Painting by Pamela Heater
Since 1887, with exceptions only for world wars, Cambridge colleges have competed in the annual May Bumps—four days of boat racing taking place, with typical English logic, in early June.
The boats in a bumping race start single file, a length‑and-a-half apart, in as straight a line as the river Cam allows. Your goal is to bump—i.e., collide with—some boat ahead of you before it bumps some boat ahead of it or you are bumped from behind. The next day, each bumper swaps starting position with its bumpee and the race is run again, four times altogether. The starting position of any boat on day one is the position in which it finished the previous year—though its crew may have changed. The goal, over many generations, is to bump all the way to the top and become Head of the River. Each day's racing is run in several flights, ranked by merit, with a way to earn the transition from a lower flight to a higher. What concerns us here is life at the very bottom, which is less a grab for glory than a desperate clinging to hope: Not Bumped Yet.
When I was a student, the Churchill College Boat Club was sponsored by Noel Duckworth, a World War II hero and former British Olympic coxswain—and also the College chaplain, for whom the Boat Club was a primary pastoral duty. Chaplains at Oxford and Cambridge have descended from two pure strains: the intellectual‑urbane; and the rugby-rowing, of which Canon Duckworth was what taxonomists call a type specimen. On race days the Canon bicycled madly along the towpath beside the Cam to shout, like some Yorkshire Casey Stengel, incomprehensible encouragement in an accent impenetrable. He could be alarming when understood. When one Old Boy came back to be married in the college chapel, the Canon preached on Proverbs 26:11, "a dog returneth to his vomit."
Every year he awarded Boat Club beer mugs to one of the Churchill crews. His 1972 honorees—my boat, Churchill's Eighth Boat—had not been pre-race favorites: out of 129 entries in the May Bumps, we were ranked, on merit, 128th.
Half the crew were Americans, but we triumphed in the most British of ways, by demonstrating the superiority of pluck and moral fiber to mere skill. (My wish to have our mugs engraved "The flesh is weak" was voted down.)
The presiding spirit of that happy few, that band of brothers if not oarsmen, was Andreas Gerasimos Michalitsianos, born an Alexandrian Greek and raised in Queens, NY—and killed by a brain tumor 30 years ago.
A souvenir photo survives, an action shot. We are forward, about to drop the blades. I'm with the scrawny types at the bow-end, looking grim. Andy, amidships, is stocky (chubby, to be exact) and gasping for breath. Our names and weights are inked in Gothic script on the surrounding mat, and the space reserved to record our triumphs says "Rowed Over"—which means that, having neither bumped nor been bumped, we endured. For four days we dueled the worst boats on the river to a draw.
Embarrassed by evidence of what I don't do well, I couldn't bring myself to buy a copy but often snuck up on Andy's, in hopes the passing years would somehow put our strokes in sync, make our splashing less wild. Over the decades, scraps of self-knowledge have accumulated: my priggishness was not Pride but Sloth, theologically understood as "the refusal of joy." We had been cast in a comic role, one he had the grace to accept but I did not.
Our very first race inscribed the Eighth Boat forever in the annals of moral fiber. At the gun our Stroke (the leader, sitting sternmost) gave an overexcited heave that levered him out of his seat to land in the bottom of the boat. We fired on half our cylinders while sorting out the mess, but the boat behind us did not close: before the start, idling in the mild current, they had failed to hold position and swung crosswise to the stream. When the gun went off, they were still struggling to straighten out—backing and forthing with frantic maneuvers more suited to a driving test than a boat race.
The rest of the field charged ahead, beyond the reach of either of us. The best we could now hope for was a draw—to complete the whole course unbumping and unbumped, to Row Over.
So we settle in for the long haul, until the moment Aristotle would call the peripeteia: the bow oarsman, immediately behind me, drops into the water a blade that's not quite square. As it's sucked beneath the boat he lets go—the only alternative to being flung overboard—and ducks to let the shaft fly past his head.
It remains attached, straining against its lock. We have reconfigured to seven working oars and a sea anchor. He leans out to wrestle his oar from the slipstream, threatening but somehow failing to capsize us. With a miracle of will he retrieves it, but by that time we've been caught—in fact, overlapped—and the safety of the finish line seems infinitely distant.
Our cox adopts evasive tactics—in the circumstances, not unmanly. Every time a bump seems inevitable he flicks the rudder and our stern somehow slithers away from the pursuer's lunging prow.
Eventually, we two are the last boats left on the river, an open mic night comedy duo amusing the raucous crowd along the final reach. We weave across the widening river like a pair of punch‑drunk lightweights who've barely managed to answer the bell. I somehow hear, piercing the hubbub, the Canon's baying at its most Stengelesque. He cries out, in some unknown tongue, for heroes.
About to faint, tunnel vision setting in, I lift my oar from the water—on the reasonable‑seeming grounds that I could do with a short rest. Bow comes forward and slams, cursing, into my back. For the next few strokes I keep out of his way by sliding back and forth, cradling the airborne oar in my arms, and when my head clears, start feebly to pull again.
Hours or seconds later we cross the finish line. Rowed Over. We're Number One (Twenty Eight). And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accursed they were not there. Backs are slapped, a stomach empties overboard, the Canon is beside himself with joy and admiration, and three more days like this one loom in prospect. Andy slumps across his oar and sputters his all-purpose bywords of amazement and relief: "Bloody hell."
The funeral took place in a different world, one with jobs and mortgages and families. Nature cooperated—sunny at church and graveside, the Maryland landscape rich with warm fall colors. As I drove back north toward winter, through bare Pennsylvania hills, clouds moved in. The sun reappeared in late afternoon, and for a few miles, I chased a rainbow. Which was apropos: my friend had been an astronomer, an expert on the sun, a specialist in its spectrum.
Our photo teaches nothing about how to pull an oar. But the sight of that comically weak flesh moves me to ask for grace—the grace to know how grave a sin it is to refuse an offered joy.
