• • •
Joe retreated into the life of the shell house. The boys still might razz him about his low taste in clothes and music, and he really was only comfortable around Roger and Shorty, but at least he felt he had purpose at the shell house. The rituals of rowing, the specialized language of the sport, the details of technique that he was struggling to master, the wisdom of the coaches, even their litany of rules and the various taboos they proscribed—all seemed to Joe to give the world of the shell house a measure of stability and order that for a long time now the outside world had seemed to him to lack. The brutal afternoon workouts left him exhausted and sore but feeling cleansed, as if someone had scrubbed out his soul with a stiff wire brush.
The shell house had become more of a home than the grim confines of his cubicle in the basement of the YMCA or the half-built house out in Sequim. He liked the way the light poured in through the windows of the enormous sliding doors, the stacks of burnished shells on their racks, the hiss of steam in the radiators, the banging of locker doors, the intermingled scents of cedar and varnish and sweat. He often lingered in the building long after practice was over, and more and more he found himself drawn to the back of the room and the stairs that led to Pocock’s workshop. Joe would not think of going up the stairs uninvited, for fear of interrupting Pocock. There was a kind of reverence that attached to Mr. Pocock, as the boys invariably called him at all times. Not that Pocock cultivated the attitude. If anything, the opposite was true. He often stood on the floating dock as the boys got ready for a workout, fiddling with the riggers on this boat or that, chatting with the boys, occasionally offering up a nugget of wisdom or two, a suggestion that they try this or that adjustment to their stroke. In point of fact, Pocock, with only a lower-school education, tended to believe that it was he rather than these college men who should be deferential.
But Pocock was learned far beyond his formal education, as was immediately obvious to everyone who met him. He was well read in a wide variety of subjects—religion, literature, history, and philosophy. He could quote Browning or Tennyson or Shakespeare at the drop of a hat, and the quote was always apt and telling, never pretentious or affected. The net effect was that for all his quiet humility the man’s wide-ranging knowledge and quiet eloquence commanded absolute respect, and never more than when he was at work in his shop, plying his craft. No one interrupted Pocock at work. Ever.
So Joe remained at the bottom of the stairs, looking up and wondering, but keeping his curiosity to himself. He noticed, though, that Pocock was at work in the shop a great deal these days. Partly because rowing programs everywhere had gone so long, following the crash of 1929, without ordering new equipment, and partly because of the recent successes of Washington crews rowing in Pocock shells at Poughkeepsie, orders had suddenly begun coming into the shop again over the summer. Pocock now had a backlog of eight orders for eight-man shells, including requests from some of the most elite rowing programs in the country: Navy, Syracuse, Princeton, and Pennsylvania. By the beginning of September, he was able to write to Ky Ebright, down in Berkeley, in a tone markedly different from that of just a year before. He was too much the gentleman to be vindictive, but he was now entirely confident: “If you are going to buy anything, old boy, I sure would advise not leaving it too late. We have taken terrific punishment the last two years and the boys back East are waking up to the fact they have got to get some equipment. That means we will be busy.” When Ebright responded by questioning his prices, it was Pocock who now pushed back, firmly reiterating the amount: “The price on an eight is $1,150. . . . One thing is sure, Ky, I refuse to go into competition for the cheapest eight in the country. I cannot build all of them, but I can still have a good shot at building the best.”
• • •
In fact, George Pocock was already building the best, and doing so by a wide margin. He didn’t just build racing shells. He sculpted them.
Looked at one way, a racing shell is a machine with a narrowly defined purpose: to enable a number of large men or women, and one small one, to propel themselves over an expanse of water as quickly and efficiently as possible. Looked at another way, it is a work of art, an expression of the human spirit, with its unbounded hunger for the ideal, for beauty, for purity, for grace. A large part of Pocock’s genius as a boatbuilder was that he managed to excel both as a maker of machines and as an artist.
Growing up and learning his trade from his father at Eton, he had used simple hand tools—saws, hammers, chisels, wood planes, and sanding blocks. For the most part, he continued to use those same tools even as more modern, laborsaving power tools came to market in the 1930s. Partly, this was because he tended strongly toward the traditional in all things. Partly, it was because he believed that the hand tools gave him more precise control over the fine details of the work. Partly, it was because he could not abide the noise that power tools made. Craftsmanship required thought, and thought required a quiet environment. Mostly, though, it was because he wanted more intimacy with the wood—he wanted to feel the life in the wood with his hands, and in turn to impart some of himself, his own life, his pride and his caring, into the shell.
Up until 1927, he made his shells precisely as his father had taught him to make them in England. Working on a perfectly straight I beam more than sixty feet long, he constructed a delicate framework of spruce and northern ash. Then he carefully joined and nailed strips of Spanish cedar to the ribs of the frame to form the hull. This required thousands of brass nails and screws, the heads of which had to be patiently and laboriously filed down by hand before he could apply coats of marine varnish to the exterior. The fitting and nailing on of the planks was labor intensive and nerve-racking. At any moment the slip of a chisel or a careless blow from a hammer could ruin days’ worth of work.
In 1927 he made an improvement that revolutionized the building of racing shells in America. For a number of years, Ed Leader, who succeeded Hiram Conibear as the Washington crew coach, had suggested that Pocock try making a shell out of the native western red cedar that grew so abundantly, and so large, in Washington and British Columbia. After all, Spanish cedar was expensive, having to be imported from its native South America. (Spanish cedar, Cedrela odorata, is in fact neither Spanish nor cedar, being a member of the mahogany family.) It was also notoriously brittle, necessitating the almost continual repair of the school’s fleet of shells. Pocock was attracted to the idea of trying the native cedar. He had, for years, taken notice of the lightness and the durability of the old cedar Indian canoes that still occasionally plied the waters of the Puget Sound. But he had been dissuaded from experimenting with it by head coach Rusty Callow. Callow had been a logger in his younger years, and like most lumbermen he believed that cedar was only good for making shakes and shingles. But when Pocock finally followed his own heart and began to experiment with the wood in 1927, he was astonished by the possibilities it opened up.
Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) is a kind of wonder wood. Its low density makes it easy to shape, whether with a chisel, a plane, or a handsaw. Its open cell structure makes it light and buoyant, and in rowing lightness means speed. Its tight, even grain makes it strong but flexible, easy to bend yet disinclined to twist, warp, or cup. It is free of pitch or sap, but its fibers contain chemicals called thujaplicins that act as natural preservatives, making it highly resistant to rot while at the same time lending it its lovely scent. It is beautiful to look at, it takes a finish well, and it can be polished to a high degree of luster, essential for providing the smooth, friction-free racing bottom a good shell requires.
Pocock quickly became a convert. Soon he was scouring the Northwest for the highest quality cedar he could find, making long journeys to smoky sawmills out on the Olympic Peninsula and far to the north in the still-virgin forests of British Columbia. He found just what he wanted in the misty woods surrounding Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island. From the cedar stock he found there—long, ti
ght-grained, straight sections cut from massive, ancient trees—he could mill elegant planks of wood twenty inches or more wide and sixty feet long. And from these planks he could shave identical pairs of much thinner planks, delicate sheets of cedar just five-thirty-seconds of an inch thick, each a mirror image of the other, with the same pattern of grain. By placing these book-matched pairs on either side of the keel, he could ensure perfect symmetry in the boat’s appearance and performance.
These flexible sheets of cedar also allowed Pocock to do away with the endless nailing of planks to the boat’s ribs. Instead he could simply strap the sheets of wood over the frame of the boat, forcing them to conform to its shape, then cover the whole assembly with heavy blankets and divert steam from the shell house’s heating system under the blankets. The steam caused the cedar to relax and bend to fit itself to the shape of the frame. When he turned off the steam and removed the blankets three days later, the cedar sheets held their new shape perfectly. All he had to do was dry them and glue them to the frame. It was the same technique that the Coast Salish peoples of the Northwest had used for centuries to fashion bentwood boxes out of single planks of cedar. The sleek shells that resulted from the process were not only more beautiful than the Spanish cedar shells but also demonstrably faster. Harvard ordered, as an experiment, one of the first to come out of Pocock’s shop and promptly reported back that the boat had taken several full seconds off its crew’s best times.
With the cedar skin attached to the shell, Pocock installed the runners and the seats, the riggers, the rudder assembly, and the trim. He took pride in using a variety of Northwest woods in his products—sugar pine for keels, ash for the frames, Sitka spruce for the gunnels and the hand-carved seats, Alaska yellow cedar for the washboards. The last of these he favored mostly because as it aged its color evolved from that of old ivory to a golden honey hue that harmonized with the burnished red of the cedar hulls. He stretched sheer silk fabric over the stern and bow sections and painted the silk with varnish. As the varnish dried and hardened on the fabric, it created a fragile and lovely translucent yellow decking fore and aft. Finally, he worked on the finish, hand-rubbing the cedar hull with powdered pumice and rottenstone for hours, applying thin coats of marine varnish, then rubbing the finish again and again until it gleamed like still water. All told, it took four gallons of varnish to get the finish he was looking for. Only when it fairly shimmered, when it seemed in its sleekness to be alive with the potential for speed, did Pocock pronounce the boat ready for use.
There was one more thing about cedar—a sort of secret that Pocock had discovered accidentally after his first shells made of the wood had been in the water for a while. People had taken to calling them “banana boats,” because once they were exposed to water both their bows and sterns tended to curve ever so slightly upward. Pocock pondered this effect and its consequences and gradually came to a startling realization. Although cedar does not expand or swell across the grain of the wood when wet, and thus tends not to warp, it does expand slightly along the grain. This can amount to as much as an inch of swelling in the length of a sixty-foot shell. Because the cedar was dry when attached to the frame but then became wet after being used regularly, the wood wanted to expand slightly in length. However, the interior frame of the boat, being made of ash that remained perpetually dry and rigid, would not allow it to expand. The cedar skin thus became compressed, forcing the ends of the boat up slightly and lending it what boatbuilders call “camber.” The result was that the boat as a whole was under subtle but continual tension caused by the unreleased compression in the skin, something like a drawn bow waiting to be released. This gave it a kind of liveliness, a tendency to spring forward on the catch of the oars in a way that no other design or material could duplicate.
To Pocock, this unflagging resilience—this readiness to bounce back, to keep coming, to persist in the face of resistance—was the magic in cedar, the unseen force that imparted life to the shell. And as far as he was concerned, a shell that did not have life in it was a shell that was unworthy of the young men who gave their hearts to the effort of moving it through the water.
• • •
At the end of October, Ebright wrote back to Pocock. If he was going to order a new shell, he wanted it custom designed. He wanted one with less camber. Pocock was horrified. After alleging that Pocock had sent him inferior equipment, Ebright was now demanding a boat that simply would not go as fast as Pocock’s best, a boat that would not reflect well on him as a craftsman. Pocock wrote back with a long, detailed technical explanation of his design and proposed a few minor modifications that he thought might mollify Ebright without compromising the integrity of the shell. Ebright replied testily with technical arguments of his own and then continued, “I think you know as much about boatbuilding as anyone in the world, but perhaps new ideas might be advantageous to all of us. . . . I doubt if you will like the tone of this letter, George.” Pocock did not like the tone of the letter at all, but he let it slide. He had orders from virtually every major rowing program in the country. Ebright could order a shell or not, as he chose.
And in time Ebright did finally order one. When it was finished, Pocock paid eight of the boys a dollar each to deliver it to the docks in Seattle, so it could be shipped south.
The boys rowed it through the Cut and to the south end of Lake Union. There they removed it gingerly from the water, inverted it over their heads, and began a mile-and-a-half portage across Seattle. A sixteen-legged cedar turtle, more than sixty feet long, they crossed Mercer Street and headed south on Westlake, plunging into downtown traffic. With their heads under the shell, they could see little except for their own feet and the back of the man ahead of them, so a coxswain ran ahead of them, waving his hands to warn oncoming vehicles to steer clear and simultaneously shouting out instructions in rowing terms: “Way enough, boys! Hard to port. Pick ’er up!” They dodged streetcars and buses, swung wide around each corner, peered out from under the shell from time to time to get their bearings. As they jogged to their right and entered the shopping district on Fourth Avenue, people stopped on the sidewalk or rushed out of storefronts to watch them pass—staring, snickering, and applauding. Finally they turned right on Columbia, followed the steep descent to the waterfront, scurried hastily across railroad tracks, and made it safely to the docks. There they sent the shell on its way to California, where they would soon race against it on the Oakland Estuary.
• • •
Tensions began to mount in the Washington shell house that October. The continuing rumors that the sophomores might be pegged for the first varsity boat in the spring had everyone on edge. Al Ulbrickson remained characteristically silent on the topic, but the older boys fretted that that in itself seemed an ominous sign. Why didn’t he just put the rumors to rest and say the sophomores would have their crack at the varsity boat the following year, as usual? As boys suited up and hoisted oars in and out of the racks, there was little of the usual banter and joshing. Icy stares began to replace good-natured grins. On the water, occasional catcalls flew from boat to boat when the coaches weren’t in earshot.
As the mood in the shell house deteriorated, so too did the weather. At first it was just the usual fall drizzle, but then on the morning of October 21 all hell broke loose as the next in a series of extreme weather events that characterized the mid-1930s unfolded. An enormous cyclonic windstorm—a storm that made the previous fall’s windstorm look almost like a spring breeze—slammed into Washington State.
It seemed to come out of nowhere. At nine in the morning, there was nothing more than a light chop on Lake Washington, a typical gray, late fall day with light winds out of the southeast at perhaps five miles per hour. An hour later, sustained winds were blowing out of the southwest at fifty miles per hour. By noon, gusts up to seventy-five miles per hour were screaming over Lake Washington. At Aberdeen, on the coast, winds hit ninety miles per hour. It was the greatest windstorm the
Seattle area had ever seen.
At Pier 41 the transpacific ocean liner President Madison snapped her hawsers and careened into the steamboat Harvester, sinking her. Off Port Townsend, the purse seiner Agnes also sank, drowning five Seattle fishermen. Thirty passengers had to be rescued from the Virginia V, one of the last of the city’s historic Mosquito Fleet, when she smashed into a wharf and her superstructure was crushed. Out in the countryside, barn roofs and entire outhouses flew away. An airplane hangar at Boeing Field—then Seattle’s principal airport—collapsed, destroying several aircraft inside. At the Alki Hotel, a brick wall collapsed, killing a Chinese boarder in his bed. In Hooverville tin roofs cartwheeled across the sky and shanties were simply shredded, leaving their denizens standing dazed among the wreckage. At a nearby bakery, hungry men gathered in front of the plate-glass window separating them from racks of freshly baked bread, hoping the window would implode. On the University of Washington campus, the glass skylights at the basketball pavilion caved in, giant Douglas firs toppled over, and five sections of temporary seating in the football stadium blew away. The winds blew for six and a half hours, almost without respite, and when they finally died down millions of board feet of standing timber had fallen, millions of dollars of property damage had been done, eighteen people were dead, and Seattle was largely cut off from communication with the outside world.
Then the rains came again, as they always do. It was not quite the deluge of the previous year, but it rained more days than not for the rest of October and into November. An unusual number of lesser windstorms continued to blow in from the Pacific as well. One of the few advantages West Coast crews were supposed to have over East Coast crews was that the easterners could not train out of doors during the winter when their home rivers were frozen. Instead they were usually relegated to indoor rowing tanks, poor substitutes for the real thing. “Like sitting on the edge of a bathtub with a shovel,” one western coach scoffed. As a result of all their outdoor exposure, Washington’s boys were, year after year, particularly hardy and particularly adept at rowing in rough water. But you could not row at all if your shell sank, and as November of 1934 wore on, the water was so rough that it continually threatened to swamp the boats. Day after day Ulbrickson had to keep them ashore. He drove his boys hard, but he wasn’t about to let a boatload of them drown in the middle of Lake Washington. By mid-November he figured he was two weeks behind schedule.