That's a photo above of the old shellhouse in Seattle, the setting and scene for the movie, "The Boys in the Boat," an intriguing, and true, story about poverty, desperation, will, discipline, survival, and ultimately, triumph. The book was engrossing; the movie's a little less so.
I moved back to Seattle in the fall of 1978. Seattle in the late Seventies was a relatively sleepy place. You could find trouble if you wanted to but by and large, it was fairly laid back. A big recession had hit in 1971, Boeing closed a plant, the oil crisis hit and Seattle seemed like nothing more than San Francisco's poor little sister. Up the road, Vancouver, BC, was a more cosmopolitan city, more a city of the world, than was Seattle. But Seattle back then was a good place to end up if you were a bored country kid.
My mom and dad had met there in the late Forties while attending the UW on the GI Bill after WWII, so the campus loomed large in our family history. And I eventually ended up working at the UW. For me personally, the heart of Seattle was always Green Lake. I oriented myself towards it no matter what part of town I lived in. Green Lake drew my attention because it was such a great place to walk, people watch, or run. Running had hit its stride in the late Seventies and the Eighties in Seattle. The city somehow seemed perfectly laid out for runners. Besides Green Lake there was the long Burke-Gilman trail running for miles from Gasworks Park on Lake Union all the way up the NW side of Lake Washington. You could also drive over to Madison Park and run down to Seward Park and back on a trail along the SW side of Lake Washington, a good fifteen mile run, longer if you ran around the Seward Park isthmus.
For a few years, I lived on the south side of Portage Bay, across the water from the UW campus. I was in between two drawbridges. A run across the west bridge would take me to the south end of the UW campus, where I'd run along the water by this old weatherbeaten shell house, which was still standing back then. My folks filled me in on the history of crew in Seattle and at the UW. I remember an article in the Seattle paper in 1986 with pictures of all the guys from the crew that had won the Olympic race in Germany in 1936. These guys were local heroes. They'd all settled down and led useful lives. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Olympic race -- that 1986 article -- they were all the age I am now, in their early seventies.
So I'd run past the crew house on whatever grass I could find, back across the other bridge, then turn towards my apartment. It was a short run, under four miles. Longer runs were done elsewhere. I think I did run from my apartment once or twice down to Seward Park and back, which was roughly 21 miles, when training for a marathon. All of Seattle seemed to be running back then -- at least, all of us still-young boomers.
There was also a boat rental place under the University Bridge. I'd go down there and rent a kayak for half a day, pack a snack and either head out onto Lake Union -- which was a working lake with planes landing on the water and the occasional tugboat puttering by, so you had to keep your wits about you -- and I'd slowly paddle by all the houseboats or cut across to Gasworks Park.
If you rowed the other way, east, you'd have to maneuver through the Montlake Cut under the Montlake Bridge. It had concrete retaining walls on either side and was the passageway for boats moored in Portage Bay to venture out into Lake Washington. If you were paddling through there in a kayak it was a rough ride, boats always motoring through, with wakes slapping back and forth and tipping you this way and that. Once through you could turn south and explore all the ins and outs of the Arboretum, still considered part of the UW campus. Lots of places to picnic there. Or occasionally I would turn north and go up along Lake Washington's shore to the old Sandpoint Naval station.
Even when I lived in Seattle in the Eighties and Nineties, regattas were still held and people would line up along both bridges to cheer the crews as they rowed through. Green Lake had its own shellhouse and amateur rowing teams as well. One of my co-workers at the UW was on one of the rowing teams out at Green Lake and competed regionally. So it wasn't just the UW -- the city itself loved and supported rowing and crew. I suppose that is still true to this day but then, I haven't lived in Seattle in 25 years. I may return in a year or two, give it another whirl. The landmarks will be the same even if the culture isn't.
Anyway, the movie "The Boys In the Boat," I found fairly unremarkable -- it didn't quite do justice to the book. Both were most interesting as period pieces but the book is a more interesting character study. My dad would have been 16 in 1936 and a high school student about two miles south of the UW campus -- there was an old high school on Capitol Hill, I forget the name. The attempt to capture the tenor of the times, the Thirties and the Depression, succeeded somewhat -- I was struck by the shanties and the ever-present poverty displayed in the film. Yet it didn't quite go deep enough. The rowing scenes were largely shot in England rather than Seattle so failed to engage me entirely. And the foliage was all wrong! These things matter to a native.
I'm currently living on the other side of the state, amongst rolling wheatfields and rangeland and wondering whether the small towns here and this way of life will survive til the end of the century, or whether corporate and factory farms will swallow this aspect of America up for good. It's impossible to predict the future and I'm not going to try, but honestly, I'm grateful that I won't be here to see what comes down the pike. Capture your moment in time, that's what I say -- because nothing lasts as it is. Even social media will be nothing more than an old polaroid photo someday.
Seattle still calls. Despite its being overcrowded, a goodly portion of my adulthood took place there, the years of 25 to 45. I may go back. Back to where it all began. Be nice to end where I began. We shall see what fate has in store.
