A Open Love Letter to the UVM Women's Crew Program

Ladies,

Well, I guess I can say that four years of my life are officially over.  Four years of commitment, love, sweat, sore muscles, sunrises, snowstorms, van rides, laughing fits, failures, successes, and all of the moments that took us from one to another. It seems impossible, that the center of my life for the last four years—the UVM Crew Team—will no longer be what gets me out of bed in the morning.

Looking back at my freshman self, it’s hard to believe that that was me. So much has changed in this short time; I’ve changed so much. I remember coming to practice on the first day and seeing the varsity girls—Kate Evans, Katie Hughes, Julia Williams, Gretchen Loft, Sarah Badley, Maddie Shellgren, Annie Bednar—and thinking holy shit. I was super intimidated by these ripped, beautiful, smart, sassy ladies, and wanted nothing more than to become one of them. I’ve spent the last four years, on and off the water, trying to live up to the incredible example and standard that my mentors and teammates have set for me.

The outstanding UVM Crew of 2010

If there is one lesson that I learned from my time on the team, and that I want to leave you with, it is this: You are strong, and capable of so much more than you know. The way to discover your true potential as a person is to be part of a group of similarly dedicated and motivated women, and to fight tooth and nail to reach your own definition of success. I’ll never forget the morning in mid-September my sophomore year, when the four let Alex take their seats for the men’s team to use, and Rick went on a 15 minute screaming rampage. As a new member of the varsity crew I had no idea how to take such an event. After we got off the water, our senior reality-check, Em West called us all together to explain one thing: yes, Rick is here to make us strong athletes and rowers, but his true reason for coaching is that he wants us to be strong women. He was yelling not because his water time got cut into, but because he was so pained by the idea that the women’s team would simply give up what was theirs to an unquestioned male authority. 

We all row for our own reasons, but at the end of the day, we have to row for each other, and for ourselves. We have to believe in and value our own potential enough to work for every inch of the success we are capable of. What I find most beautiful about the sport of rowing, and particularly about the teams and boats I've been a part of over the last four years, is the combination of strength and love necessary to move a boat. Rowing is a grueling sport. Success is impossible without a huge amount of work, pain, frustration, and toil. But the only way to truly maximize that work is to do it for something greater than yourself. 

Movin' Boats

In the final sprint of my last collegiate race, my coxswain Christa called the last five strokes for the seniors. I have never felt a boat pick up under me in that way, or felt such a real, visceral surge of love, commitment, and connection. I finished the race collapsed over my oar, unable to breathe, tears in my eyes, laughing. All of the physical work we had committed to over the last year culminated in a moment of pure dedication to one another. To row is to work. To work is to love. Love moves boats.

Boat huddle before my last race

So I guess the last thing to say is thank you. Thank you Maddie, Erin, Caitlin, and Sarah for somehow thinking that I was a cool freshman and inspiring me to live up to your expectations. Thank you Em West, Annie, and Kyle for setting an incredible example of leadership, dedication, and unadulterated hard work, and for all that you did to foster me as a rower and a person. Thank you Julia, Katie, Kate, Rachel and G$ for being teammates and friends, for getting through hell and (extremely) high water, always together. Thank you Rick, for forcing me to be stronger and work harder than I ever knew I could.

Some seriously high water...

Thank you for more sunrises than I can count. Thank you for warming me up in the car with dance parties on the way back to campus. Thank you for a senior Charles that I will remember for the rest of my life. 

Thank you for every terrible winter erg piece in the Christie dungeon. Thank you for the best spring break of my life; bear shirts, boon beats, clotheslines and all. 

Team Spirit Animal - take a guess

Thank you Alex, Amanda, Michaela, Christa, Tara, Frances and Liz for reminding me everyday why I came back to the team this year, when I could have simply walked away. Thank you to my incredible freshmen for continually raising the bar on the erg, in the boat, and as a team. Thank you to Michaela for being my best friend through four of the craziest years of my life, and for going stroke for stroke with me the whole way. Thank you Gretchen, for being my other, more logistically inclined half, and for surviving all of this despite ourselves. Thank you Doug for believing in me as a rower and as a person, and for making it possible for us to create the unparalleled sense of support, positivity, and possibility that the team has had this year.

I am so proud of you all, so proud to call you my teammates and family. I hope that you will continue to build on this incredible foundation that we’ve created this year, and keep getting stronger, faster, and braver, on and off the water.

All my love from bow,

Emma

This is a view I'll miss
photo cred to GPow

Of Piggybanks, Promises, and Presence

A couple of months back, I had a bad day—a bad week. A bad couple of weeks, really. Obligations stacked, responsibilities weighed, the future loomed. It rained more than it snowed, and I worked twice as much as I slept.  But that one day in particular, it was a plateau day. I had hit rock bottom the previous week, and had since rebounded to a more or less stable place of mindless apathy. I had successfully convinced myself that I only had to do—to show up, make the motions, not fuck up—and eventually it, whatever “it” was, would be over.

I came home that night, sixteen hours after I had left, to a package sitting on my bed. It was a fairly large box, 12x12x18 I might guess. It was light, but something shifted inside of it. Scrawled across the top was my best friend’s unmistakable chicken scratch and a stamp saying that the delivery had been delayed due to an incorrect area code.

I fumbled for my knife to open it, and under the flaps of slightly soggy cardboard, was a gigantic replica of a strawberry milk syrup bottle covered in stickers of our favorite gear brands and pictures of us on various mountains. Across the cap was a large slit that characterized the loud piece of plastic as a piggybank. Below it was a card that read, 

“I got this sufficiently silly piggybank (someone at one point paid $15.00 for this) as a token of my devotion to the project. I have covered it in things that represent things you love and have made it so ludicrously heinous that you can’t help but notice it every morning (and hopefully smile a little bit). I have started you off with the change from my wallet and expect it only to grow by the time I come home. ADD for every day you might feel like shit/giving up/moving to the Arctic. BUT also add on the good days as an incentive to keep them coming."

. . . 

The Project, to which she referred, stemmed out of years of dreaming and a Saturday morning cup of tea. I was sitting in the living room of my not-quite-homey apartment looking at the photos my friends in Argentina were posting of their summer adventures. I was experiencing such an intensely visceral, curl-your-toes-in-your-slippers sense of longing, but a happy, optimistic longing, that I had to tell someone. So I called up Becca, not really knowing what I wanted to say. When she answered the phone, I blurted something along the lines of “Boo, I just, I just need to go back. I want you to come with me. There is just so much there that you need to know. Promise me someday?”

She responded, a smile in her voice, “Of course. Write up a contract. Send it my way. We’ll go”

The contract I sent her later that day read:

As dictated on January 26, 2013,

At the Speeder and Earl’s café on Pine Street

Burlington, Vermont

I, __________________________________, do hereby enter into a soul-binding contract to accompany my dearly cherished friend, _______________________________, on an adventure of epic and unforgettable proportions in Patagonia.

We will embark on this journey with eager hearts and open hands in the intention of seeking out beauty, joy, challenge, exhaustion, happy accidents, friends new and old, questionable choices, blisters, sunburns, glacial streams, rough trail, wonder, gratitude, alpaca sweaters, Fernet Branca, sunrises, sunsets, long views, short sleeps, and all of the other things we cannot even begin to imagine.

Though the exact dates and locations of this journey have yet to be confirmed, I promise to fulfill this agreement to the best of my abilities. Someday. No matter what. Even if I’m really, really, REALLY old. Or broke. Or sad. Or happy. I will take the time out of my crazy, busy, messy, beautiful life and spend a moment with myself and my friend and the universe.

                                       

                                    ________________________________________________________

                                                Signature                                                Date

They copy she sent back was embellished with mountains and a few additions to the list of must-do’s.

 . . .

Flash forward a few weeks, to me sitting on my unmade bed, 3 liter piggybank in hand, a softball-sized lump in my throat. It takes a certain kind of person to keep surprising you, even after seventeen years of the most intimate friendship. It takes a certain kind of friend to give you the exact thing you didn’t know you needed.

I needed an escape, yes, but I also needed a reason to stay put. I needed a reason to slog through the bureaucracy and the bullshit. I needed a reminder that it will all be over, sooner rather than later, and that the only way to get through it is presence—appreciating the moments for what they are, moments, and letting them go, good and bad, with the drop of a coin. I needed to be aware that every day here is an investment in a future that, while I cannot yet imagine it, is very real, and deserves my best. But perhaps most of all, I needed to find my joie de vivre.

What tends to happen while living in Vermont is that I have a habit of taking on too much. In theory, I take on all of these things because I love them. It probably also has something to do with my type A personality, inability to say no, and the slight high I get off of sleep deprivation, but that’s another blog entry. The point is, I take classes, do research, row, volunteer, and take part in cultural exchanges because they are things that I love, and supposedly bring me joy. The problem is that all too often, I lose sight of that, and the activity or responsibility becomes and end in and of itself. I do school because I do school. I row because I row. I do research because I have to do research.

Because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Because it would be unfair and unethical to quit. Because my resume isn’t sufficiently plushed out…

But what about the joy?

A few weeks ago we got an unexpected Tuesday night dump. Without thinking, I posted on a friend’s facebook picture of the snow, “who wants to play hookie tomorrow?” Another friend responded with, “I will! Imma call you!”

Hookie Lunch

The next day around 1pm, after a morning row and Spanish class, I found myself carving turns in untracked powder, smiling so much my teeth were cold. My legs were pretty toasted from 1000m pieces and moving fresh snow, but the joy was warm and exhilarating and immediate. Urgent even. I realized, for the gazillionth time, that the mountains are were I am happiest. It is the place where I feel most myself, most like the person I want to be.

The person I want to be is happy. The person I want to be is engaged. The person I want to be says yes, without hesitation. The person I want to be is fueled by passion and joy, not guilt or duty. The person I want to be is always seeking, not something else, but something more.  

I decided that day that I needed to rediscover the loves that brought me to the life I currently lead. That means my love of knowledge, of questioning, of writing. Of working hard, of sweating, of being sore. Of dreaming, of hoping, of risking disappointment for the possibility of the unknown. I also decided to take the time to do the other things I love, but tend to let pass

by—dinners with friends, sunset hikes, a god nap, a quiet moment alone.

And so, for every good day, I put a few coins in the bank, and also for every day that isn’t so good.  I like to think that joy is the sort of investment that compounds its own interest. 

Coming Back

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At the start of each new journey of my life, I have always started a new journal. They have been my means of making sense of the inundation of stimuli in and around me, of confiding in something when I don’t have an immediate support system, and of capturing all of the little, inconspicuous moments that constitute a life well lived.

When I went to Argentina I started a blog using (and heavily editing) my journal writing.  At first I saw of it more as an easy way out of responding to a zillion different emails, but quickly that changed. Rather than writing only for myself, who was living it all first hand, it forced me to search for narrative and meaning in my experiences that would prove interesting for someone else. Writing for an audience helped to teach me how to view and live my life in a much more purposeful way.

I am currently in the process of a different sort of journey. I've spent the last 10 months back in Vermont, which is about the longest stretch of time I've been in one place since I was sixteen. I am practicing the capacity to be present, open and optimistic, even when my default reaction to life in Burlington is to retreat, brood, stress, and otherwise catastrophize. It has been a somewhat bumpy learning process to say the least, complete with good and bad days, progress and setbacks, and frequent bouts of deliriousness. But such is life, or my life anyway, so I'm trying to just be in the moments as they come.

So as I muddle through these transitions, transformations, growing pains and joys, I would like to share the experience with anyone who might care to follow along. This blog will be an accumulation of personal insights, academically inspired ramblings, good stories, and whatever other details feel worth sharing as I move through my life. 

Yours, with love, hope, and half a night's sleep,

Em