Learning to Row on Glasswater

3 points · October 2026

There is a stretch of the river above the weir that the club calls glasswater, and you only get it before seven, and you only get it if the wind has not woken up, and I have had it perhaps a dozen times in a year of rowing and I would row for another year to have it once more.

Glasswater is the river with nothing on it. No wake, no chop, no reflection of anything but the exact sky. You put the blades in and they go through it as though it were not there, and the boat runs on, and the only sound is the seat on its rails and your own breathing, which you become embarrassed by, because it is the loudest thing for a mile.

I learned to row at forty-three, in a boat that was designed for people who learned at thirteen, and I was bad at it in the way you are bad at things whose whole difficulty is letting go. Rowing is a sport of not doing. You do not pull; you hang. You do not push; you let the boat come to you. Every instinct I had was wrong, and the instincts were the same ones that had made me good at my job, and the river did not care about my job.

The coach said, on the first glasswater morning, stop trying to make it go. I had heard this a hundred times. That morning, with the water like that and the sky in it, I understood it, for about six strokes. The boat went. I had done nothing. It was the best six strokes of my year and I have not managed them since, and I have thought about them every morning I have gone down to the river and found it choppy, which is most mornings.

I want to say something about why I am writing this down, because I am not sure. I think it is that the six strokes were the first thing in years I could not take credit for, and I found that I did not want to; I wanted only to have them again. That is new. Most of what I have wanted in my life I have wanted to have done. This I want to have happen.

The river is choppy this week. Tomorrow I will go down at six and see.