I had experienced my share of desperate moments since I came to University, but none rivaled the week after my freshman year midterms.

Midterms had been like a big, ominous cloud bank at the horizon for the last month. And as midterms came closer, the darker the sky became until there was no sun. I dreaded them early because I knew my classmates were smart. I dreaded them later, because I knew I hadn’t prepared enough for them. But it wasn’t until after I got my grades back that the dark clouds that had hung over me for the last month broke into hard rain.

Parents hold certain illusions about their children. They are the curators to the museum of your life, tending to its stacked remnants and memories, arranging and rearranging the cobwebbed and dusty artifacts of a you that no longer exists or perhaps never existed at all. There some things you don’t share with these gentle curators, some truths you don’t expose them to. Imagine going to the natural history museum, finding a docent, pulling him aside as he admired the scale reproduction of a Tyrannosaurus skeleton. Imagine then offering him incontrovertible evidence that dinosaurs not only never existed, but that he had been the subject of a grand hoax, one specifically designed to prey on his love of paleontology.

I could not tell my parents my grades. I had done poorly. Very poorly. I had over-extended and was getting burned for it. I had hoped to get all of my requirements done during my freshman year and had signed up for classes that would be a challenge. I could have taken introductory science, but chose organic chemistry. I could have taken philosophy 101, but I was taking a 300-level class on Kant. I thought I could do it. I had fallen victim to pride in the accomplishments that had carried me into the school and would now suffer humiliation at the hands of my graders.

Mom and dad believed I was a genius. They believed I worked hard and did well because of it. They believed I was going to graduate Phi Beta Kappa and go on to get a PhD. I couldn’t tell them that I was just average. It would have been too hard.

I could have borne up under the pressure of grades had that been the only thing weighing me down. When I was in high school, grades were the only thing I had to worry about. But here there were new pressures.

Rowing was one of them. It took up my afternoons. It ate into my study time. I knew these things but still enjoyed being in the Armory most afternoons, listening to music and taking notes on rower performance. The real stress, the one I had trouble admitting to myself, came from the team itself.

When a group of young men reaches a critical mass, they look less like individuals and more like a single organism. The organism lives and breathes and roams around the boathouse. Its behavior is predictable and self-regulating. The sum of its parts is often a more moderate amalgamation of the individual weaknesses, desires, or beliefs. Save for one feeling.

When one member of the team is stressed, the others pick it up and the great organism shudders and convulses with tension. It crouches, muscles tight, and waits, tense and impatient. The normal dissipation of feeling one would expect from the group turns into magnification and everyone is on edge.

So it was during midterms.

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