Duluth Rowing Club: Winning Essays
by Bria Kask
If I told you that every morning in the summer at five o'clock I roll out of bed and go down to a dumpy old building that is falling into the bay, you would say that I am either joking or crazy. Well, I'm not joking, but still undecided about crazy. Yes, I do drag myself down to the rowing club, although it's not as bad as it sounds.
The early morning sun is rising over the lake as my family drives slowly down Park Point. When we get to the boathouse we forget that it is now only six o'clock. It might be the dew clinging to our feet as we stroll, head down, across the overgrown grass, or the sound of the water lapping against the shore above the quite murmur of the master rowers. Maybe it is the silent sleepy shadows of the juniors and the boats upside down on their racks, a quiet reminder of the workout to come. Their sleek hulls casting halfhearted shadows into the boathouse. It could also be the boathouse itself; a maroon building with white trim on rickety stilts jutting out over the water crammed full of rowing shells.
Whatever it is, it puts the rowers into a trance. We start to wakeup and we no longer have control over our bodies. The Coach does. Everyone starts chatting. The rowers are no longer shadows, but a brilliant collage of color. From the masters' corner comes an occasionally roar of laughter. The boats shine and glow in the light streaming through the tin roof. The once frigid building is now warm enough for us to open the garage door. The junior boys are goofing off like normal. The coach yells at us to go for the morning run. We don't want to go for a run. We just do it. Coach said to. Then we go lie down on the wet grass for stretches. Slowly the circle of juniors gets smaller as everyone is put into boats. Now the boat racks are empty. There is no longer a circle and the coach is out in the launch.
To anyone driving down the Point, they would see an open building with nothing inside. Many of them would be disgusted by the gross, sandy, rolling floors and the hundreds of inch and a half long spiders that live there. You must be a rower to like this place. Soon, you learn to love this building. It becomes your morning home during the summer. Some of your funniest memories will take place here, coxswains getting launched off the dock and launches dying.
Some people may go to the mall. Others go to the coffee shop, or the library. I go to an old building without heat or air conditioning. I go to a building were I know I will get blisters. I go to the boathouse. We, the rowers, go for the sport, the other people, the workout, and the good times.
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