WRITING NATURE: 
DISCOURSES OF ECOLOGY

Gata Salvaje, con tu pasiónŠarráncame corazónŠ "Wild Cat, with your passionŠrip my heart outŠ"

This summer I religiously watched "Gata Salvaje," a Spanish telenovela or soap opera. After dinner my mom and I would sprawl across the teal velour couches and anxiously await the introductory theme song which I would sing enthusiastically. I am not an avid TV watcher; commercials disillusion me, and characters sting me with superficiality. But for some reason, by being in a different language, the telenovela was comical. Part of this hilarity stemmed from my parents, neither of whom know much Spanish. My mom's ability to comprehend the disgruntled soliloquies and violent female-versus-female brawls impressed me. "She just told him that she was too good for him, right?" While I dissected the grammar, Mom followed the condescending eyes, the oscillating vocal tones.

Que donde tú y yo estemos, el cielo nos unirá. "Wherever we are, the sky will unite us." This saying introduced to me by my Paraguayan friend, Claudia, encouraged me to keep practicing Spanish. When I visit her in her home country, I want to be able to communicate in her arena. I noticed Claudia often understood our friend, Jargal from Mongolia, better than I did. They could understand each other because they both thought in the mode of a foreign language.

"Only the coxswain can see where you are going," the crew coach proclaims as we wait for the vans. "From now on, you will live life backwards." A muffled laugh reverberates among the novice group. I think of Memento, the movie I watched last night in the dorm lounge. The movie begins with the chronologically last moment; the viewer deciphers the plot by thinking in reverse. This, now, is my command. Come I here life new!

My name is starbird seven. This means I row on my left in the seventh place from the bow, or back, of the boat. Starbird seven...I like the alliteration of my new name. "Starbird" takes me back to a cedar-perfumed teepee. I wear a blue feather, blue like the water reflected in the sky.

Or perhaps I am not an Indian but a seagull. Like in Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, it won't be long before I'm off by myself again, "far out at sea, hungry, happy, learning."

Eager to learn, I downloaded pages of rowing vocabulary. "Erg" is short for "ergometer," defined as "a) indoor rowing machine; b) your best friend during the winter months." Scrolling down, I noticed the absence of "starbird." Where is my beloved name? Shell...starboard...stroke...but no "starbird." Wait, starboard?! Though I now realize I am not an aviator of the sky nor harmonizer with the earth, I refuse to detach myself from my mistaken name.

In the vans we huddle for warmth. Clad in layered sweatshirts and skimpy shorts, we look like indecisive tourists. Shotgun fiddles with the radio station. Bronzed voices of car commercials, ditzy laughter of morning talk shows, percussive rumbles of rap, serenading scales of classical... "Stop here," one girl interrupts. "Yeah this is soothing. It's too early in the morning to listen to that other stuff," another adds. The wordless musical language of letters A through G accompanies our silence.

Disembarking at the dock parking lot, we shiver as we divide into our two categories, lightweight and open weight. Again we divide in two, starboards retrieving oars and ports (right-side rowers) unbuckling the boat from its outdoor bunk bed. Each starboard carries two oars, one for herself and one for her port partner. Starboard is green; port is red. "Christmas colors!" one girl exclaimed when this procedure was explained to us a few days ago. Twinkle lights pulse above us, strung not across evergreen needles but across the Milky Way.

When my ex-boyfriend was five, he told his mom he wanted to decorate the tree. "No dear, I need to go to the market. We can do it later." When his mom returned, she found him standing proudly next to a bedecked pine. Using a chair and rebellious determination, he had done it all by himself. "Since then, Mom has let me do what I want," he explained to me. "No matter how impossible it seems, she knows I can handle it."

Carrying the boat on our shoulders, we walk gently "on little cat feet" like Carl Sandburg's fog. "Imagine you are carrying a $30,000 check, because that's what you're doing," our coach informed us. Our coxswain echoes the words of the coach, practicing new phrases. Her language lab, and ours, is the goose bump air, the shivering waves, the impending tangerine sunrise. Her echoes are soft and polite, not even loud enough to inform the coach that she'd rather be a rower. But we, fellow novices, hear her quiet plea.

Mom wanted to know why I chose to live in an all-freshman dorm. "Don't you want to meet people of different ages?" I desired the camaraderie of being lost together, of experiencing the new together. The bond between my crew mates and me is even more defined. What other college student would wake up at 5 a.m.? Who else has to decide between a shower or breakfast between morning practice and a nine o'clock class? None of us know what we are doing. Like Jargal and Claudia, we understand each other in our foreign atmosphere.

We carefully lay the boat in the water like a cradle onto a liquid pillow. We are Moses, carried upon Nile waters to a pyramid palace. Where will we finish? What palace lies hidden in front of us? Only the coxswain sees. As of now, she is too shy to tell us, but she must learn the language of boisterous enthusiasm, of piercing command.

"Starboard seven, bring your arms through your legs," our coach instructs. "Do you understand?"

"I guess." I try unsuccessfully, confusedly twisting myself like a malleable pretzel.

"No, through your knees, so the oar moves smoothly." After minutes of my mistakes, our coach demonstrates, showing not telling or yelling. I comprehend.

In my high school Spanish class, I was one of the few students who participated vocally. While most students only answered when they were called on, I volunteered. My accent was poor, but the only way to ameliorate it was through trial and error, through practice. My rowing accent, extremely flawed, also will improve with time.

I try to follow the rhythm of the girl in front of me. Catch, drive, finish, recovery; catch, drive, finish, recovery. I need a beat, an internal song. No, classical will not work now. Brazilian music with rainforest panpipes? That's a little better. I recall a recent reader suggestion in Runner's World magazine. To facilitate his workouts, he made a CD of alternating fast and slow paced songs to signal a desired change in effort. The songs on a CD I burned this summer also alternated, but between Spanish and English. I listened to this CD while working out in a hotel gym on a Lake Tahoe trip. I still remember which exercises accompanied each song: walking down the stairs to the gym, biking fast then slow then fast, stretching hamstrings and calves and ankles, doing Pilates, and walking back up the stairs. Amazingly as I opened the room door, the last song ended. A perfect workout! Here in the boat, the motion alternates with the changing of rowers rather than the changing of songs: stern pair, then six and five, then four and three, then bow pair. The rhythm undulates up and down the boat like a caterpillar running, like the skilled muscles of a belly dancer. Eventually we will row all eight at once, but until then, this exercise helps us recognize the internal beat of our strokes while reducing side-to-side tipping.

Our open weight boat approaches the lightweights. Our coach, following us in a motorboat, shouts out, "Now it's time for our first race." Taken aback, we ripple with excitement. After a megaphone countdown, we're off! We alternate rowing between the front four and the back four, balancing each other like eager children on a summer's see-saw.

In cross-country and track, my previous sports, I never knew if someone was coming up behind me. Even when spectators yelled, "She's moving up on you," it was often just a ploy to encourage a sprint. Creeping up on competitors was difficult; my asthma gave me away. The nice thing about living life backwards, I realize, is being able to see what's behind you. We all see our ever-increasing lead over the lightweights. We yell out encouragements in our newly learned language.

"Good job, stern four!"

"Pull hard!"

"Get ready to go, bow four!"

Finishing victorious, we catch our Twix candy reward dangerously thrown to us one-by-one from the motorboat. Some Twix candies fall into the water and surprisingly float like tiny foil-wrapped sea otters.

I unstrap my soggy shoes and walk barefoot on the dock. The cold muddies my toes as I look over my shoulder. The sun salutes me from her mango elevator, and I smile in return. I am almost stunned to realize that in my backwards world, the sun does not rise from west to east. As she communicates with me through the ever-changing palette she streaks across the horizon, I whisper to her thanks for this language lesson: Unirá nos cielo el, estemos yo y tú donde que.