Q:
What’s left when you take away the river, the vault of the desert/mountain sky, the canyon walls, the cold beer, your friends, the excitement of upcoming rapids, the sense of having gotten away from it all, the delight of messing around in a boat?
A:
A rowing machine.
Rowing on a rowing machine, in a deep sense, is a regressive and masturbatory activity. You sit in a hunched position, yanking on a pole. You aren’t going anywhere. Your goal is to whittle away at your 500 meter split. Rowing, I discovered, is boring. You don’t experience the changing scenery, like runners do. It’s even more monotonous than gym/weight room exercise, that other machinemensch-like activity—an hour spent working out at a 24-Hour Fitness is sort of like speed dating: you approach each machine, you get right in there, you see how it feels, you move on. At the end, you take a shower to cleanse yourself of the experience. Rowing is like a long-term relationship that consists only of work: assume the position and toil.
I’m not going to say I never use it, because I do. And neither will I claim that it isn’t a great workout, because it is. But I will say that whenever I look out my front window, or cross my porch coming and going, I’m a little surprised that I’ve bought a rowing machine for eight hundred dollars. Sure, there are benefits, and we had a rationale: Claire’s neck. But as time has progressed, and we’ve used it a less-than-defensible amount, I’ve realized that we bought the thing from within a mind-state from which people buy anything they don’t actually need: abstractly, secretly unto ourselves, we buy the thing imagining another life—or, at least, a slightly different version: Me, except wearing this cool shirt. Us, except sitting in this large double-beach chair, which is excruciatingly heavy, but ideal for specific types of near-car recreation, during which my partner and I can sit side-by-side, like the couple in the Cialis commercial, each in their own soaking tub, watching the sunset, the only difference between the two partners being that one has a massive erection, albeit obscured by the extra-deep soaking tub’s walls. Hark! There I am, rowing the mist-hung Thames in an expensive turtleneck! When we buy, we are like the young person essayist Annie Dillard describes—a young person who wants to be a writer, but does not like sentences; who does not realize that poets enjoy poetry, and novelists novels. “He likes himself only in the role,” Dillard writes, “the thought of himself in a hat.”