Julia Flynn Siler

One of my recent discoveries in Oxford has been the Falcon Boat Club, founded by a group of pleasure-boating men from Holywell Church in 1869 and initially based out of of my local pub, The King’s Arms. Unlike most of Oxford’s rowing clubs, it admitted women as members from its beginnings, more than 150 years ago.

 

 

Now, with its two-year-old newly built boathouse on the banks of the Thames just upstream of Donnington Bridge in East Oxford, it’s become my regular weekend morning outing. I’ve joined club outings on Saturday and sometime Sunday mornings, where we row up the Isis (as, confusingly, the Thames is called in Oxford) all the way to Folly Bridge and then back beyond the clubhouse, to picturesque Iffley Lock where the boats turn around.

 

 

Unlike my women’s team at Marin Rowing Association, the rowers taking part in the club outings on weekends are both women and men, and include some competitive athletes as well as those who are relatively new to the sport. Last weekend, for instance, I was in a boat with a physicist, a former Cambridge rower, and someone who helps oversee British rowing regattas. My favorite part of the morning is the joking around (and the smell of bacon baps, toasted crumpets, and “posh” coffee served by cafe volunteers.)

As much as rowing the Isis seems like an idyllic way to spend a weekend morning, the river itself is cold, fast-moving, and dangerous, particularly in the winter. The Falcon’s captain sent an email this week that was a tragic reminder of this. The body of an Oxford University student Ben was retrieved from the river this past Sunday morning, not far from the boathouse near Iffley Lock.

There’s shadow and light in everything and that’s certainly true with the rivers that flow through the city of Oxford (the Isis and the Cherwell, pronounced “Char-well.”) Today should have been a joyous one, with university rowing teams competing against each other in the annual Torpids regatta, in which traditionally boats have bumped against each other for position. But the day the regatta was suppose to begin, it was it pouring and the rivers were running fast and high.

At the start of the regatta, the river had a red flag warning  — meaning it was considered unsafe to row on for now. But the weekend brought with it brilliant blue skies. I went out on the deck of the Falcon Boat Club overlooking the river on Saturday, watching the rowing shells from different colleges fly past, their coxes urging them forward. It was grand.

 

 

 

Julia Flynn Siler is visiting scholar at Oxford University this spring, studying with the Oxford Center for Life Writing.