Does waking at dawn to crowd into a narrow, uncomfortable boat and get ordered around by a tiny person in a headset sound fun to you? Then you should’ve come to rowing camp! That’s where I’ve been these past few days.
Every summer Recovery on Water, the rowing team for breast cancer survivors that I joined shortly after I was diagnosed last year, hosts a weekend-long camp in northern Michigan. For four days rowers across a spectrum of experience converge on the 134-year-old Fountain Point Resort on Lake Leelenau. Most of them are members of ROW’s Chicago team, but camp is open to any woman or non-binary individual with a breast cancer diagnosis, and some campers come from across the country to spend four days in community with each other.
And really, that’s what it’s about: community, something that with this one exception I haven’t really sought out in the year since I was diagnosed. There are a lot of support groups out there, facilitated by hospitals, cancer centers, and places like Gilda’s Club and Wellness House – not to mention countless Facebook groups and other online forums. There are other camps out there as well, like Camp Breastie, in upstate New York, or Epic Experience, in Colorado. Many people I know have availed themselves of these and other resources, and speak well of them.
But ROW is the only IRL cancer anything I’ve joined. I did so just a few weeks after being diagnosed, at the urging of my friend and neighbor Jacqui, who also had breast cancer and had been a college rower at Smith. “Guess what I have!” I told her, and after taking a beat she said, “Well, you have to join my rowing team.” Before I had even started chemo I was sitting in a training barge on Bubbly Creek, a gentler tributary of the South Branch of the Chicago River that takes its name from the bubbles that, in the city’s meatpacking heyday, burbled dramatically thanks to all the decomposing carcasses of pigs and cows that had been dumped in the water. (It’s a lot cleaner now.)
I rowed through the summer of 2022, but stopped in mid-September because by that point I was too fatigued, dizzy, and nauseated from treatment. Then I broke my ankle, effectively beaching me for the rest of the year. In the winter ROW holds indoor erg workouts at its loft in Bridgeport. The erg sessions are excellent training for rowing technique and cardio health, but even farther from my house than the boathouse, and a lot less exciting. I made it to exactly two of them between September and April. But when we got back on the water this spring, after a little dithering, I was there, sitting in the shell and trying to remember how to set the boat. And, after some more dithering (it’s expensive!) I registered for camp.
I’m so glad I did. There are a lot of reasons rowing is good practice for breast cancer patients and survivors. It’s low-impact and physically accessible to people across a broad range of ages and fitness, from folks like me who were pretty active before cancer, to people who have never in their life considered themselves sporty. Rowing builds cardiovascular capacity and bone strength, both things that can take quite a hit from all the drugs that get poured into your body during treatment. It also is a nice upper body workout that can help rebuild strength and mobility after chest surgery. And it’s a team sport, one that is pretty much unconcerned with individual excellence. Like a chorus line, rowers do not want to stand out from the pack; if you go faster than the rest of your shell you’ll just wind up whacking the person behind you with your oar and then the whole boat will be in trouble. As a metaphor this is pretty potent.
ROW is often described as a cancer support group that barely talks about cancer. Most of the time, we talk about how to better engage our glutes on the stroke, how to slow down on the slide. In the boat we don’t talk at all, for the most part, which I love. Sitting in the six seat (the third seat back from the coxswain) I listen to the soundscape of the boat: clunk goes the oarlock as you turn it on the feather; shhhhh whispers the seat as you glide up to the catch; clunk again, you turn the oar on the square and then plop drops the blade into the water; finally shzoosh as you power the seat back to the finish. Clunk, shhh, clunk-plop, shzoosh: I watch the back of the rower in front of me and practice matching her cadence without thinking, just as she is following the beat of the rower in front of her. It’s meditative, and sometimes magical.
At camp we trained twice a day – at 7 am and at 3 – and had other small group activities in between. We ate a lot of delicious carbs and protein. We slathered sunscreen on each others shoulders and cycled through showers in the shared bathrooms and clustered into groups to drink beer on the veranda that stretched the length of the hotel. On the final night we had a potluck and sang camp songs like “Sloop John B.” that had been dorkily reworked with rowing-specific lyrics. It was all wildly wholesome and restorative, even if I was exhausted by the time we packed up the car for the 6-hour drive home.
In conversations at camp I told a few folks about this newsletter, and realized that I haven’t written much about rowing at all, even though – especially this spring – it’s been an important part of my healing. I think this is because it’s just not complicated. It’s not something I struggle to understand or need to problematize. I like it; it is fun and physical and allows me to train my body to move through new and interesting pathways. It is a community, with its own lingo and folkways and private jokes impenetrable to outsiders.
I marveled at the rarity of it all; how many times do you get thrust into situations like this as an adult – where you are sharing time and space with virtual strangers, getting to know them over and over? I went to summer camp once, when I was eleven – for some reason my parents sent me to a horse camp, though I was not a horse girl, and while I made it through those two weeks on an Eastern Washington ranch I never went back. And I spent eight weeks at the American Dance Festival — “dance camp,” essentially — after I graduated from college. But that’s it.
Around here, for adults, there are hip networky things like ORD Camp, or Camp Wandawega, but I’m not enough of a “creative” for those. The closest you might come to the experience of camp as an adult may well be attending someone’s destination wedding (or I guess, as you get older, funeral), or perhaps at an exceptionally good conference in your chosen field. The experience of getting to know 40-odd new friends was exhilarating and draining all at once. At the end of the first night of camp I was so tapped out I realized I could not share my story with one more person, and wisely went to bed.
And that’s the other thing about rowing, or about ROW anyway. As I’ve explored the world of writing about cancer, its memoirs and its essays, there’s a constant pressure to not be basic, to make your story interesting and unique. Memoirs of illness, cautions Andrew Solomon, reviewing Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness in the New York Times, “are now fairly standard fare…. Self-reflection on maladies has become such a commonplace that it is almost impossible to bring freshness to the project.”
Or, consider, yet again, Anne Boyer, here writing on writing about cancer: “In our time, the challenge is not to speak into the silence, but to learn to form a resistance to the often obliterating noise.” If you don’t have anything special to say, shut it, is the message.
But at rowing camp, this pressure is off. My story is not any more or less compelling than that of any other member of the team, and that’s as it should be. Just as rowing in a boat of eight or four denies the possibility of individual excellence, so the cancer story at camp becomes just one mundane component of the sweeping humanity of the team. I don’t think I realized how much I needed that until I was there.
wow jacqui sounds like a cool person 😎
Maybe next year I will be ready to join you. Sounds fabulous!