Always Moving – Even When You Stop
Issue 57 - ROW360
It’s refreshing writing a piece for a rowing magazine as I don’t have to fill in as many blanks as I normally do. In other outlets, the average reader has often never heard of ocean rowing, but here I can safely assume that either you yourself are a rower, or, like me, unexpectedly (or involuntary) became an ancillary member of this institution.
Which means you’ve probably already heard of Angela Madsen.
Angela, a 3x Paralympian, 14x Guinness World Record holder, and Marine Corps veteran rowed the Atlantic twice, the Indian once, and circumnavigated Great Britain. She was rescued ten days into her first solo attempt across the Pacific in 2013, but in 2014, successfully crossed with ocean rower Tara Remington. In 2020, Angela, still fixated on her solo goal, once more attempted to be the only paraplegic in the world to row across the Pacific Ocean. Tragically, sixty days in, Angela drowned halfway between Los Angeles and Hawaii. In a sport where there are only eight recorded fatalities, this one sticks out.
Let’s back up a bit.
The first question everyone asks me, the filmmaker following this story, is how Angela and I first met.
Angela contacted me via Facebook after she watched a sailing documentary I produced and directed which was touring sailing clubs in California.
When I was 21, I took a semester off from film school to accomplish a lifelong dream of living on a sailboat. The dreamy picture in my mind quickly evaporated as chronic sea-sickness, physical exhaustion, and extreme sleep deprivation took over. Academically, the program (Sea Education Association) was rigorous, and keeping up with the mental sweat in addition to the awkwardness of learning to be a “real” sailor (that is to say - without the facilitation of contemporary gadgets and gizmos like GPS, for example), was profoundly intense. Adding another variable to the equation, documenting the entire trip and producing a 25 minute short, Where the Water Takes Us, made for a busy 40 days at sea.
While I personally don’t find this film to be exceptional, it possesses tendrils of effective storytelling, immersive cinematography, and above all, conveys my deep reverence for the ocean in tandem with the bare-bone, white knuckle experience of living at sea. Despite being only a couple months graduated from film school with a limited CV and outsized appetite for adventure, Angela, a Paralympic star and ocean savant, decided that I was qualified enough.
And so, a seemingly innocuous message: “Hey, I am going to row the ocean solo. Do you want to make a little video about it?” turned into the sharpest left turn and the greatest understatement of my life.
Until I met Angela, I didn’t know people rowed across oceans. No sail or motor, no follow boat or any kind of assistance. Months at sea being tossed like a jerry can in a mere 20’ vessel was a lot to wrap my head around before contemplating the even rarer breed of ocean rower who volunteers to do it alone. Why alone? It was this question that first hooked my curiosity, but it was Angela herself who captured my attention.
Angela, at 60, with an untamed mane of grey hair, no sensation below her lumbar spine, a wildly inappropriate sense of humor, and a radiant face of joy was unlike anyone I had ever met or anyone I had ever seen in a film. She was born to be on camera: visually, it was captivating to watch her, audibly, she spoke in perfect sound bites, and conceptually, her story held no shortage of intrigue. After four years in film school righteously declaring to tell stories of underrepresented voices, here was the opportunity of a lifetime to grow close with someone who I knew, deep in my bones, would go down in history as a symbol of our generation.
We worked together for six months leading up to her departure. I documented everything – her training, her preparation, and her special, comedy-infused relationship with her life partner, Deb – before her launch on April 24, 2020.
Things unfolded at sea with the predictable drama of challenging ocean conditions, juxtaposed with the intense civil unrest back in America with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration, and the Black Lives Matter protests. A revolution was unfolding on land, but out to sea was a grandmother, who, at 60, dutifully got on her rowing seat for two hours on, two hours off, to inch across the vast Pacific Ocean.
The film, naturally, was growing into a deeper story about the individual versus the collective. More and more, the question of what we were capable of achieving alone felt pertinent. This was a sports story that because of what and who Angela represented, was intricately connected to the greatest social justice issues of our time.
But then, on June 22, 2020, everything changed.
Angela got out of her boat to fix the shackle on her bow anchor and never made it back on.
Overnight, Angela’s journey went from the local nightly weather report in small town Bakersfield to the front pages of the largest media outlets in the world. World-wide public attention and scrutiny of the tragedy was overwhelming in every sense. Here I was, in the epicenter of it all, the young filmmaker following the journey, somehow responsible to bear to the world the story that so dramatically shifted into something far different than I could have ever predicted.
If you end up with the story you started with, you weren’t listening along the way.
Today, six years since the Facebook message, ROW OF LIFE is a feature film about Angela’s remarkable legacy as an athlete, an ocean rower, a devoted wife, and extraordinary individual leading up to her final solo row across the Pacific Ocean in 2020.
It is a love story — a selfless, unconditional love that Angela’s life partner, Deb – the steady, unwavering cheerleader back home – exemplifies by championing Angela’s pursuit of her dreams despite what becomes the ultimate cost.
It is a story of a promise kept — a lesson in front of and behind the lens to never, ever give up and see through to the mission of finishing what was started, no matter the twists and turns, tragedies or triumphs that transpire in between.
It is a story of a destiny manifested, aptly put by Angela herself: “I’m not afraid of death. It’s going to happen when it’s supposed to happen and when I’m done doing on this earth what I’ve been put here to do, and apparently I’m supposed to do it in this body.”
Angela packed a remarkable life story into 60 years, and for an even more remarkable final act, she died doing something she loved, something most never even dare to dream.
In a way, you couldn’t help but feel proud of her. It’s a hell of a way to go when weighed against alternatives. But this question as to why she felt she needed to do this alone still hung overhead, especially in the depths of my grief when I couldn’t comprehend the outcome.
When you asked Angela, her answer changed. First she insisted that it has everything to do with a personal and public sense of accomplishment. In previous rows with teams of four, six, eight, even sixteen, Angela felt the narrative after the row was successful went along the lines of: “Crew with disabled woman cross ocean”. She never felt fully validated, and instead, suffered from the limits others projected around her disability. This gnawed at Angela. She had to prove them wrong.
“An ocean rowing boat is a relatively safe place compared to society,” Deb expands, “You don’t have to depend on your chair. You can get to where you want to go. And no one knows you’re disabled along the way.”
Was it that simple? That obvious?
The camouflage of it all.
The limitless of it all.
The undeniable mobility she experienced at sea and not on land.
“No sidewalks…” Angela playfully echoes, “It’s peaceful when it’s not like riding a bull. Amazing sunrises and sunsets. Big full moon when it comes over the ocean and it looks like molten silver with little ripples in the water. Sometimes it looks like gold when the sun is setting. Something different every minute, no two minutes out here are alike. It’s always changing. You’re never at the same Latitude and Longitude either. Always moving – even when you stop.”
Angela who, at 33 years old, experienced a botched spinal surgery that left her paralyzed from the waist down would, of course, seek physical agency. The magnitude Angela sought is breathtaking, and feels poignantly summarized in a line that closes the film:
Always moving – even when you stop.
Not only does it culminate the lessons of sixty years of adversity and resilience, but also reminds us that despite how things may appear, we are never truly stopped, but set into a different kind of motion always in the direction of becoming who we really are.
And that, to me, feels like reason enough for anyone, but especially Angela in her final ROW OF LIFE to sit alone in a rowing seat and start pulling the oars.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
