Just to be clear, there is nothing unusual about a 66-year-old guy rowing. There are categories in competitive rowing for men and women my age and well beyond. (Boston’s Head of the Charles regatta offers six categories for rowers in single sculls over 60. “Grand-Veteran Singles II,” is for rowers 85 and over.) What’s slightly unusual — by no means unique — is for a guy my age to take up the sport having never seen a shell close up (I did watch some ivy leaguers practicing in eights on the Charles by twilight once — escort boats with brilliant flood lights tooling through the off-season darkness of 4:30 PM.)

In western North Carolina, I live in a rowing vacuum. Nobody I know rows. Very few people I know know what a shell is. But it seems as if the rest of the world does. It feels as if I’ve independently discovered a sport played by kicking a ball that looks like something designed by Buckminster Fuller on a chalk-lined field with nets at both ends and a world-wide following.

This sense of isolation is not entirely geographic; one of the sites for the US Rowing Association’s annual competition is only 145 miles south of here. The “North Carolina Rowing Championships” are scheduled on April 9th about as far to the east. A few hours west of me is the Head of the Hooch in Chattanooga, an autumn regatta whose website takes great pains to say exactly how it should be referred to and when the “tm” trademark symbol must be used. Really? Who knew? I didn’t until late night Googling revealed all.

Rowing is entirely new to me, but it’s a thoroughly mature sport. People have firm opinions (and deep-rooted expertise) about every detail. Some opinions have been held since before Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball. People really care about the exact height of the riggers (to the mm); the proper spread between opposite oarlocks; the exact amount of “inboard” and “outboard” of the sculls; whether they should be counterbalanced completely or by how much. Don’t get them started on the shape of the blades. In a boat driven by oars that may span over 19 feet, there are earnest debates about whether any given rower could have gone faster if his or her sculls were an inch and a half shorter. Debates about which muscles do what and which joints should bend how far and when end in bar fights (and not just in country clubs). Measure all that to the mm and the millisecond and you, too, could find a place in an NCAA clinic.

The presumption is that anyone who rows a shell has every intention of racing it. (Since I don’t yet row, take the rest of this paragraph for what it’s worth; I didn’t know I would race kayaks, either, but that turned out to be fun.) I am pretty sure that racing is not a large attraction to me, let alone the main one. I know: to some, that is akin to saying that scoring more goals is not the point of soccer. Maybe rowing is more like golf: every duffer knows that his score is indicative of his skill even if he never has PGA dreams or registers a handicap at the local club. Nobody who plays 18 holes ever does so without counting strokes (tell me if I’m wrong). Even people who say they simply enjoy the spoilt walk can still tell you what they shot. Likewise, I’m guessing I’ll always have some metric in mind.

These are some of the things I think about while cleaning up the shop.

Try this video. I think this is my kind of rowing.

And if you want a lot more rowing, this one.

Stephen Walker has a lovely website — I’m talking about the free bits. I’m nowhere near ready to pay his “Sculling Academy” a thousand pounds (or even the greatly reduced late-enrollment specials) for the premium bits, but the public portions are terrific.

Rowing exists in a different social stratum from mine. I don’t know: maybe it’s a stratum dominated by trust-fund babies and upward social mobility. Until Amy explained it to me a couple of years ago, I had no idea my high school had been dominated by social clubs and a social caste system. Never had a clue; don’t actually give a damn now, either. But it would have been informative. I’m just as oblivious, and approximately as concerned, about the who’s and whats’its of rowing. A sculling shell is an efficient rowboat, as far as I can tell, and all the rest is… sociology. This is going to be interesting.