A young man came towards me carrying breakfast, bare-chested, broad across the shoulders. He smiled and said hello; on his plate was a piece of meat that looked very much like steak. I had not seen the lake yet.
Someone Was Already There
Katherine was still asleep when I left.
I closed the door quietly and drove alone to Lake Karāpiro. We had been there before, but this time the day had barely begun.
A film of moisture covered the windscreen. Cambridge was almost empty. Streetlights glowed through the mist, each one surrounded by a pale halo. The shops were shut. Now and then a car passed in the other direction, and then the road was mine again.
It was a public holiday. I assumed there would be nobody around that early.
Outside the rowing centre, there almost wasn't.
Inside, a line of young men was already on the rowing machines.
Beyond the squat racks and weight plates, they moved back and forward in rhythm. Knees folded. Legs drove out. Bodies opened. The handles came into their chests and went away again.
Then again.
The machines made a steady mechanical sound in the otherwise empty room.
I had always thought of rowing as something done with shoulders and arms. Standing there, what I noticed first were the legs.
Fold.
Drive.
Return.
The day before, at the Grassroots Trust Velodrome, we had gone to see bicycles and ended up watching a young woman training below the track.
This morning I had come looking for boats.
I had not seen one yet.
I walked farther inside. Photographs and racing memorabilia hung near a meeting room. That was where the young man came towards me with his breakfast.
He was bare from the waist up, his shoulders wide, his arms thick. He saw me and smiled.
I said hello.
Then I looked at his plate.
A large piece of meat. Steak, or something close to it.
He walked past.
Behind me, the rowing machines kept going.
Boats into Mist
The lake appeared only when I went outside.
Mist sat low over the water. Sky and lake had almost the same grey-white colour, with no clear line between them. The grass along the bank was wet. Each step pressed it flat and darkened it.
People were moving around the boat sheds.
Several of them came out carrying a long shell on their shoulders. The boat stretched so far beyond them that the people beneath it looked oddly small.
They walked towards the water.
Nearby, someone checked an oar. Someone adjusted shoes. Someone crouched over the inside of a boat.
There was very little talking.
The shell was lowered onto the lake.
The rowers climbed in and spread their oars. The first stroke was almost silent. On the second, the boat moved. A few strokes later, their bodies were coming forward together and opening together.
Blades entered the water.
The boat went on.
The blades lifted.
The surface closed behind them.
Soon the shell was a thin line in the mist.
Then it was gone.
Another crew came out carrying another boat.
A man passed close to me. His shoes made almost no sound on the wet grass.
I did not stop anyone.
I had been to Karāpiro before. This time I stood on the wet bank and watched one boat after another come down from people's shoulders and enter the lake.
This was not a morning arranged for visitors.
I had simply walked into somebody else's day.
The hull entered the water.
The blades cut in.
The lake closed again.
Home of Champions
Katherine was up when I got back.
“I thought there'd be nobody there on a public holiday,” I told her. “I went inside and there was a whole row of them training.”
I told her about the young man with no shirt and the breakfast that looked like steak.
She laughed.
“You know New Zealand rowing is famous, don't you?”
“A bit.”
“Do you remember the twins at the Beijing Olympics?”
As soon as she said Beijing, I did.
Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell. They had won Olympic gold in Athens four years earlier and defended it in Beijing.
We had watched a lot of those Olympics. Two almost identical New Zealand women in the same boat: that image had stayed with me.
Then Katherine said, “Do you know Cambridge has another name?”
“What?”
“Home of Champions.”
There is a sporting Walk of Fame in the centre of town. Plaques carry the names of athletes connected with Cambridge.
I thought of the empty cycling track the day before.
Then of the boat disappearing into the mist.
“Why does a town this small have so many champions?”
Katherine did not answer.
I sat for a moment.
“I want to see one of the schools.”
“Let's go to St Peter's.”
The Map
That afternoon we drove to St Peter's School.
It was still the public holiday.
At Karāpiro I had expected an empty place and found people training. Here the quiet was real.
The road into the school ran between trees. Autumn had deepened their colours—red, yellow and the last of the green. Afternoon light came through the branches and broke across the road in patches.
We parked and walked in.
The school did not look like the schools I remembered. The buildings were low and spread among grass and trees. After one block there might be a wide open space before the next. With no students and no bell, the campus seemed larger than it probably did on an ordinary day.
We stopped at an information board.
There was a map of the school.
I looked first for the classrooms. The academic and everyday school buildings sat mainly in the middle.
Then my eyes moved outwards.
Athletics. Football. Rugby. Cricket. Hockey. Swimming pools. Sports halls.
Field after field around the centre.
“Have you noticed?” I said. “The classrooms are all in the middle.”
Katherine leaned closer.
“And everything around them is sport.”
We stood there looking at the map for a little longer.
Then we walked on.
The coloured shapes on the board became real grass. Some fields lay close to the road; others ran away towards the trees. With nobody playing on them, it was easier to see how much ground they occupied.
Katherine stopped beside one of them.
“When you're young, you really should do more sport.”
She had been the kind of student teachers liked: good marks, obedient, good at doing what was expected. She kept studying and eventually went on to postgraduate work.
I had been a rather different student. In my first years at university, higher mathematics and organic chemistry gave me plenty of trouble. I was more at ease on a football field.
Katherine has sometimes said she envies something about that.
Not the marks.
I have simply tended to try things because I wanted to see where they went. Often I did not know where a road led until I was already on it.
Wind came across the empty fields. A few leaves rolled along the ground.
These days Katherine notices things her younger body never asked her to think about. A movement takes a little longer. Something once automatic now occasionally requires a moment's hesitation.
Much of what we once memorised for examinations has gone somewhere else.
She looked across the empty fields.
The YOU on the Wall
Ahead of us was a white building.
We could read the words before we reached it.
BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE
Large black letters across a white wall.
We stopped.
“Be the best you can be,” I read.
For a while we just looked at it.
“Do you think this means something different when you read it at our age?”
Katherine said nothing at first.
I read the words again.
“Actually, I don't think best is the most important word.”
She looked at the wall.
“It's the YOU.”
I nodded.
“Exactly. You are the starting point. And the starting point can be new every day.”
She smiled.
The campus was still quiet. There was nobody on the distant fields. Afternoon sun caught the red leaves of a tree beside the building and lit them almost through.
Some distance farther on, I turned back.
The white wall was smaller now.
The black letters were still easy to read.
BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE.