Training Days

By Caitlin G. Callaghan
This article appeared in Abroad View spring 2004

It began on the water. I GREW UP two miles from the Pacific, pulled my first oar at fourteen. Before that were kayaks, paddleboats, simple rafts. When there were no boats, I swam. In the ocean, the mountain lakes, the blue pools studded across the state. So when I crossed the Atlantic, I gravitated toward the familiar: water. Crew shells; the swing of eight girls sliding to the catch, dipping blades and pulling. In those first weeks, when my definition of winter was reworked through sleet and black mornings, I grasped my oar like a rope. It held me to this place, tied me to eight other girls.

Next came the swans. Everything had to be redefined: when a swan floated stubbornly in the middle of the Isis, we raised our blades. “Watch your oars on port side, ladies,” our coxswain called. I wrote home about that one, about how ridiculous it was that we had interrupted our piece for a swan. “You should have smacked it and taught those birds a lesson,” one friend wrote.

“It must have been pretty magical.” That was my mother’s reply. The daffodils were blooming in carpets across Christchurch Meadow, and the mallards’ feathers gleamed green at sunrise.    

Even when it rained, and the river frothed, I ran along the bank and imagined rowing. It was all I wrote about for weeks—how wonderful it felt, knowing that the boats were also waiting, warm and dry inside their own houses. 

Running, and rowing, I started looking: On my first visit to the Oxford Museum of Natural History, I walked down a windy, daffodil-lined street in cold sunshine. Trucks and cars trundled down the opposite sides of the road, braking at a stoplight. I passed two children bundled up in parkas, their light hair stuffed into knit caps, hopping over the cracks in the sidewalk. They met me at the curb, jumping from foot to foot, giggling. We waited together at the stoplight, the traffic passing us around the corner, the asphalt protesting with a soft swish.

A visit to Alice’s animals in the museum. Alice, as in Alice Liddell, the girl who befriended a math tutor, Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll). He brought her on rainy afternoons to the museum to see what they could see: a stuffed field mouse, two ducks, the dodo bird, and an American eagle (Haliaeetusleucocephalus)—which became, in the stories, the protesting eaglet, a prodigious, whiny baby.  

But here it is imperious, the ornithological centerpiece, its talons curled over a stack of books. In a museum of stuffed field mice, ferrets, rats and foxes, octopi from the deep, dinosaur skeletons found in East Anglia, an albatross and the dodo’s footprint in stone, the eagle stands out. American and alone. I stare at it for a long time, trying to catch its eye, memorize the Latin name. By the time I leave I’m not sure if we’ve made contact, or simply, as with other Americans in this English town, nodded and silently passed by. 

Birds of paradise. I walked by the Oxford University Press shop and saw a new anthology of western birds and felt how much I needed those things: “western” and “birds,” in this unfamiliar place. Western Kingbird. Pacific-Slope Flycatcher. Yellow-Billed Loon. Mountain Bluebird.

When I go running here on a muddy path, just after rain, it’s not like out West. Like the edge of the world, where the continent falls into the ocean, and each running step feels like a fresh footprint in time. Here I feel the ground pounded before me. Like running on bones. Nothing to mould, only to pass over. And the birds! Two outside my window every morning by 4 a.m. What are they? Too small to hover over mountain ranges and roost on some rocky beach. Little birds, old birds. They probably have Royal British Historical Society designated nests, too, so that should a bird feel the obligation to uphold tradition and remember its ancestors, its chicks can be born in the same faded nest as its grandbirds and great-grandbirds and so forth.

As my tutor said in her royal blue cursive script, “make sure you know what a word means before you use it,” and left me a bit miffed, the young woman who still pondered the possibility of becoming a professional etymologist. Today, walking in the Botanical gardens, stopping in the glass house by the Cherwell, the river muddy with rain, I watched steam gather on the panes and tried to pretend I was in northern California. Just for a moment, walking in with a cloud of white jasmine brushing my face, leaving those cold, green fields behind. I always put too much stock in smells. Early March mornings in San Francisco, when the sun crept up our front steps, I would leap outside, convinced I could see Maryland draped in lazy summer fireflies. All those childhood summers of hot evenings on the Chesapeake with blue crabs creeping about in the muck and key lime pie by the blackberry bushes. But now, in the glass house, I think about the river, watching the river and consider whether the British really knew what that word meant before they used it.  Creek, stream, trickle. Not river, I want to point out, clearing my throat. Punts are piled up wet and leaf-blanketed under the bridge, like coffins.

Later, reading news from home on the Internet, learning about the John Steinbeck centennial celebration on the other side of the world (as though through the layers of the earth) I read that Steinbeck wrote: “no man should be buried in alien soil.” And I thought about the neat rows of headstones in the U.S. military graveyard outside of Cambridge. Full of American airmen. Haliaeetus leucocephalus.

What scares me: turning out grey, like the angry, as in pale, furious faced, people I see sometimes in England. Lips stuck to cigarettes, fingers shoved in pockets, not touching. Maybe in the U.S. there’s just too much out in the open to really notice; I can’t decide which is worse, going around and smearing with it, like Robert Hass once wrote, or killing it, like the British do, but without eradicating the ghost.

The river early this morning, fast and muddy and furious. And me wanting to jump in and swim away, not knowing if I’d make it anywhere, but too scared regardless. 

 Tonight I was thinking about how racing season used to be my favorite time of year. Even when I hated it, hated having to be faster, hated hurting, I would think of the crowd roaring on the wet dock and my brother waving his arms, I could almost bear it. In those last years when clouds piled high above the Pacific and sea spray found its way to the lake, and boats and motors sank, when we started winning and winning big and bigger, it felt like me. But now, thinking about racing season, I’m not fast anymore. I’m not even a shade of that speed. What I remember, now, are the waves against my back on windy afternoons, when we could barely pull at half slide, and I felt like the first person on earth.   

Spring. I find myself sleeping at odd hours, curled motionless on my bed. Exhausted. A blustery, cold May Day, clouds piled high, running eastward. “May Day” is what young boys shout when playing war in California.

Trying to write this essay at my desk, with my window open. A sunny day that is now dark grey, menacing, like stormy summer afternoons on the east coast. I hear my American friends kicking around a football in the garden, where the magnolia tree I watched all winter has blossomed with white-pink petals. Some scatter to the grass in the wind; the rest cling to the branches. The ball flies across the pavement and into a flowerbed; Sabrina laughs at Josie. Clint shouts at Tim who is wearing sandals:

“Put on your running shoes!”

“You mean trainers,” I almost correct her, from my invisible height. And then sit back with surprise, staring at the words I didn’t say, flying unseen and unheard, out the window, into an Oxford afternoon. AV 

This bio was accurate at the time this article was printed: Caitlin G. Callaghan is a recent graduate from Stanford University. Now a devotee of kebab vans and muddy rivers, she returned to Oxford in October to study for an M.Phil in Comparative Philology.