by Alex Marshall - articles and essays

Long Boats and Underground Vaults by the River Charles

By Alex Marshall
For The Powhatan Review
November 1999

Crewing is the ultimate wasp sport. It requires patience, diligence and years of work at the simple task of pulling oars through water, as you park your butt in the bottom of a tiny slivered almond of a boat. Crew is not flashy. There is no crew equivalent of passing the ball behind your back on your way to a slam dunk over the head of a surprised defender. No, crew is all about steady effort for the sake of some future reward that may never come.

To the uninitiated, crew is that sport where teams of two, four, six or eight people sit in skinny boats and haul themselves through the water like ancient teams of galley slaves. The boats are tiny, just a foot or so across, and bizarre looking. It is mostly practiced at or near elite colleges, I suspect, with Harvard being the epi-center.

The sport and its spectators were on display recently on a fall weekend on the Charles River here at Harvard in Cambridge. It was the annual Head of the Charlesî regatta, a crew tradition which involves hundreds of teams coming from all over the world. They came to race along the river and glide under the Parisian-style stone bridges, a classic moment in the sport, like playing tennis at Wimbledon. According to the newspapers, some two hundred thousand of us stood on the banks and the bridges watched the thin boats and their denizens.

In their motion, these boats in motion looked like water bugs jetting over the surface of the water. Their teams pulled themselves across in smooth yet jerky movements. They also reminded me of air hockey pucks, from that game youíd play for quarters where jets of air kept a thin plastic puck floating on top of a table as you whacked it about. The boats appeared to rest on top of the water, not in it.

But to the guys and gals hauling the boats, it probably did not feel so effortless. They were hauling themselves through the water with their thighs, backs and arms. The men were muscular but in a lean, mean way.

The women varied more physically. I watched their backs float underneath me, and noticed with pleasure rounded shoulders and lean arms jutting out of shapely T-shirts, with a pig- or pony-tail usually hanging somewhere. But some women had bulky, linebacker style bodies, with big butts and broad backs. I wonder if they made up for their weight with their strength, or whether their bulk slowed the ship down. I wonder if the other girls ever thought, Jeez, I'm tired of dragging Cheryl's flab through the water.

Crewing is one of the classic Harvard traditions -- one of the few I have bumped across. I arrived here for my year sabbatical expecting to be submerged in tweedy accents and various obscure customs. But although it's a pretty place, the people and customs are more average looking and acting than in my imagination.

The students look like students elsewhere. Among the undergraduates at Harvard College, there are the standard cliques. The jocks, who walk around the campus in groups and have buzz haircuts on their bullet heads. The artsy students, with interesting haircuts and fashionable clothes. Then the mass of students, who wear conventional clothes on conventional bodies and look pretty non-descript. I suspect most of the undergraduates have been so busying studying in order to get here, that they have not had time to craft the elaborate personal identities as say a slacker, or a rapper, or one of the many other sub-cults of American youth.

Partly though, the student's casual attire reflects the changing norm of personal dress. The 60s have made us all more casual. Even in the pampered, ultra-elite world of Harvard Business School, which lies across the Charles river on its own carefully maintained campus, the students, who are generally in their 20s and 30s, look like students everywhere. These men and women, who will become CEO's of major corporations some day, wear jeans and casual shirts. They do not look corporate at all.

You can still find some classic Harvard sights and roles, however. One of my favorite things to do has been to dine at the Harvard Faculty Club. Because I am a fellow, I am rated on the same level as a faculty member and thus automatically a member of this club. This feels like a bit of a charade, but one I fully enjoy and exploit.

The Harvard Faculty club looks as you would expect. Its building is a conservative brick house. The rooms are furnished in dark wood with heavy carpeting and serious paintings on the wall. In the main drawing room, you can lounge on big leather sofas while a nearby fire crackles, helping yourself to one of the many newspapers and magazines placed there daily. The men's bathroom has a supply of colognes out for use.

On the upstairs walls of the faculty club, there were hung framed photos of the interiors of Harvard dormitories in the 1880s. I saw rooms stuffed with furniture, paintings and knick-knacks. The students wore coats and ties, sat in deep leather chairs and puffed on pipes, probably with nearby servants ready to refill their tea cups. Evidently, class and privilege used to be much more obvious here.

Within the faculty club dining room there is an air of gentle care and attentiveness. The male waiters take my orders without fuss. There is no tipping. The head waiter, Pierre, remembers my name. The only unpleasantness intruding on my comfort is the irrational fear that someone will recognize me as an imposter and throw me out. So far, that hasnít happened.

Harvard is one of the intellectual capitals of the world, so as well as crewing and leather chairs, you might expect more intellectual treasures and vistas to be found here. They are here, but they are also elusive. No one has yet ushered me into a room and said, Here, you have admittance to the secrets of the universe. There are a lot of smart people here, but I am struck that the professors here are often dealing with the same questions I am, even if they do so with perhaps more facts and skills at their disposal. This can be liberating.

One past fellow in my program said attending Harvard gave him the confidence to try new things in his job, because he realized that even Harvard professors were still trying to figure things out. Final answers are elusive. In all but the hard sciences, (and possibly not even there), accuracy or truth is more a matter of percentages, getting either the practice or a theory right enough to work in some situations some of the time, before events and time wear a model out and exhaust its utility.

Many of the tangible, physical secrets at Harvard are buried, literally, within their many libraries. The dozen libraries here are a vast, intimidating vault packed with records of human striving. Widener Library, the imposing, Greek-style main library with massive columns, has more floors below ground than above it. And these tunnels lead to subterranean chambers of adjacent libraries. I have only briefly explored these dark depths. And when I do so, I find myself quickly clamoring back up into the light, to get away from so many words packed into narrow corridors in low-ceilinged rooms. These subterranean chambers seem like some vast hidden machinery laboring away, below the genteel public face of Harvard's green lawns and classic brick buildings.

I hope during my time here at Harvard, I discover a few of its secrets. I will try to bring them back, when I resume my more ordinary life in Norfolk.