June 2024

I stop at Suttle Lake on the return from a recent visit with my son and his wife. Suttle is a man-made rectangle some 2,300 meters long and 300 meters wide. It lies at 3,400 feet elevation and stretches east-west at the base of Santiam Pass highway in Central Oregon. I sculled it 1980 through 1988 when my wife and kids and I lived nearby outside the former logging- and mill town of Sisters.

March through August, three to five mornings a week, I left home in the darkness with my Owen racing single and sculls atop the car, drove to the lake, beach-launched, and pushed through two round trips along the north shore. I then dried the shell, loaded the equipment on the car, drove home, unloaded, and got ready to be at my office by 9:00 a.m.

Labor Day weekend marked season’s end for most water skiers and campers, so I had the place to myself for afternoon rowing from then until my own season ended with November’s sub-freezing temperatures. Halcyon days! Vine maples crowding the shore cast gold and red reflections at me across the mirror-like water. Sweat steamed off my wool sweater in the mountain air, wafting scent of warm lanolin and melting the snowflakes that sometimes parked on my shoulders. Once, a bald eagle descended to my wake close astern, plucked a 15-inch wriggling trout from the crystalline water, lifted off, and banked away – while I just kept right on rowing.

A man standing alone on the cinder beach late one afternoon proved to be rowing luminary Steve Gladstone. Steve was vacationing with his wife in Bend, and had driven alone forty miles from his hotel in hopes of meeting the young lawyer known to row on Suttle Lake. I sat on my single near the shore while we jawed on and on about rowing and the rowers we knew. I was in no hurry even though my muscles were tightening in the cold.

Those autumn moments spent with Steve began a warm friendship. They helped to cement a realization that even more important than all the effort for speed and winning, what kept me on this skinny shell was the character of those who do the same and the allure of the outdoors. That remains true forty years later.