Row, Row, Row the Boat

Out here, on the Charles River at dawn, you can hear the city breathing. Sirens wail in the distance. Rush-hour traffic picks up and begins to hum. Cars and trucks rumble and roar. But John Yasaitis hears none of it. On his one-man scull, oars in hand, the 59-year-old rower hears only the sounds of his own making.

Pull, swish, glide.

This is his routine, his rhythm. Everything else fades away. Out here, it's just Yasaitis and his boat, slicing through the water. Out here, he doesn't even think about the accident. It is gone now, submerged in the river. He has left it behind one stroke at a time. And yet, it's still all around him.

On the eve of this month's Head of the Charles regatta on the river - the very site of Yasaitis's accident four years ago - people still talk about him with a mix of both horror and awe. just doesn't happen every day that a man gets speared by another boat, feels his intestines after hitting the water, and later decides, Yes, I will row again.

"Some would say it's an obsession," Yasaitis says. "I don't know. It's just something I got into and something I like doing." This is classic Yasaitis, who will compete once again in the Head of the Charles. He is understated, a quiet, no-nonsense man with an engineer's mind. At 6 foot 3 and 185 pounds, he weighs what he did when he graduated from MIT in 1968 or maybe, he confesses, even a couple pounds less. He is a creature of habit: up at 5 a.m., on the road by 6, bound from his home in Lexington to his teal, 28-foot Van Dusen shell at the Riverside Boat Club in Cambridge. Karen Chenausky, a Riverside coach, says she can count on Yasaitis showing up for practice even when everyone else bails. He has a PhD in materials science. And he seemingly half sinew, half steel.

A rower since his days at MIT, Yasaitis left the sport for more than 20 years, raising three children with his wife, Holly. But in 1998, with the kids growing up, he returned to the water, worked hard, and soon impressed rowers half his age. Igor Belakovskiy, who met Yasaitis while training at Riverside in the spring of 2002, remembers it was always hard to catch him. "And I'm like 30 years younger than he is," Belakovskiy says. In August that year, Yasaitis finished second at the US Rowing Masters National championship. At age 55, he was, he believed, in the best rowing shape of his life, a sure bet to do well at the Head of the Charles that October. Then, just three days before the regatta, in a narrow part of the river near the Arsenal Street bridge, it happened: An eightman boat, piloted by a coxswain and headed downriver, slammed into Yasaitis's single scull headed upriver. Yasaitis never saw it coming.

"We collided, and their boat, unfortunately, went straight into my back," he recalls. "I slipped off , into the water, and I was just sort of ticked off at that moment. My boat was badly damaged." He looked at it, not feeling any pain yet, then realized he had a bigger problem. felt my intestines coming out of my back."

Rowers know that accidents can happen. Boats bridges or run ashore. Chenausky says it's not uncommon for boats to smack into each other or to get swamped. There have even been fatal accidents, including one in 1989 on the Charles, where a motorized pontoon boat crashed into a Wellesley rower. But, Chenausky says, "I don't think I'd ever heard of an accident where somebody had been pierced."

Neither had Dr. Rob Sheridan. A burn-trauma specialist, Sheridan was the surgeon on call at Massachusetts General Hospital the morning of October 16, 2002. He has seen plenty of impaling injuries over the years, he says, including people speared by fence posts. But he had never seen anyone pierced by anything as large as an eight-man rowing shell. The exit and entrance wounds, accordingly, were sizable.

"You could easily get your hand in either one," says Sheridan, who took one look at his pale patient and knew he didn't have much time. Yasaitis's back muscles were ripped, his intestines torn, and his pelvis cracked. But the biggest problem doctors faced was blood loss. Sheridan, figuring he had only a few minutes before Yasaitis's blood pressure crashed, whisked him into surgery.

"As bad as his injuries were," recalls Sheridan, "he was a really lucky guy." The shell had missed Yasaitis's aorta and many major organs. The surgery, performed while Yasaitis lay on his side, was deemed a success. He dodged infection in the days afterward - an "amazing" feat, says Sheridan, given the river water in his wounds - and he was soon walking.

But not content to walk, Yasaitis hit the gym the following January. Hesitant but driven, he worked his upper body and used the rowing machine. In time, what hurt the most was doing nothing: standing or sitting. The pain in his left hip and lower back seemed to fade when he pushed himself. And so he did, returning the water in the spring of 2003.

Pull, swish, glide.

His swift return surprised nearly everyone in the rowing community as well as his surgeon. Yasaitis probably wouldn't have recovered so quickly, says Sheridan, had it not been for his attitude after the accident and general fitness before it. But even after he got back his boat, Yasaitis needed to do one more thing before could start over. He rowed upriver to the Arsenal Street bridge. He reached the site of his accident, took everything in, and then made his decision.

"OK," he thought. "I'll keep going now."

Keith O’Brien is a freelance writer in Jamaica Plain. E-mail him at keith@keithob.com.