I was born on a small island, and that nearness to water has shaped many of the choices I made about where to live. Water, ponds, lakes, lochs, rivers, estuaries, and above all the sea where a far horizon teases me with possibilities – adventures that will carry me from myself, journeys into new ways of being. In books and stories I read and write, water thins the intensities of event and drama so that individual lives and events are washed through with larger themes and prospects, seas and lakes and rivers bringing charge and mystery to my pages. I’ve been in the water as beachcomber, wader, swimmer, and as scuba diver where the watery world beneath the surface reminds me that we are but guests when we enter this shifting, unknowable medium that covers more than two thirds of the world’s surface. Yet it’s only recently that being on the water has been as important as being in it… Which is where I want to begin. For I started rowing in a skiff about five years ago and this has changed how I think about the land around me, the body of water that is beneath me as I go. It reminds me anew of all the things about water that I love and has also taught me how to be with others in close proximity in a year that has made strangers of us all.
And how to consider this? This being in a boat, sitting behind and in front of others, part of a larger craft to which we all contribute movement and flexibility? Part of a larger vessel that holds us closely together, separate but as one? Perhaps I can think of what we do on the water as an act of pooled intelligence, a metaphor for the same sort of mutual understanding and pleasure that comes from reading books. For yes, as I write this, I can see the connection…That feeling of sharing ideas and responses, the fresh thinking and action that comes from reading and being with books might well be imagined as an onward pull of oars and ease of shared motion. A kind of thinking about writing that is made up of separate responses, ideas, opinions, and questions as different as the others with me in the skiff… All met together in a connective rapport, “essaying” here with me, on the water as on this page.The St Ayles skiff I row in is a 22 feet wooden boat crewed by four rowers and a cox. As rowers we have to work together. We lean forwards with straightened arms to pull back on the handles of single wooden oars, pushing hard simultaneously with our feet on foot braces. This action propels the boat forwards. Forward lean, catch and pull in one motion. Rowers row backwards into the direction of travel, trusting the cox to steer and guide, to let us know what’s ahead, if a big wave is set is to hit the boat, or if the floating debris of last night’s storm needs be given wide berth; these events, interruptions, challenges that the water puts in our path have to be negotiated. The skiff alters course a little, we change. Just as in life, interruption and danger are calibrated and managed by each of us in concert with others, so do our movements on the water reflect a changing tide to which we react and respond. Our individual actions, our own speaking and doing become a social self, aligning with others, considering them and their needs and capabilities, and that same tug and pull of trust and reciprocity is crucial in a skiff. It keeps us in synch; though we are all separate here still our actions together allow us to move on.
In a similar way, books engender ideas that keep our minds in motion. We move through life in words, in the language we speak to each other, each deepening of expression like the dip of our oar in conjoined activity so we might settle into our place on the water. Just watch how rowers follow the person in “stroke” position at the front of the boat, matching movement for movement, rhythm for rhythm… Is what I’m getting at here: the forward lean, the catch and pull, the drive backwards, and the recovery… As a kind of understanding, a reading, a comprehension of others and their ideas and individual selves...
Forward lean…
Catch and pull…
A gesture, an action, a yearning, a learning to be part of a wider world…
In our singular lives
So I dive deep into the waters of that great nineteenth century novel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville and read these lines, “Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern… Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull my little ones…” * I feel this text, its paragraphs and pages, as tilting and shifting with the swell of the sea beneath it—as much a journey as a story. It’s a reading of shared movement, this, individual but also part of the historical, cultural and imaginative wellspring philosopher Carl Jung called ‘collective unconsciousness’, those depths beneath our own separate lives that resound with ideas and sensibilities plumbing the profundities of what makes us human. So a book written well over a hundred years ago is calling to me here, in 2021, in this Book Week Scotland project of ours, a reading and writing of personal histories and experiences in association with the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association: And, come in this essay calls, “Pull, pull my fine hearts-alive”. Be part of this. Read, share and write. “Pull, pull…”
approach to formulating ideas that makes space for a mind to follow other minds in a skein of words, ripping, flowing, concircling, aligning and dispersing like the patterns made by our oars in the water...Have you readthis book? Do you want to have another look at that poem? What meanings do these words suggest to you? Questions, thinking, in a dip and pull. What moves you here? These patterns on the water are also lines written on a page. What is it in this story that you love? So imagining rowing together as conversations, exchanges, the sharing of responses we bring to others when we are deep inside a verse or a text. Yes, I am starting to see the overlaps more and more as I essay deeper into this project of ours.So I find here, in this novel, how the boat “held on her way north eastward… one transparent blue morning”… and I see how Melville’s words are arranged in a way that draws us into them and onwards in a clear and lovely motion, “a gentle air impelling her keel…tall tapering masts as three mild palms on a plain.” Here in his sentences is the same forward lean…catch and pull… and again, lean… An action, a shared understanding, felt in a book as I do on the skiff, a reaching forwards, into “the surrounding serenity” of becalmed waters…To see what’s ahead, and then moving towards there. Onwards, reading on, rowing on…Thinking, writing, entering our own imagination, moving through the water of our days.
Someone said recently: Row to a waltz rhythm, make your recovery twice as long time-wise as your pull, and I think about the effect upon the reader of a rich and complex text, requiring thought and concentration, that long “recovery” of thought that arises when ideas coalesce and settle around a theme, reading and the time to reflect upon texts mirroring my actions on the water. So the mind and the body is in concert after all, again in forward lean…In catch and pull. Just as every rower’s learning starts with watching the oar blade, with more experience all of us look straight ahead at cox, watching the shoulders and back of “stroke” and other rowers, each matching their pull and drive to the rest. So, in the same way, every reader’s learning starts in patternings that are social, collegial. School, Libraries, Universities… In these accommodations, the “deep hulled boats” of The Iliad they may as well be, the world that is the ship of The Odyssey, there is space for all; the sea faring craft can hold us and we come to texts together, a “dance of the intellect amongst words” upon the water. There’s a training manoeuvre where we are asked to close our eyes and simply follow the rhythm we’ve started with, listening to the plash of the oars as they hit the water. Here I am too, in that way, in rhythm with others’ thoughts, feeling the expanding of my own ideas into something deeper and larger that resonates with all of us. When rowers are all in synch and the skiff slices through the water I feel a fluency in speaking, reading, thinking… An inwards flow outwards. And when our rowing rhythm is out of joint, and the skiff rocks from side to side, the awkwardness—the hesitancy of the surge forwards is like a stuttering. And reading, I don’t want to stop. Be held back. I need to know what I mean. I need to understand my difference in order to learn how to be someone who is part of a “together”. To be part of a conversation. To be at a point where individual participants, the books and their readers all converge. So help me find my rhythm again, show me how I might learn and engage that I might contribute to the whole, feel necessary, a part of something larger than myself.
*
“That’s amazing” a friend responds when I tell her. “What a life affirming thing, to hear of this,” she says. “A connection formed on water, by water…What a beautiful idea.”
And so words do reflect these networks, actions, communities. Beautiful, to make of a time spent on the water something shared; beautiful to celebrate this in words and actions, both. Newly formed clubs encourage the making of new friends between diverse individuals who may not necessarily cross paths outwith the sheer pleasure of rowing, but now forging lasting bonds that arise from shared passions or bodily exertions. Racing regattas, companionable and convivial, are as much a time of feasting and celebration as sporting exertions, enabling local communities to get to know each other as they come together. The project has breathed new life into what was a historic tradition of Fife mining communities building boats, hosting regattas, rowing and sailing against each other. The Scottish Coastal Association (SCRA) formed in 2010 is now a network of more than 70 member clubs, and coordinates some of the major races in the rowing calendar.
In the same way, Book Week Scotland has been established to engender reading in all kinds of communities, households and places… Bringing together books and enquiring minds, sharing words, stories and ideas with those who may not have come upon them in much of their daily life. So we bring them here, to the water, to read together in the same way that to row is also a reading of the watery world around us. For why should the two activities of mind and body be set apart? The physical, the contemplative…They arrive as one here on the page, a project supported by Book Week Scotland and the SCRA, the making of essays, reading and writing words all arising from the experience of being on a skiff on the water with others. 
So let me honour that experience as I close this long line of words and water by reminding myself that 2021 has been designated the year of the RowAround Scotland, marking a decade since the formation of SCRA, and delayed one year by the global Covid pandemic. For it‘s been joyous to come together again, after time away, joyous to find ourselves on the water again, feeling it, reading it… And, to celebrate, two specially crafted wooden batons, named “Community” and “Spirit”, both with central sections of clear resin encasing a model of a skiff on blue water, have been passed from rowboat to rowboat, club to club in a gesture of friendly affirmation, greeting and good will. When the RowAround Scotland venture is complete, these batons will have circumnavigated all of Scotland’s coastline, and also some of her inland waterways and lochs—outlining a watery map, connecting all of the thirteen Scottish regions, affirming each local club’s place in the spirit of friendship and community that enables us all to thrive where we are. And what a story for Scotland, this! A narrative of association, society… Of adventure, fun, health and experience and, yes, joy. A story of being on the water, together and apart, apart and together…Moving onwards, forwards around a country whose edges are written in water. Here in this celebration of lines written by skiffs in the water, drawn by their oars, joining the action of one to another in this essay…and another…and another…might you catch something of our enjoined project, hear articulated in these pages an activity that is also a literary experience written and read, shared and enjoyed.
Come in… Be part of this! Let’s take our place in a real or imagined skiff upon the water and on the page!Forward lean…
Catch and pull…
Let us discover what is ahead for us all…
Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low October 2021
* Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale, Harold Beaver ed.,( Penguin English Library, 1972) p.319
For more information on Book Week Scotland 2021, seehttps://www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-week-scotland
For more information on Scottish Coastal Rowing Association RowAround Scotland 2021, seehttps://www.rowaround.scot/