there opened a dossier of associations about rowing, assembled higgledy-piggledy over the years. I remembered the vague impressions from Central Park, from summer Olympics in front of the TV, and from the folk wisdom of the Ivy League; that rowing was a sport for people who had never been good at sports, that it was a sport of second chances and first aid, that it was all about conditioning and all about grace, that it was for people with big thighs and bigger IQs, that it was for Anglophiles and stevedores, that it was both elitist and democratic. In other words, half the things I could think of about rowing directly contradicted the other half. I might have kept on walking but, being an academic, I have a taste for paradox, so I turned back....
"I decided to give Learn to Row a chance. The Greek in me wanted to know what it felt like to pull an oar. The intellectual wondered about how to get eight individuals to move to the same beat. The athlete wanted to check what has been described as the ultimate workout. The romantic craved seeing if the quirkiness of the sport — there is, after all, little practical value to oarsmanship in the postindustrial age — stirred his blood. The failed Little Leaguer couldn’t resist a second chance to make the team. So I copied down the phone number from the poster; made a call when I got home, and arranged to show up at the beginning session the following week. The voice at the other end of the telephone asked politely about my sports background; rowing, it was pointed out, was a sport that risked few injuries. So it was, I would discover, but only if you did it right."
— from Rowing Against the Current by Barry Strauss (New York: Scribner, 1999)