Near Brookgreen Gardens, SC – May 5, 2013

The wind shifted like clockwork, rotating from the north to the east to the south, pulling warm air on top of cold in grey sheets of clouds and rain that wash across the land. The water feels right again, fluid, movable, and I go, sliding up a flooded river edged with cypress.

The trees wade out into the water on thickening trunks. Grey moss hangs on their branches, old against the fresh green crowns. Ospreys nest in the crowns. Streaks of light spill across the dark sky. Waves of rain slip over me. I search for any dry land left unswallowed by the flood, but find only walls of half-sunk trees and cypress knees guarding the shore.

The grey sky fades to black. Frogs roar in the night. The trees become dark shadows slipping past. I don’t see land until midnight, until I find a thin muddy bank and collapse on it, feeling like I’ve actually moved for the first time in days.

Hi Everyone,

People often ask why I turned around and decided to paddle back to the Northwest Angle after reaching Key West so I wrote an essay for Outside about the decision. If you’d like a little deeper look into my mindset and a few minor spoilers about what’s coming up in the next few weeks of my way behind journal (Spoiler Alert: I’m still alive!), here it is: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/water-activities/Gone-and-Back-Again.html

Please comment, share, and send it to anyone who might be interested. It centers around a message that I think is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned on this trip. Dream big and go.

Thank you for all the support along the way! This trip would be impossible without it.

Daniel

Past McClellenville, SC – May 4, 2013

The wind didn’t stop. It just slammed into me again as I inched forward. It felt routine. The last few days blend together, daylight and darkness mushed together with bent grass and frustration. I should be forty miles from here. I should be close to North Carolina. I should be two days ahead.

Then I heard music through the trees and saw white tents and a crowd of people along the shore. Shrimp boats paraded by with colored flags waving from their towers. They came one after another in a long line that rose above the salt marshes and made its way toward the ocean. People cheered and clergy blessed the fleet while I floated in the water and watched, not sure what I’d stumbled on.

I got out and found myself in a festival of people eating shrimp kabobs and BBQ sandwiches and listening to music blare out from speakers. Kids raced through the crowd. Laughter and cheer filled the air between bites. Everyone looked happy, colorful, and full of joy.

I felt like an alien floating through the crowd. Salt stained, beaten down by the wind, tired, almost broken, but no one there worried about the wind, no one cared about where they should have been or how many days they’d lost, they all just looked so content and filled with shrimp and beer.

So I bought a BBQ sandwich and a shrimp kabob. I gave a Mickey Mouse ball I’d found floating in the grass to some kids playing on the dock. I made friends and talked to strangers. I joined the crowd and I decided to be happy too because I am where I am and nowhere else and nothing will change that.

And maybe, just maybe, my ship needed the blessing too.

I returned to the water like a boxer leaving his corner after a bad round. Sluggish. Weary. Not wanting to do it again.

The wind hadn’t stopped blowing. It just rolled over me all night, loud and angry, shouting taunts.

The water felt like wet concrete. The bow lumbered through the sludge on heavy strokes. The world slipped backwards on the gusts. I moved in inches, pressed into the grass at high tide, scrapped the mud bottom at low, trying to find a crack in the wall of rushing air.

Another seven hours, another ten miles, and the bell rings.

Seewe Bay, SC – May 2, 2013

The wind came from first light and never stopped. Endless and alive, it pressed across the salt marshes, roaring, raising white caps on brown water, its gusts taking shape in flicking blades of grass.

Nothing else moved in the sky. Pelicans abandoned flight and disappeared. Egrets hid in the grass. Plovers crowded together behind oyster mounds with their heads sunk into their bodies. All seemed content to wait for another day.

I did not want to listen to the roar or the birds or anything but my will to move forward. I’ve been gone too long to sit and watch water move. I don’t have the time for it. I want to go, to cut away pieces of the map.

I snuck along edges, picked my way through mazes of marshland, slid from side to side of every channel, feeling, searching for some way forward, some quiet pocket in the roar.

But it never came.

I traded seven hours for ten miles and the wind only roared and roared and roared until my arms grew heavy, my hands tight, and my will cracked to pieces.

The wind will be back tomorrow, but so will I.

Isle of Palms, SC – May 1, 2013

I caught the tide as wrong as I could on the Ashley River. The wind blew in my face. My arms felt rusted and heavy with two weeks of fat.

Ten miles of barely moving forward brought the grand, sideways houses of Charleston into view. Two kids waived at me from the seawall staring out toward the ocean. Civil war mortars lined the park behind them. Fort Sumter rose in the distance, guarding the mouth of Charleston Harbor.

I thought of confederate troops and the first shots of the civil war and a tiny island filled with rubble after four years of bombardment. The walls still have shells in them, sunk between brick and mortar. I paddled close and watched dolphins play underneath the ramparts.

The tide flipped and I caught it wrong again on the back side of Palm Island. I watched the sky darken and sun disappear as I paddled into the night. Two hours later, I scrambled over mud and oysters to sleep between two trees on a thin bank.

I’m soaking wet and a little miserable, but I’m back in it.

You never know when you’ll hear the end of a story. I suppose in a book you can feel the weight of pages and know you’re getting close, but in life there’s no such aid. Ends come unexpectedly.

I remember the white flyer on the door of a gas station in New Madrid. This was back on the Mississippi River on the Missouri side across a long bend that retreats all the way from Tennessee into Kentucky.

“Please Help Me!!!” it read. “Please help me find my canoe. My boat was taken from the boat ramp in New Madrid on Friday, November 2nd where it was padlocked to the fence rail with a cable lock. I am canoeing the Mississippi River from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.”

It described the canoe as “18 foot, green fiberglass with a half dozen white bondo patches on it,” “one seat in the middle with a green back rest,” and “The Kristi Nicole” painted in large, white letters on the hull.

I read between the lines and saw that it was so much more than a disposable piece of equipment. I saw years spent in the patched holes. I saw the river slipping by from that single seat. I saw the fresh, white paint–still sticky with hopes and dreams–when he spelled out “Kristi Nicole” across the hull.

I never left my kayak for long after that. I didn’t want my dream stolen on the side of a riverbank. I only leave it in grandmother’s garages where it will be safe while I fly up to Minnesota to talk at the Midwest Mountaineering Expo.

“Yea, someone stole my canoe,” the man said.

I was wandering around looking at booths and filling my head with possible adventures when I heard it.

“Wait, where?” I said.

The man had been telling me about the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin, but the conversation had shifted to paddling.

“New Madrid,” he said.

I looked at him like he was a ghost. Then he pulled out a copy of the flyer and a picture of the boat. There it was with “The Kristi Nicole My Little Cricket Bean” painted on the side.

Someone had offered him a canoe to replace her, but he’d turned them down. He wanted to finish in The Kristi Nicole or not at all. He named it after a woman he loves who no longer loves him. They keep in touch though. She told him she hated the name and wanted him to change it, but he kept it anyway. You can’t replace a boat like that off the rack.

“But I found it,” he said. “Three months later this guy called me up and I got it back.”

You never know when you’ll hear the end of a story, maybe never, maybe all we ever get are pieces. I got an email from him when I landed in Charleston.

“Kristi Nicole still hates me,” it said, “but I’m going back to the river in one week.”

Charleston, SC, Los Angeles, CA, and Minneapolis, MN – April 17-30, 2013

I caught the incoming tide up the Ashley River and slipped past Charleston to an old railroad bridge. There used to be a ferry there, on the river bend. Hessian mercenaries crossed it on their way to occupy Charleston during the Revolutionary War. Slave ships would dock to sell slaves to the plantations. Now it’s just a quiet neighborhood where one of my best friend’s grandmother lives.

“She might ask you trim a shrub or two, just fair warning,” he said. “But she loves to cook for people and says you can store the boat in her garage.”

I was in.

Fran claims to be over eighty, looks not a day over sixty, and is sharper than most twenty-year-olds. She seems to know everyone too. Someone to help get the boat to her house. Another person to get me to and from the airport. Yet another person to show me around Charleston.

I stripped everything out of the boat, let it dry in the sun, and packed it all away along one side of Fran’s garage. It felt strange to shut off the lights and leave it behind, almost like I was betraying a friend.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”

I got a ride to the airport the next morning, printed out a ticket, and boarded a plane. A few hours later, without stepping outside or even glancing at the Rocky Mountains, I saw the Pacific Ocean from a small oval window.

A week passed with friends, then another airport and I landed in Minneapolis to give a presentation about the trip, talk about adventures, and see a few people I’d met along the way. Three days later I was back in an airplane, circling over Charleston, catching a glimpse of the Atlantic just before sunset.

I flicked on the lights in Fran’s garage and saw the familiar yellow gleam of the kayak, waiting for my return with her crew of flamingos and the tiny stuffed alligator.

“I missed you guys,” I said.

Continents move quick in big metal tubes, but you don’t see much.

Charleston, SC – April 16, 2013

I pull the kayak up a bank of oyster shells pilled just above the high tide line. A giant bridge stretches over the water behind me with cars roaring over it into the night. The Ashley River cuts inland on my left, joining the canal I’ve been following to drain toward the ocean.

I spread my tarp on top of the shells, stamping my feet to mash down as many sharp edges as I can before laying down my pad. I pull out my sleeping bag. It’s still wet from humid, rainy nights and no time to dry during the day. It feels muggy and sticks to my skin, but I don’t care anymore, because in front of me, glowing with electric lights, is Charleston.

I’m calm for the first time in weeks. I’ve pushed for so long to get here, to stare at this city, and now it’s rising in front of me with old houses and a fleet of sailboats moored in the river. I smile and stare and eat cold ravioli out of a can.

The days of paddling into the night, the early mornings, the map that never seemed to shrink fast enough, none of them matter against Charleston’s silhouette, against the first domino falling in a long line stretching back to the Northwest Angle.

North of Edisto, SC – April 15, 2013

Reptile eyes, leather, scaled skin, the long crooked smile. The way it slides down the bank, gliding, slipping into the water, leaving only its bony snout and eyes above the surface and a thin v of ripples trailing behind.

Then it disappears, sinks down, gone into the blackness. There then not.

The surface goes calm. Nothing moves. You stare at its footprints, the line left by its sliding belly in the mud, the still water where you swear it was.

Your imagination lights on fire. You swear it’s gone, you know it’s gone, you tell yourself a thousand times its gone, but it doesn’t leave for hours, just hangs there in the back of your head, waiting underneath the surface, watching you with those reptile eyes, reminding your that there is a bit of wild left in the world.

North of Beaufort, SC – April 14, 2013

The wind shifted in the night and I woke to a swarm of noseeums, tiny biting midges, crawling over my face. They chewed at my lips and slipped under my collar. I felt like I’d choke on them if I breathed too deep. They bit and I packed, wild, half mad, racing to the water.

The wind pushed up waves that crashed and splattered across my deck. The boat rose and sank, barely moving, sliding backwards, fighting out of the open ocean and into a long, shallow bay.

As the tide fell, oyster beds rose out of the water. The bay transformed into a labyrinth of channels that split and turned, dead ended, and looped back on themselves. The knife-edged shells hung on the banks like a wall of razor-wire.

I guessed, backtracked, and scrapped through for hours, spilling out into a big, deep bay at sunset, just to stare across the wind-whipped waters in the purple light and know it was too far to cross, too big in the dark.

I slunk around the shore as the light faded and rain fell. I saw the shadow of trees on a rise of marsh grass and crashed into the muddy bank of marsh grass. Water swirled around me, spilling into the boat as I jumped out and pulled, trying to escape the ocean as my feet sliced open on oyster shells.

I limped and dragged the boat to the line of trees. The wind ripped into my soaked clothes and every movement to set up my tarp felt forced, every knot, every tangled line, everything. I crawled under it and into my hammock, beaten, soaked with sea water, bleeding, and lay still, collecting myself, grateful for a pocket of sanity in a vicious world.

Days like these are the sinew between beautiful moments

Past Hilton Head, SC – April 13, 2013

I don’t trust the water on the inside. It shifts too much and the tides are strong along the Georgia Bight, that long, inland curve on the southeast coast.

The sea rises ten feet in an afternoon. It covers football fields of dry land and turns calm marshes into rivers. It drops away into mud flats and oyster beds. Beaches appear and vanish.

Water seems to flow in every direction through too many channels to understand. A thousand arteries connect the inlets and bays, flushing in and out from all sides, filling and draining pools, pushing and pulling at the same time.

It feels like a maze that never stops shifting no matter how long I stare at a map. Sometimes it’s with me and sometimes against. I never know until I go, limping or flying through the salt marshes, never trusting the water for more than a bend.

Savannah, GA – April 12, 2013

The line stretched two blocks by a quarter to noon, not single file, thick, filling the sidewalk three or four people wide. I joined the back and waited. It inched ahead. More people came behind me. Some rotated in shifts to stretch their legs, marveling at how their partners had moved just a few feet after a ten minute walk. When it rained, we squeezed under overhangs, shared umbrellas, or just got wet. No one left.

After an hour I’d moved about halfway and made friends with a couple from Atlanta and a group of folks scrambling to find enough quarters for an under-fed parking meter. A man came out from the back in an apron, sweating a bit from the heat, and whistled as he caught a breath of air.

“You got enough for all of us in there?” someone asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said, smiling. “We got plenty ready for you.”

Just past one, my friend Nancy joined me after getting off work. We still had a ways to go, but we could see the entrance now, a small door on the side of an old brick building.

“It used to be a boarding house where workers would stay and get their meals,” Nancy told me. “But the food was so good that everyone wanted to eat here and it became famous.”

People filed out of the doorway with giant smiles, hobbling a bit, moving slow and lethargic past the tiny sign out front with “the Wilkes House” painted on it.

“It’s worth it,” they promised again and again.

We waited. Inched closer and waited some more. At one thirty, we reached the door and stepped inside.

There’s two rooms filled with a handful of large tables, each with ten chairs. A man led a group of us toward the back, Nancy and I sat next to each other and the rest of the table filled in with people from the line.

Bowls and plates crowded the center of the table. Fried chicken, cornbread, green beans, dressing, black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes, BBQ pork, squash, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet corn, everything you can imagine coming out of a southern kitchen.

We sat and ate, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, passing dishes across the big table, tasting everything, spooning out seconds and thirds, telling stories, connecting with one another until the last bit of blueberry cobbler and banana pudding disappeared.

Then we brought our empty plates to the dishwasher, just like it’s been done for years, paid our tab, and walked out through that small door, our stomachs full near bursting, past the long line of people waiting outside with hunger in their eyes.

“It’s so worth it,” we said.

Isle of Hope, GA – April 11, 2013

———-

If you don’t know who Wally is, you should probably read his posts from the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and nine months first, otherwise you will think I’m talking to myself.

———-

“Hey, do you ever get the feeling like we just never stopped? Like we just turned around and kept going?”

What are you talking about, Wally?

“I don’t know, some mornings I just wake up and head over to the gut to wait for some ice cream and it feels like the ocean is under us or something.”

Wally, that’s probably just your sea legs acting up.

“Sea legs, huh, after a month off?”

Sea legs can be tricky. Some sailors say dry land is never straight again.

“You know what else is strange, I keep getting repair requests. Shoulders and back, hands, salt-encrusted skin, busted toe nail.”

Yea, that’s weird.

“And then just the other day, I was up by the neck, working on a few ligaments, and I thought, maybe, just maybe, I should just go pop over to the eyes for a minute and look around.”

Uh oh.

“And what do I see there? Did I see a couch or a tv? Did I see the refrigerator door or a pizza box? Did I see a bed with blankets and pillows? No, no, I didn’t see any of that.”

Um…

“I saw a mother fracking ocean!”

Fracking?

“Keeping it PG-13. Don’t change the subject. Why is there an ocean where the tv should be?”

Oh come on, Wally, don’t look at me that way. Did you think we ate a half-gallon of ice cream in Key West for nothing? What’s another 3,500 miles?

“Are you trying to kill me?”

You said we were as good as new!

“I was trying to look good for the ladies, impress them, get you a date, I didn’t think you’d believe it!”

Well, too late now.

“Too late?”

Yea, we’re already heading back.

“No, I demand a vote!”

Demand a what?

“A vote, in accordance with the code.”

What code?

“The Pirate’s Code.”

You gotta be kidding me.

“I read Treasure Island. I demand my vote, couch or continue, yea or nay.”

Yea.

“Nay.”

Ali votes yea.

“Ali is a figment of your imagination. He can’t vote!”

Yes he can! He has been on this whole trip and the whole crew gets a vote, it’s in the code. 2-1, yeas have it.

“Fine then, Frank the Flamingo votes nay, says he only wanted to go to Florida. 2-2, tie.”

Ok, Frank Jr. Votes yea, says he want to seek adventure like his dad. 3-2, yeas.

“Who the hell is Frank Jr.!”

We picked him up a week ago, it’s Frank’s kid.

“You picked up another flamingo! This isn’t Noah’s arc. He can’t vote.”

Forget the vote Wally, it doesn’t matter. Without you, I’m not going on. I need you, we’re a team.

“Sweet talking ain’t sweet unless it comes with ice cream.”

We’re going to go by Burlington, Vermont, you know, the home of Ben and Jerry’s, Chunky Monkey, Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, Cookie Dough.

“I’m listening.”

And maybe we’ll have to do another half-gallon challenge since it’s kinda a new trip.

“Seems only fair. Continue.”

There’s fried chicken and fish, cheese grits, grilled shrimp, New York pizza.

“Keep talking.”

There’s something called poutine in Montreal.

“The Russian guy?”

No, it involves gravy, fries, and cheese all stacked together.

“Whoa.”

Think delicious heart attack.

“Ok, ok, Canadians are crazy. I’m in. Me and the boys down in the gut vote yea, 4-1, yeas have it.”

Should we let Frank revote too so we can be unanimous. I don’t want to have to maroon him for desertion.

“No way, he went against captain’s orders, maroon him.

I’ll take tomorrow off.

“Well, he did get us a slice a key lime pie once. Ok, 5-0, yeas.”

Great, Wally, great! Cheers to the Northwest Angle!

“Cheers to half-gallons and whatever the hell poutine is!”

South of Savannah, GA – April 10, 2013

Long crescent beaches with nothing but sand and trees. Blue sky and sunlight. A southern breeze and fresh air. Glass waves until the earth curves away.

Some moments are perfect. I get lost in the joy of them. And then they’re gone almost as soon as I realize they’re there, almost because I realize they’re there, because I want to capture them and I can’t. I can’t hold on.

They don’t work that way, these perfect moments. They’re not meant to be captured, not meant to be bottled and saved. They can only be lived.

Georgia Coast, GA – April 9, 2013

I see the Atlantic every day, but only in glimpses at the mouth of bays and the gaps between barrier islands. Even in tiny pieces, it feels huge, a giant sheet of water stretched to the horizon, some days calm, some days full of rage.

You can go from Miami to New York and barely touch the Atlantic. The Intercoastal Waterway will take you Norfolk, Virginia, and from there, protected bays, rivers, and canals will get you the rest of the way.

But something always calls from the outside. A Siren maybe. The power of the unknown. The wild feeling I get when there is nothing but water over one shoulder and mistakes have meaning. It calls from those little gaps, whispering, wondering why I hide.

I slip past the St. Simons lighthouse and curve around the edge of the island, feeling the slow, rolling waves, the offshore wind, and the ocean open up over my right shoulder.

A giant freighter lumbers out in front of me, confident in its size. I watch it until it looks like a toy against the sea. Powerboats fly past with fishing poles strung on their racks. They cover a days worth of paddling in half an hour.

I want the ocean’s promise to stay calm, to keep its glassy-smooth waves, to guarantee a day to reach the next gap, but all I see is the endless horizon rushing at me, spinning in my head like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, and telling me that the Atlantic makes no promises.

I take breath, look back at the lighthouse one last time, and paddle for the outside.

I felt alive from the moment the kayak’s hull touched the water. The Boundary Waters, Lake Superior, the Mississippi River, the Gulf Coast, hundreds of sunsets, waves taller than me, freezing rain and gale force winds, miles of white sand beaches, sunshine and barrier islands, all of it wrapped in a grand adventure.

So what would you do and where would you go if someone handed you $10,000 and said go for it?

Here’s your chance to stop talking about it and start doing it. Outside is offering the grant again. My advice is to dream big, bigger than you ever have before, write it down, make a video, and apply.

Be careful though, adventure is addictive. When I got to Key West, I decided I was only half-way done. I put my kayak back in the water, got in, and started paddling back. Now I’m a thousand miles into the return trip. You can follow my adventure at http://www.predictablylost.com. I’m looking forward to following yours.

You’ve got until June 1st.

Go for it.

St. Simons, GA – April 8, 2013

“I was in the Marine Corps for 22 years, if I didn’t want to do this, I would tell you to F off.”

And that’s how I met Jim.

My friend Sid put us in touch and Jim told me he’d gotten me a hotel room in St. Simons. I called to turn him down. It felt like far too much from someone I didn’t know and I don’t do hotels. I haven’t this whole trip other than a few days in South Bend when I was visiting my dad and stayed with him.

It’s not because I haven’t wanted to. Many rainy, cold nights, I’ve thought about it, but I like facing the elements, meeting strangers, seeing cities through their eyes, reconnecting with friends. Hotels let you escape the world instead of facing it, they make it too easy to hide, so I banned them.

But when a Marine Corps Officer tells you he’s getting you a room, it’s almost an order.

“Ok,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the dock.”

Jim took me to Barbara Jean’s when I got in. It’s his wife Barbara’s restaurant. She’s German-Irish and born in Brooklyn, but if I had to guess from the food, I would have said South Georgia Coast without any hesitation. It’s classic southern food, hand made from scratch, the kind of place you can’t leave hungry.

I sat down with salt stained clothes, half dead from pushing up the coast as fast as I could and wanted to eat everything. Jim pulled the manager over and told her that anything I wanted was on him, same for dinner if I came back.

I took his word for it, because like he said, he’d been in the Marine Corps for 22 years.

That’s how I met the most dangerous thing I have faced on this trip, an open menu at Barbara Jean’s.

Crab cakes, fried catfish, corn bread, creamed spinach, pot roast, she-crab soup, beans, grits, it’s the king of food you dream about after days of granola and spoonfuls of peanut butter.

I’m just lucky to be alive.

———-

Jim would probably kill me for plugging the restaurant, but he told me he “really doesn’t read blogs” so I think I’m safe. If you ever find yourself along the North Florida, Georgia, or South Carolina Coast, I definitely recommend trying Barbara Jean’s. I promise you won’t leave Barbara Jean’s without a smile and full stomach. The crab cakes are ridiculous. I saw people show up from hundreds of miles away to pick some up to bring home.
 

My dad’s friend’s friend’s friend left me a voicemail. He owns Tiger Point Marina on the tip of Amelia Island just north of Fernandina Beach, the last bit of Florida before it gives way to Georgia.

“Stop in and take a shower,” he said. “If it’s locked, look for Greg, he’s got a black sailboat next to the boat lift and has a key.”

I’ve been racing up the coast, trying to get to Charleston to catch a flight to Minnesota for a presentation I’d agreed to do months ago, before I thought I would turn around and paddle back to the Angle. I thought the presentation would be a good excuse to get off the imaginary couch I pictured myself basking on day and night, but then I flipped that coin into the ocean and there was no couch, just a kayak and too many miles between Miami and Charleston.

I’ve been paddling so hard that I never dry out, never wash. Salt water and dew soak my clothes day and night and my skin feels like it’s been brined soft and is rubbing off my back in pieces.

The shower is heaven and I sit on the dock next to Greg’s boat drying in the sunlight, giving myself a few hours to feel human again.

The boat is an old Sweedish designed sailboat named the Svenska, which is Sweedish for Sweedish. It’s pretty, black with a classic curve to it. White and wood trim. Greg and his wife have been fixing it up piece by piece, ripping out panels, painting, repairing the engine, making it their home and getting her ready to sail. It’s a process that can take months, years even, before it’s complete. Sometimes it never gets there.

I pass marinas all the time and see hulls encrusted half-a-foot deep in barnacles and boats that look like they haven’t moved in a decade. I’ve stared at giant lots stacked with sailboats pulled out of the water and set on steel cradles, their keels hanging in the air. Some are almost new, just put up for winter or a fresh coat of paint. Others are rusted and old, like they’ve sat down on land and will never see the ocean again.

Greg’s wife tells me she calls it the field of dreams or the field of broken dreams, I can’t remember which she said, but it doesn’t matter, she’s right either way.

I look out at the boats, the rusted riggings, the half painted hulls, they’re dreams, all of them, broken or not, every fool and his dream of owning a sailboat stacked one after another in a long line of disrepair.

Greg disappears below on the Svenska, grabs a few tools and pulls out another panel. It’s a long process, a slow war of repair and breakdown from bow to stern. Electrical systems, mold, water, rigging, navigation, engines, sails, there are so many pieces.

Down the dock, a boat preps for a trip to the Bahamas at the end of the month. Across the way, a couple works on the last repairs for a boat they bought years ago.

“They’re finally setting off in a few weeks,” Greg tells me.

I sit in sun for a bit longer, then pack gear into my kayak. My skin feels better, not all the way healed, but better, like it had a chance to breathe, but Charleston is still a long way away. I say goodbye and Greg hands me a marine flare and a glow stick. He knows I’ve been paddling at night and wants me to have them just in case. We all wish each other luck.

I slip out and away, gliding past the field of dreams, broken and unbroken, out of Florida and into the salt marshes of the Georgia coast, paddling into the night until I find an oyster bed high enough to sleep on. I’m wet, soaked in dew, but moving north, eating away the miles to Charleston.

If I can get there in time, I can make New York by mid-June, Montreal by mid-July, Lake Superior by the end of August, the Angle before winter.

Maybe.

It’s going to be hard, soaked in rainstorms and wet nights, stretched thin by waves and long days, beaten by the wind and sun. But there will be ice cream too. And sunsets. Beaches for miles. Granite cliffs and blue lakes. Friends I haven’t met. Fried chicken and the Statue of Liberty.

I think about the rusted boats, the broken ones, the ones worn away by time, forgotten, and left to rot.

It is isn’t enough to have dreams, you have to sacrifice for them, to wake up early and go to bed late, to pry them out of life. No one will hand them to you. They don’t come easy. They come hard. But that’s why they’re beautiful.

The water exploded with grey skin and foam. A monstrous leather tail appeared out of nothing, thrashed, then shot towards me, waves rippling off it like a torpedo racing through the water.

I slammed my paddle down and pushed back, trying to get out of the way, but the manatee covered the twenty feet between us in a few powerful strokes and exploded into the port bow before I even put the other blade into the water.

The bow dipped and popped into the air, water shot skyward and a wave crashed onto the deck. The boat tilted sideways, righted itself, then sat still. Everything went calm.

I didn’t move for a moment. I just looked at my soaked clothes, stared at the water, and let my mind catch up. Then I laughed because what else is there to do when you’ve just been torpedoed by a manatee.

Ponte Vedra, FL – April 5, 2013

I don’t remember how many days it has been. Most of my life feels like a distant memory. The day my father left us for the north and promised to return, the days spent in the garden center, the green lawn in the Florida sun, they all seem like a dream now.

But the fateful storm replays every night in my mind. I don’t think it will ever fade. I still feel the rushing water, the wind, how desperately I hung on to the grass, how I slipped away, off the edge, and over into the ocean.

I remember the days spent floating, the way the sun baked overhead, how my heart stopped every time a fin broke the surface. The long nights in the dark water.

I drifted for days, weeks maybe, the color bleaching out of me in the sun. When I landed on the edge of a forest, I thought I was saved. But no one came. No one came for days.

Then I saw the yellow kayak and tried to signal, but fallen branches and roots pinned my limbs. I could only watch as it slipped past, my hope fading with each stroke.

“They do not see me,” I thought. “I am lost. I am lost.”

Then the boat turned and I did not dare believe, but it turned and came close and a man splashed out into the water. He pulled branches off me and took me up in his arms, carrying me back to the boat.

That is when I heard the voice I thought I would never hear again.

“Junior!” it called out. “Junior, is that you?”

I thought it was a ghost, a mirage of my salt-soaked mind, but it kept calling.

“Junior! Junior!” it said.

“Dad!” I answered. “Dad, you’re alive!”

“Junior!” my father yelled.

“Wait, you know this guy?” the man said.

“Of course I do,” my father said. “It’s my son, Frank, Jr.”

The man looked at me for a moment then sighed.

“What’s one more flamingo,” the man said. “People already think I’m crazy.”

He strapped me to the back deck and shoved back into the water.

“Hold on tight,” he said, “and welcome aboard.”

–Taken from the personal diary of Frank Jr. from the day he reunited with his long lost father who had been presumed dead after an expedition to Lake Superior never returned.

St. Augustine, FL – April 4, 2013

I shook Charlie’s hand and got back in the boat. Four good hours of paddling left, daylight and a southern breeze. Tomorrow will be different, tomorrow the wind shifts to the north for the next two days so I can’t waste four good hours.

It doesn’t feel right. I don’t mind that my body is sore and I haven’t felt clean in a week. It doesn’t matter that salt is scrapping sores into my skin, that my left big toe is mangled, that my back hurts. That is the deal I made when I decided to rush for Charleston. I knew all that.

But Charlie, he drove up to help me get resupplied and offered to put me up for the night. I wanted to say yes. I should have said yes. I only got a glimpse of his stories. He once sailed into Havana at the height of tensions because be wanted to meet the captain of Hemingway’s ship. He met him too, maybe, I’m not sure. But he went and looked. And I don’t know the story.

The thing about dumping fuel into the fire is that you don’t always get to choose the fuel. Charlie’s stories, two Spanish forts, the oldest city in North America, they catch fire the same as cookie cutter houses, private docks, and condos, but they burn like unread newspapers, they burn with regret.

Near Ponce Inlet, FL – April 2, 2013

I like the stillness of night. Everything goes calm. Boats disappear into marinas, the wind rests, buildings fade into points of light.

I feel stronger, like my body celebrates the hundred victories and losses of the day by burning the last reserves in a giant fire. Muscles loosen, joints quit aching, and my mind goes clear.

It never lasts long, an hour or two and a new exhaustion takes over, fiercer than any in the day, but for a moment, every movement is easy and I relish the black water of night.

I feel connected to the black water in the darkness. I can’t look and see, I have to feel. I notice the little ripples. I hear the burst of breath from dolphins. I sense the swirls of an outgoing tide.

I even feel the Atlantic, huge and heavy across a thin strip of land that breaks open where a lighthouse flashes in the night. Six white bursts every few seconds. I know the ocean is there. I feel it like gravity, this huge vastness pulling at me in the dark, disturbing the water, making it boil and swirl underneath my bow.

I slip past the opening and onto an island, knowing my fire burns low, exhaustion is coming, and my time is almost up.
 

I never stopped from the moment I slid into the water. I just went, watching the sun rise high then fall away and disappear, watching night slide around me and turn the world black.

There are only so many good days, bright sunny days, days with the wind at my back and nice water underneath me. I can’t waste good ones. I can’t watch them pass from the shore. I have to dump all my energy into them, dump it like rocket fuel and fly.

Because even as spring unfolds, as snow melts off portage trails and ice buckles and cracks on Lake Superior’s shore, I know the truth about winter.

When you race winter north, you better run fast.

North of Titusville, FL – April 1, 2013

There’s a statue near the arch in St. Louis of two men standing in a boat, one holding a rifle, the other waving a hat in the air. They both stare westward toward a once unknown world.

The city has built up around the statue. Bridges and buildings crowd the forgotten relic, make it seem like a bit of bronze too heavy to move. There is no ceremony around it, no pedestal and park, it just stands there on the water’s edge, Lewis and Clark, reminding anyone who notices that St. Louis used to be the edge of civilization.

I turned under a bridge today and saw a space shuttle gleaming white and black in the sun. It looked smaller than I imagined, it always does, too small to carry the weight of where it’s been.

I remember watching one of the last shuttle flights in a crowded park. I remember counting down with the crowd, staring at a speck on the horizon, and imagining it would be hard to see.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6…

But I was wrong.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Flame and smoke poured out. The shuttle looked like a tiny machine riding a fireball into the sky. I stared in awe. The powerful rockets left a twisting white cloud hanging in the air, pushing, thundering, roaring upward until they broke away and sent the shuttle onward.

Cape Canaveral is eight minutes from space.

I wonder what Lewis and Clark would say. I wonder if they’d count down with the crowds. I wonder if they’d stand at this edge of civilization, this new St. Louis, and wave their hat toward the stars.
 

North of Vero Beach, FL – March 30, 2013

I hung over the side of the Fish and Wildlife boat staring at the turtle. It bobbed head down in the water like a buoy, its back flippers barely moved in the air.

“The biologist said to just let nature take its course if we don’t get it in the next try or two,” the officer said to me.

It looked dead, but had some life left in it, enough to dive away every time we tried pull it on board. The slick shell would slip from our fingers and the turtle would disappear for a moment under the surface then float back up to hang in the water.

I tried not to hear the officer’s words. Nature taking its course had nothing to do with it.

The turtle looked stunned and dizzy, probably hit by a boat. While I waited for Fish and Wildlife, another boat pulled up, stared at it for a minute, then began to throw out fishing lines with shrimp on them to try and hook it. They sped off as soon as I yelled at them. A third boat almost ran the turtle over before I paddled between them, playing chicken in the Intercoastal.

Nature’s course wasn’t good enough.

I leaned over as far as I could. My hands hung an inch off the water.

“You gotta hold on, Daniel,” I told myself. “Grab it and hold on. You can’t be timid. You got one shot, maybe two.”

We drifted closer. Waves rocked us up and down. The turtle’s stony head popped out of the water for a breath.

It stared at me like a confused drunk, then sunk under the surface, trying to dive. It sunk a few feet down, then popped back up tail first and hung there.

I took a breath, slipped a rope around one flipper, tightened it, and lunged for the far side of the shell.

The turtle burst into movement, its muscles straining against me, trying to escape, fighting the way life always fights, for keeps. But I fought too, with everything I had, holding on tight because once I’d been too late. Once I’d only only arrived to mourn and watch sunset over the grey skin of a dead manatee, watch waves slide its head and tail across the sand.

Not today, I thought, not today. I will not be late today.

And I held on.

I wrestled a hand to the shell’s lip and wrapped the other around the back then yanked it up. Flippers splashed water into the air, the turtle’s weight dragged me down and almost over the side but the officer grabbed my shoulder strap and we both pulled, the three of us collapsing backwards.

Everything went calm.

The turtle sat on the deck. We both stared at it and it stared at us.

Not today, I thought. Not late today.

———–

Imagine a forest without birds or an ocean without fish, nothing reflects our preservation or destruction of wilderness like wildlife. There is no greater feeling of being in nature than seeing the wild creatures that call it home. The Florida Wildlife Federation works every day to make sure that we can still see panthers, manatees, bears, and other creatures across Florida. I encourage you to go to their website and learn how you can help make sure the next generation has a chance to do more than read about these creatures.

St. Lucie Inlet, FL – March 29, 2013

A rock ripped a flap of skin off my big toe yesterday. It happened fast enough for me to watch blood ooze onto the sand for a moment before I felt the pain. Nothing is brighter red than your own blood.

Neosporin, bandages, duct tape, ten hours paddling, and a night of sleep left the toe swollen and tender. Caked blood filled the creases. My skin hung pale and dead, ready to be ripped off and replaced as soon as I could manage the will.

It took six pulls before it tore away.

I limped around on my left heel and packed the boat, trying to keep from smearing sand into the wound. I felt like some wild animal, a strange, injured creature, limping and bleeding, dragging the boat to the water on one foot.

A hundred feet away, a little red-headed girl splashed through the shallows collecting shells. Her dad trailed behind her, cheering every selection.

They’d paddled out at first light. I’d watched her race down the shore as soon as they landed, stooping for spirals and horns, shouting at her dad to hurry so she could raise each one up in triumph. I just wanted to get out of their way, but then I saw the plastic bag of shark teeth and sat for a moment, watching the girl pick through the water.

I meant to send them to my friend Joseph who I met at Thanksgiving in Memphis, but I kept forgetting them when I went to the post office. I fingered through the bag for the snaggletooth I’d found a month ago, then hobbled down the beach, limping in the sand like Long John Silver toward the girl and her dad.

She stared up at me, half hiding behind her dad’s legs, half curious. Then I held out the tooth in my fingers.

“It’s for you,” I said. “For coming all the way out to the island.”

I dropped the tooth in her palm and her eyes lit up. She held it like it was pirate’s treasure, mesmerized until her dad nudged her and she stammered out a thank you.

I waived goodbye and limped back to the boat, thinking about filtering sand with Vicki on the gulf coast and her search for a megalodon, of Memphis and how moments flow into each other, of how a hurt toe doesn’t matter much against little girl’s smile.
 

Beyond Peanut Island – March 28, 2013

“Maybe I’ll see you in Montreal,” Davia said.

I smiled at her, squinting in the sunlight, wishing all signs were pretty blondes in bikinis.

“I should learn French,” I thought.

Nineteen days ago, when I landed a block away from the Southernmost Point, I tried to think of anything but the possibility of returning north. The idea felt too big and reckless, like it would devour the moment, overshadow the end of a nine month journey.

But the question refused to wait and rushed back in my head when two pretty women wanted to take a picture with me. I threw my arms around them, smiled for the camera, and asked where they were from. Portland, said one. Montreal said the other.

“So you know about the voyageurs,” I said.

“Les Voyageurs,” she said. “Of course!”

The French words floated off her tongue and made my voice sound boxy and harsh. I thought of Montreal and the Northwest Company canoes leaving for the interior, of tough Frenchmen with paddles and bales of beaver pelts, of water routes to the Northwest Angle and portages. I wondered what were the chances of meeting a French-Canadian in Key West and thought it was a sign.

“I’ve never been to Montreal,” I said.

“You should go,” she said.

I saw a lot of signs, not just in black bikinis with pretty smiles.

A map of a waterskiing team’s loop around the eastern United States. My aunt’s house waiting on the water in Miami. The Florida Paddling Trail stretching up the coast. Route 1 flipping from end to beginning if you walk across the street.

Canadian paddlers telling me stories about the North Shore of Lake Superior. John Buckley agreeing with them, saying it was like paddling through postcards, saying I should go sometime. A magazine picture of a horse on a barrier island in Virginia. My ex-girlfriend wondering why we never took a trip to Savannah.

The spare room in my friend Emma’s apartment in Brooklyn. The Canadian flag on a sailboat in Key West’s harbor. A guy named Mark who paddled the Hudson. Hitching a ride with someone from Thunder Bay.

An article on the Statue of Liberty opening in July. Knowing Burlington,Vermont, is the home of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. A second route to Lake of the Woods on the Kaministiqua River. The snow on every trip I’ve ever taken except this one. Wanting another chance to see an aurora for the first time. The idea that it might be possible.

Signs, all of them signs.

“But I spend winters in Delray Beach,” Davia said.

“Where is that?” I asked.

“North of Miami,” she said.

A week later I told her I would pass by Delray. She offered a spare room and her dock. It was the only sanctuary I had along the endlessly developed South Florida coast. It was the only reason I spent the last two nights sleeping. It was a sign.

They’re everywhere if you look, everywhere and in every direction. But they aren’t the universe telling you where to go or some higher power moving you with an invisible hand. They’re a Rorschach Test for your heart, a blank slate for your will.

I dropped off the dock and into the boat.

“See you in Montreal,” I said.

The signs say north.

Delray Beach, FL – March 27, 2013

The boat looked odd upside down, floating half-sunk with its hull shining in the sun. I stopped and stared at it, not wanting to believe my eyes. I thought of everything inside, flipped and soaked with water, maybe gone. All the careful pieces I’d collected and saved lost in a single night.

I scrambled down and wrestled it over. It weighed a hundred pounds with all the water and took me three tries to flip. The front hatch wasn’t shut right and flooded along with the cockpit. Wet gear floated in a pool. Bags of food soaked through. I dragged equipment into the sun piece by piece, wringing out water, running through my mental list–paddles, skirt, life jacket, water bottles, sleeping pad, tent.

I pumped out water and watched the hull rise above the surface. I began to breathe again, realizing I hadn’t lost anything I needed, that a few hours of sunlight would fix the damage. Even Frank’s curved neck hung on the back of the boat by a strap.

“Nice job watching the kayak,” I said.

Ali clung to the front deck bag, soaking wet.

“You too, Ali,” I said. “You hurt worst if all. I expect this from Frank, but you? You’re supposed to be the responsible one.”

Ali didn’t say anything. He just sat there, drying in the sun, looking guilty.

Delray Beach, FL – March 26, 2013

I slept on a park dock with the sun baking on me and my hat pulled over my eyes. Families walked by. Kids fished. Joggers ran down a footpath. I didn’t care. I just slept, soaking in the heat of the day.

I woke at four in the afternoon with my face warm to the touch and slowly packed the boat for ten late miles to a small dock off the intercoastal. The area is just as developed, just as crowded with houses and condos as last night, but this time it’s different, this time I have sanctuary because a woman I met in Key West offered me a place to stay if I came north.

I arrived after dark, still tired and worn thin, grateful for a crack in the wall, grateful for someplace safe to close my eyes.

———-

Want to hear more about the trip or some of the other adventures I’ve taken? I’ll be giving two different presentations at the Midwest Mountaineering Expo in the Twin Cities this weekend. On Saturday, April 27th from 11:45-12:45, I will talk about paddling from the Angle to Key West and on Sunday, April 28th from 2:15-3:15, I will talk about taking the leap and doing the adventures you’ve always dreamed of.

Boca Raton, FL – March 25, 2013

I slept in a beautiful house last night. Three stories. Soft bed. Warm shower. A deck overlooking Biscayne Bay. I’ve stayed there before. It’s my aunt’s house and the doors are always open for me, there’s always hugs and kisses on the cheek, food in the refrigerator, and an empty bed to sleep in. But it’s stuck in one place and I must move. I watched my aunt, cousins, and uncle wave at me, watched them disappear back into the house, watched the familiar fade into the horizon.

Now there is no place to sleep, just beautiful houses crowding every inch of the intercoastal, pressing against the shore. Mega yachts moor along docks like mini-cruise ships. Helicopters hang off decks the size of apartments. Every tiny piece of land has been cataloged, processed, and divided.

I only want to sleep.

There are no quiet cracks to slide into, no undeveloped pieces, no slips of open sand. There’s only exhaustion, envy, and unused second homes. There’s only perfect lawns, docks, and gardens. There’s only a thousand places to sleep concealed like cake behind a glass counter.

My eyes ache and the world blurs. The western sky darkens. Day fades into night. My arms feel dead. I catch myself slumping over. Time drifts and holds still, bursts forward and stops, minutes disappear from my memory. Signs blare out alarm warnings. Docks read “no trespassing.” Close places feels distant and untouchable. The eastern sky brightens. Stars wink away in handfuls. Tiled roofs glow in the morning sun.

I squint at the world. Million dollar houses blur into memories of soft beds and warm showers. My eyes burn and I paddle on.

———-

Want to hear more about the trip or some of the other adventures I’ve taken? I’ll be giving two different presentations at the Midwest Mountaineering Expo in the Twin Cities this weekend. On Saturday, April 27th from 11:45-12:45, I will talk about paddling from the Angle to Key West and on Sunday, April 28th from 2:15-3:15, I will talk about taking the leap and doing the adventures you’ve always dreamed of.

Miami, FL – March 19-25, 2013

Miami is loud. It’s a dozen conversations at once, packed Cuban restaurants on Calle Ocho, and birthday celebrations. It’s cousins and more cousins, hugs and kisses on cheeks, aunts and uncles, and late dinners around familiar tables. It’s fried yuca, grilled fish, and lechon asado. It’s four generations in my grandmother’s kitchen, loud voices in two languages, and beloved stories that fit like old clothes.

It’s laughing at old pictures with cousins, seeing kids grown up, and meeting new additions. It’s black beans and rice, croquetas, ropa vieja, and maduros. It’s my parents driving down, breaking news that I’m not finished, and worried words and prayers from loving faces. It’s days filled to the brim, time slipping by, and knowing I have to leave. It’s retooling equipment, fixing gear, and researching the new route. It’s soft beds, hot showers, and air conditioning. It’s lunches, dinners, feeling forever full, and twenty extra pounds on my frame. It’s last hugs, my aunt slipping a few dollars in my hand as I drop into the boat, and saying goodbye.

It’s my uncle waiving as I pass downtown, my cell phone ringing, and his voice as excited as a kid’s while he watches his nephew paddle north.

It’s love. It’s family. It’s Miami.

Miami, FL – March 18, 2013

Miami hung across Biscayne Bay, tall buildings rising from land still hidden under the horizon. It’s was a beautiful day. Sunlight and a tailwind, water glowing sapphire clear and shining underneath us as we slipped across a sea of blue.

The bay is fifteen miles of open water from the northern tip of Biscayne National Park to Miami. There is no where to stop, boats zip back and forth, it’s not an easy crossing, but Chris wanted the real deal, even though he isn’t a paddler and borrowed his boat from a friend.

I would have been proud of him for that, for the tenacity where most people would fade, but it felt so trivial after a single moment in the middle of the bay, a slip of his hand when he thought I wasn’t watching.

That made me proud.

We’d drifted apart and I was racing to catch up when I saw his hand slip off the paddle and drop into the water for a moment. He scooped up a piece of plastic, the cap of a tennis can or something, as it slipped by the hull.

He didn’t make a show of it. He didn’t brag or say anything. He didn’t think anyone was watching. It was just a private moment between him and the ocean that he loves.

But I saw.

Everyone cares in a spotlight. That’s easy. The dark matters more, even if it’s in the bright sun shining across Biscayne Bay.

Boca Chita Key, Key Biscayne National Park, Florida – March 17, 2013

My cousin Chris and I grew up easy. We only hear stories of what it was like to leave everything behind in Cuba. Neither of us worried about where we’d sleep or if there would be food to eat. When cousins came to visit, they weren’t crowding into shared rooms for months while waiting for their parents to arrive. No one we know went insane because they couldn’t handle losing their world.

Our fathers had it different. They lost everything when they left Havana. Friends, their house, their neighborhood. They grew up in a strange land they didn’t understand. They had to learn a new language a decade into their lives. They dealt with racism and poverty, but my grandfather knew there was a better life for them in America and he gave up being a lawyer and sold women’s dresses for the rest of his life to give his kids a chance at it.

But even they were lucky. They came over in a ferry, one of the last to leave Havana. They got out before it got bad.

Chris and I both stood and stared at the raft. It was old and abandoned. Broken wooden pallets, a shaky metal frame, a rusted drive shaft to power a homemade motor, giant foam tubes strapped to the sides with “OK USCG” sprayed across them in black paint.

Sometimes you forget what you take for granted, what you stumbled into because you were born on one side of an imaginary line. Then you see foam blocks and wooden pallets thrown against the ocean for a chance, just a chance, at a better life.

We didn’t move for a moment, we didn’t say anything, we just stared at the broken wreckage, at the twisted foam tubes, the splintered wood tied to the rusted frame. We just stared and felt lucky.

I hope they made it.
 

Near Alabama Jacks, Road to Key Largo – March 16, 2013

George loves cars. When he tells a story, the characters all come with their cars attached like titles.

“Helen Sneider drove a ’38 Pontiac,” he says.

“I had a ’37 Ford,” he says.

He fell putting gas in the engine and it blew up. She took care of him in the hospital. She was beautiful. They fell in love.

“My second wife was a Sicilian,” he says. “Her mother owned the second biggest antiques dealer in NYC. She had lions and tigers and all that.”

He shows me pictures in an old photo album. The pages stick together and George smiles at me from forty years ago.

I met George a. Hour earlier on the dock next to his house.

His place is small, just two little rooms left over in a restaurant parking lot. A pair of restored bicycles and a moped from the mid-1900s fill one room along with a tv, table, chairs, and a big recliner. His bed and a kitchen fill the other. There’s no door.

The bikes look new, every piece painted to perfection, the frames swooping and curving like old automobiles.

“Can I leave my boat here while I go eat?” I asked.

“Where are you going in that thing,” he said.

We were drinking together five minutes later.

George is from South Florida, West Palm, 1931, but he loves Canadian Mist. It’s a whiskey that comes in plastic bottles, cheap and strong. He has three half-empty ones in his refrigerator and a case of Coke.

George and I decide to split dinner. I’ll order conch fritters and he’ll fry up some green tomatoes. I run over to the restaurant to order before they close, but I’m too late.

“Even for George?” I ask, pointing to his house in the parking lot.

“Even for George,” the man says.

George takes the news well.

“We still got the green tomatoes,” he says.

I’m meeting my cousin in the parking lot in the morning so George offers to let me stay in his place.

“You can sleep in the recliner,” he says. “As long as you don’t mind watching westerns until 2 am.”

“I love westerns,” I say.

We flick on the tv and Bonanza comes on. Little Joe is in love with the wrong woman. Hoss is fist fighting his uncle.

“Get ‘em Hoss!” George says.

He has seen almost every western ever made. Most were made before I was born. He runs through names and looks disappointed when I don’t recognize them all.

We drink more Canadian Mist. I wonder if there is any water in George’s house. I have my doubts.

George tells me to pour my own drink since I know what I like. I pour light, mostly Coke, knowing I barely drink anything these days.

“You gotta be able to taste it at least!” George yells.

I pour a bit more. We start frying tomatoes. George salts them with a big cylinder of Morton’s. I laugh because that’s how he told me his last name.

“Morton, like the salt,” he said.

Three Cuban ladies show up to fish on the dock. They call him Georgie and give him big hugs and kisses on the cheek. He grins at me when they go out to the dock.

“You’re a charmer, George,” I say.

“Always have been,” he says.

George tells me about dancing with “8 to 10 women” at the restaurant who come watch the band play on Sundays.

“I got all kinds of girlfriends,” he says. “And moves you ain’t never seen before.”

He explains that age 42 to 50 is his sweet spot. George is 82.

A new western comes on. There is a killer cougar and a love triangle. George tells me about growing up. He and his dad used to go out and cut dade pine with a cross saw.

“It’s the toughest wood there is,” he says.

Some of the oldest buildings in south Florida were made of dade pine. They are the only ones that have survived all the hurricanes.

The cougar makes its appearance on the tv.

“There were lots of cougars back in the 40s,” George says. “Even black panthers. Lots of them.”

I don’t know if that is true, but he was there so I don’t push him on it. Not a lot of people still remember the 40s.

George leaves me frying tomatoes so he can go flirt with the three ladies fishing on the dock. The world is spinning a bit and I’m dealing with hot oil. The tomatoes are good though, especially with a bit of salt.

George comes back in. The two men in the love triangle have teamed up to hunt the cougar. George falls asleep in his chair. I’m afraid to move because if I wake him he might make me drink again.

He wakes up anyway and the first thing he says is, “I gotta go talk to those girls again.”

He disappears for a bit then comes back. The cougar is dead and we’ve switched to a new western. This time a wagon train is heading west through dangerous territory with only one man to protect it. George yells at them not to go through the pass because there is an ambush. He is excited because he hasn’t ever seen this one before.

The ladies come back in the apartment. They call him Georgie again, very affectionately, and give him lots of hugs and a few kisses on the cheek. Then they are gone.

George smiles at me and we both get another drink. He also hands me a slice of turkey to eat. We settle in to see what happens to the wagon train. The female lead comes on and begins falling in love with the one guy left defending the wagons.

“Every movie has to have a woman in it,” George says, “to cause trouble.”

The wagon train survives and it is bed time. George insists that I sleep on his giant recliner. It’s comfy and goes almost flat. I feel like a baseball in a mitt.

I text my cousin to make sure he knows where to meet in the morning.

“Do me a favor,” I say. “Bring me a bottle of Canadian Mist.”

He does.

And you should too, if you’re ever down that way. Go on Sunday afternoon and look for the man dancing to the band. White hair and full of life. You can’t miss him, just remember, it’s Morton, like the salt.

Florida Bay Outfitters, Key Largo, FL – March 15, 2013

I pack out every balloon I find. The first was a purple latex ball tangled in the forest along the Appalachian Trail. The last was a faded birthday mylar half-buried in a sea wall.

I found a handful of helium-filled latexes floating across rocks in the heart of the Sierras. I uncovered a dozen silver mylars near the base of a Colorado 14er. I shooed away a pair of cows from an “I Love You” in the middle of the Utah desert. I even found a birthday balloon on my birthday in a canyon winding through Arches National Park.

On this trip, I crawled up mud banks and sunk into marshes. I leaped out of the boat onto levees. I crashed into wave-soaked beaches. I did it all to snag colorful bits of mylar and latex and drag pieces of unnatural red, green, blue, and silver out of the wild. I’m a bit obsessed.

It started because I liked the unknown attached to each balloon. I like holding deflated mylars in my hands and reading happy birthday wishes, valentine requests, congratulations, St. Patrick’s Day cheers, and good lucks. It made me feel like I was holding the end of a story and I’d never quite know the beginning. I’d invent wild scenes, dramatic proposals, surprises, and cheerful reunions in my mind. I’d imagine all the drama and tragedy that brought the balloon out of a package, onto a helium tank, and soaring in the air.

I’d imagine, but I didn’t know. I only knew how it ended, with the balloons shoved in a pocket and tossed into the next garbage can. It’s not the romantic speck someone watched disappear in the sky. It’s a bit of litter too bright to ignore, deflated and broken, scattered across the wildest places.

But somewhere between mylars, collecting balloons became more than ending stories, somewhere I began to believe they were lucky. I’ve chosen between routes based on balloons. I’ve felt safe after finding them. I’ve held deflated birthday wishes in my hand and knew nothing would bother me for a little while.

The last two nights, I had no idea where to camp until a balloon clung to the beach and caught the light of my headlamp. Tonight, I’m staying with my friend Monica in Key Largo.

She asked me to do something when I started this trip, kinda out of nowhere and a bit odd.

“Can you keep track of all the balloons you find?” she said. “They’re one of my pet peeves.”

I laughed.

“No problem,” I said.

The wilderness always favors those who leave no trace.

———-

Florida Bay Outfitters is a great kayak shop in Key Largo. Definitely check them out if you are hoping to paddle in the keys. Very nice people and great knowledge of the area.

Off Islamorada, Florida Keys – March 14, 2013

All the cracks show back on the water. Everything I forgot matters again as Key West fades in the distance. The weariness across my shoulders, the tight third finger on my right hand, my salt-scraped skin, I notice all of them, fresh and bright. They all matters now because the end is no longer near.

I haven’t found my rhythm. The water feels heavy. The wind presses in my face, licks up waves in the gaps and channels, demands my attention, reminds me that it will not be easy. I paddle past sunset and into the night, feeling darkness like a heavy shadow. The water feels thick and still. A low bank of clouds sinks tight overhead.

I wonder if I made a mistake, if I should have ended it at Key West.

The clouds break and stars litter the sky in front of me. I see the gleaming edge of the Big Dipper spinning through the night, catch it and follow its lip to the North Star hanging alone in the darkness. For the first time, it’s in front of me, constant in the spinning heavens, and the world feels right again.

I’ve raced winter toward that star three times and never lost.

I look at it and everything feels right again.

If you don’t have anything to do, don’t come here to do it.

Long Key, Florida Keys – March 13, 2013

There’s a set of old bridges shadowing me as I paddle north. Concrete arches stretch between islands. Blown out sections let boats slip through. Fishermen hang over the railing with rods in the air. It’s Flagler’s bridge, finished in 1912, constructed to extend Florida’s East Coast Railway to Key West, transformed into the first overseas highway. It was once a wonder of the world and it still looks sturdy a hundred years later.

I paddle and stare at it. I count arches and watch waves slap against the concrete. I try to imagine a ’58 Oldsmobile sliding across the top with its frame sunk low by the weight of four kids and everything my grandparents owned. There were no moving vans when you fled Cuba. Whatever didn’t fit, disappeared.

“It was right there,” I think. “Right on top of that arch.”

I wonder if they looked down at the ocean as they drove. I wonder what they were thinking, if those kids really believed what their dad told them as soon as they rolled off the ferry dock in Key West.

“You’re never going back to Cuba,” he said. “This is your home now.”

Then they drove on that old bridge, Flagler’s railroad turned highway, to find the American Dream.

Bahia Honda, Florida Keys – March 12, 2013

The end felt inevitable.

Five hundred miles, two hundred, fifty, ten, four. It felt easy at the end, easy and loud with people and chatter, phone calls and texts, handshakes and hugs. The volume rose like Key West on the horizon, warm and bright, louder and louder as if an invisible hand spun an invisible dial on an invisible machine.

It’s quiet again now.

I slipped back into the water and disappeared. No one knows. No one cares. There’s no crowds, no flashing cameras. There’s no phone calls or reporters. There’s no one, only a whisper of wind and a battered yellow boat, a pink flamingo and a stuffed alligator, an old idea traded for a new, an end traded for a beginning, the inevitable traded for the impossible.

Key West, FL – March 11, 2013

I want to flip a coin because I don’t want to decide. I don’t want the weight of it. Put the weight on fate, I think. Let fate decide. Heads or tails, call it in the air.

I want to flip a coin because I’m scared.

I walk down old streets with uneven pavement, past wraparound porches of Conch houses, balconies and rooftops stretched out to shade big windows with wood slates shuttering the glass. I walk and stare, thinking, wondering, wishing. Is it in me? Can I make it? Do I want it bad enough?

I pushed the idea away for so long. I told myself to wait until Key West, wait until I had to decide, but now I’m here.

There are 29 bars on one side of Duval Street and none of them have the answer. Victorian houses crowd together and peaked roofs of tin flash in the sunlight. They remind me of the old cracker house Jarry and Chuck live in, the one they bought on faith in a glance. I never told you about them or how they gave me the keys to their house in Big Pine so I’d have a place to stay, but I never told you a lot of stories.

I met a woman once who water skied in a giant loop from Gulfport, Florida, to Montreal and back. East Coast, Great Lakes, Illinois and Mississippi River. She showed me a picture of the route on a faded-yellow piece of paper. It looked like a giant ring with stars at all the cities they stopped at.

“No one believes me,” she said. “But we did it.”

I believed her.

I walk past roofs trimmed with gingerbread carvings and shotgun-style homes built to send breezes from front to back. Windows peek at me under eyebrow roofs. Roosters descended from Bahamian cock-fighters stroll the streets. I pass Hemingway’s house crowded with six-toed cats. I finger the coin in my pocket.

I wish I was here a month ago, I think.

I wish I knew the route, I think.

Put the decision on fate, I think.

I walk.

Performers crowd into Mallory Square to juggle batons, balance on boxes, and turn themselves into statues. Cameras flash and hats fill with dollar bills. I disappear down Duval Street looking for space to think. My feet ache.

Someone asked me about the Erie Canal, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson River once. They thought that was how I would get down to Key West.  We were in the boundary waters and they were talking about the East Coast.

“I didn’t know that was even possible,” I said.

Route 1 ends in Key West. Stickers cover the sign and tourists snap pictures of the two-thousand mile long strip of asphalt stretching from Maine. But if you walk across the street and look in the other direction, it begins again.

That coin feels so heavy.

They say the North Shore of Lake Superior is the prettiest place on the lake. I missed it by a few dozen miles, saw nothing but the hazy outline of cliffs from the northern tip of Isle Royale.

“It’s like paddling through a book of postcards,” someone said.

“One day,” I said.

Key West feels like a reckless town, an edgy place with lots of dreams and lots of wreckage. It has been the richest city in the country and the poorest. PanAm’s first international flight took off from a dirt runway here and landed in Havana. Cigar factories and workers from Cuba once rolled a million cigars a year and filled warehouses with tobacco. Pirates stalked the shores. Wreckers built empires out of splintered ships. Spongers, some Greek some Conch, and the first self-made millionaire in Florida lived here. The whole city rebelled once, formed the Conch Republic for a few minutes in 1982, then retreated into a state of mind.

There’s a second voyageur route to Lake of the Woods. They talk about in Grand Portage because it’s where the Northwest Company moved its outpost to avoid crossing international borders. The route starts in Thunder Bay and runs up the Kaministiquia River. I only know the name, but it’s there or at least it was once.

Cape Fear and Hatteras, New York City and the Hudson, Huron and Superior’s Canadian shore, I don’t know anything except that I could quit now and no one would ever know that there was more, that somewhere I always knew, ever since that first thought, that hint of possibility, somehow I knew I would have to go back.

But I need more time. I need better research and plans. I need a route and maps. I need a body that isn’t worn down. I need gear that isn’t breaking. I need months I don’t have. I need a lot of things.

The Southernmost Point is quiet after dark. The line of people waiting for pictures disappears and the giant painted buoy watches the ocean in silence. The water’s rough, splashing up and onto the sidewalk. I feel the coin in my pocket. I think it’s heavy for a penny.

This can be the end. No one would ever know if I quit now.

Except me.

I look at the coin in my hand.

I’m scared. Let fate decide. Heads or tails. Call it in the air.

I watch it turn, spinning copper and light against the dark sky. I think of the Statue of Liberty and granite cliffs, of sand beaches and Spanish forts, of rocket ships and pirate islands.

The coin arcs down, still spinning, flashing copper, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, until it falls into the sea.

Adventure is not fate. It is a decision.

There will always be a thousand reasons not to go, but you have to leap.

Florida – April 3, 2013

There’s some warmth to the boat. The plastic covers my legs, the neoprene skirt and a life jacket wrap around my torso, blood pumps into my muscles with each stroke. Falling rain soaks into me. Water pools across my shoulders and slides down my back. I can fight cold to a standstill, keep it just off my skin, if I paddle.

But I can’t paddle forever.

The sun disappears into clouds then sets. The world looks dark and gray. Drained. Colorless.

The rain has to stop sometime, I think. It has to.

But it doesn’t, I know it doesn’t. I stare at the gray clouds in the east, the cold, monochrome sky. I see the top of a picnic pavilion on the far bank, raindrops beating on the roof. It’s almost dark. I feel soaked through and begin to shiver.

I want to go on. I want to paddle into the night, to outlast the rain, to cheat more miles out of the storm, but somehow I know, I see myself replaying this moment again and again, staring at that roof, shivering and cold, hating the decision to turn away. I see myself wishing for a second chance even before I’ve missed the first.

There are more miles tomorrow, I tell myself.

I drag the boat up and under the roof to a square of dry concrete eight-feet wide. The wind snatches away my warmth. There isn’t much time. I’m cold, numb, shivering, peeling off wet clothes, prying open hatches, rushing for my sleeping bag.

I feel thin and brittle. I wonder why I’m here, why I do things like this. It could be over now. These could be raindrops on a window.

It takes a minute for me to feel right again. To think straight. To wonder where I am.

The lights of a pickup flash across me and stop. I wave and a ranger gets out. It’s a park at night, I know I’m not supposed to be there so I apologize and offer to leave.

“Just let me rest for a few more minutes,” I say.

I dig for will. I want to be good to my words. I feel hollow.

He looks at me and understands. He talks it over with his supervisor and tells me not to worry about it, that I can stay.

I tell him I’ll disappear in the morning. He nods. The rain begins falling hard and he shouts over the roar.

“Where are you coming from anyway?” he says.

I smile.

“You’re never going to believe this,” I say. “I came from the northern tip of Minnesota and went to Key West.”

The words hang in the night. The metal roof rattles. I stare at him through the rain.

“Now I’m going back.”

Key West, FL – March 11, 2013

———-

The next adventure is coming soon. If you want to keep up to date, follow the blog via email (look for the link on the right hand side or bottom of every page), facebook, or twitter and you’ll know as soon as I’m lost again.

———-

If you don’t know who Wally is, you should probably read his posts from the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth months first, otherwise you will think I’m talking to myself.

———-

Key West, FL – March 11, 2013

“All right boys, that’s it, there you go, pack it up, pack it up, job’s over.”

How’s it going down there, Wally? Everything ok?

“Oh, here he is, finally coming down to say hello. I thought you were too busy taking pictures with girls in bikinis to remember us.”

Wally, it’s the 21st century. You can’t go around calling grown women girls.

“Women, girls, whatever, you still forgot about us down here in the gut.”

I’d never forget about you, Wally.

“Where’s our postcard then? You bought three dozen of the things.”

I would have bought more if I had everyone’s address, but whatever, you don’t get a postcard.

“What? Why not?”

What are you going to do with a postcard? You can’t eat it. Consider that chocolate dipped key like pie your postcard.

“Those thirty-two stamps you got better be self-adhesive, I’m not wasting tongue strength on anything but ice cream.”

Yea, yea, so what’s the final damage report anyway? We gonna make it?

“Well, we got a few nicks and cuts and you sat on your ass so long we gotta rebuild it from scratch again, but I’ve got the blueprints around here somewhere. It’s nothing a bit of key lime pie and ice cream can’t fill out nicely.”

You get that half-gallon? That should help.

“Yea, but you know I don’t like Neapolitan.”

Didn’t seem to be a problem when you ate it all.

“Well, I don’t want to be picky, but the chocolate really overwhelms the other flavors.”

Seriously? Chocolate? Are you complaining about this?

“I said I don’t mean to be picky.”

Saying that doesn’t make you not picky. Being not picky makes you not picky.

“What? I can’t have one complaint? It’s not like I just pulled you through 4,000 miles of paddling without any real injury and you–”

What about that rib?

“That rib? That rib! Enough with the rib already! That was three whole days out of nine months and it hasn’t hurt you since January! You’re as good as new and you’re complaining about some rib from two months ago! I’m working miracles here.”

Maybe you should go for sainthood.

“If sainthood is a giant couch in front of a sixty-inch TV then I’m all for it, otherwise, not interested. Season 3 of Game of Thrones is just around the corner!”

Game of Thrones? Really? Is that where we’re at now? Waiting for the next episode of a TV show?

“Mostly I just want to sit on a couch.”

Aren’t you even just a little sad?

“No.”

Not even a tiny bit?

“No.”

You don’t miss Minnesota or Lake Superior?

“It’s -20 up there right now. The only time I want it that cold is when I’m standing in front of a freezer door trying to pick a flavor. Take a load off, you’re in Key West. Drink a margarita. We just finished the adventure of a lifetime.”

Oh come on, Wally, you know I hate that.

“What?”

That phrase.

“What phrase, adventure of a lifetime?”

People are always saying that to me. Adventure of a lifetime this. Adventure of a lifetime that.

“So?”

I hate it. It’s so limiting.

“Whatever.”

It matters, Wally. It’s the secret of this trip. It’s the secret to life.

“It’s just four little words.”

Yea, but they’re in the wrong order and that makes all the difference.

Key West, FL – March 10, 2013

———-

Sad the trip is almost over? Me too, but I’m sure the next adventure is coming soon. If you want to keep up to date, follow the blog via email (look for the link on the right hand side or bottom of every page), facebook, or twitter and you’ll know as soon as I’m lost again.

———-

The route overwhelms me when I think about it. I remember how big Lake of the Woods felt when I started and how much water it held. Water is everywhere in the Boundary Waters, water separated by granite rock and evergreens, water that flows and sinks from lake to lake, water connected by portages miles long. It’s the oldest highway in the North Country, older than any road, a highway made of lakes, rivers, and footpaths. It feels endless until the last steps of the last portage when you look out on Lake Superior and know what endless looks like.

The biggest lake in the world stretches from horizon to horizon between two countries. It’s cold and deep, so cold that it feels like a punch to the head when it touches your skin. It’s an inland sea with storms that sink seven-hundred foot ships before they send a distress call. It’s rocky cliffs and waterfalls pouring down its sides.

There are few escapes, but the Savanna Portage will take you away, only no one’s been across it in years. It’s a swamp backed by a five miles of trail if you can find it. Beaver dams and fallen trees clog the water, mud sinks to your hip on false land. The voyageurs hated it so much that they called it the toughest portage in the west, but they haven’t been around to maintain it for two-hundred years.

Cross it and you’ll find the Mississippi waiting, a giant sheet of brown water draining a continent into the Gulf of Mexico. It cuts through rock and earth, slices of chunks of land, follows gravity and flows. It’s floods wipe out entire towns. There are barges bigger than six football fields moving goods in and out of the heartland. Twenty-nine locks control the northern-half, will and concrete levees control the south. Salt-water freighters fill the last hundred miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans like floating skyscrapers.

A water bottle thrown into the Mississippi in Minnesota, flows into the Gulf of Mexico ninety days later along with everything else swirling in those muddy waters. The Gulf sits between five states and three countries. Oil rigs crowd the open sea. Waves churn from distant storms. Hurricanes build in monsters across the warm water.

But this trip never felt impossible to me, even in the beginning, even as portages crushed my shoulders and Superior stretched like an ocean, because I never thought of Key West. That isn’t how a trip like this is done. I can’t paddle to Key West, that is impossible, but maybe I can paddle to the Gulf. No, that is too far, perhaps I will just reach the Mississippi River or just Lake Superior. Still too far. Perhaps I will make it to the Rainy River or just across Lake of the Woods or maybe just to that island I can see on the horizon. Perhaps just the next tree, the next stroke, the next foot.

I can’t paddle from the Northwest Angle to Key West. No one can. It is too far, but I can paddle the pieces bit by bit, pieces stacked together, pieces that make the impossible real.

That’s what matters. All those little pieces, those little efforts, those moments that come together into something greater.

So you want to save the Mississippi River or keep the Boundary Waters as beautiful as they have always been? You want to restore the Gulf of Mexico or make sure panthers have space to roam in the Everglades and manatees aren’t extinct? It all sounds hopeless sometimes. These are big places with complex problems and we’re just people, you and me, single individuals, we can’t change anything that matters.

It’s impossible.

I hate that word. Impossible is a lie we tell ourselves. It’s a costume for difficult. It’s an escape.

What you do matters. When you pick up a piece of trash in a park or teach a kid to love nature, it matters. When you donate what you can to protect a place you love or take five minutes to call a politician’s office, it matters. When you vote for people who care or refuse to buy products from those that don’t, it matters. Those are the little pieces, the little efforts, the bends in the river, the next island to paddle to, the moments that come together into something greater.

Look around you and do something, do it now, no matter how small, that helps make the impossible real.

———-

I’ve been lucky to work with four fantastic organizations who help protect the route I traveled. The work done by Friends of the Boundary Waters, American Rivers, Gulf Restoration Network, and Florida Wildlife Federation make this trip possible. I urge you to go to their webpages and learn more about how you can help protect the route I have traveled so that it will continue to be a wild and amazing place for generations of adventures. I also urge you to check out organizations who work to protect the places you love, on this route or off, but do something, anything, no matter how small.

Key West, FL – March 9, 2013

———-

Sad the trip is almost over? Me too, but I’m sure the next adventure is coming soon. If you want to keep up to date, follow the blog via email (look for the link on the right side or bottom of every page), facebook, or twitter and you’ll know as soon as I’m lost again.

———-

Four miles to a block of sand on the south side of Key West. White umbrellas and blue chairs. Bikinis and a golden man smiling in a golden thong. Tourists blinking at me in the sun. Hawaiian shirts and sunscreen. Nine months stripped to satisfaction.

“From where?” people say.

Word spreads across the beach. Couples stop. A man stares. I want to shrink into myself, but there is nowhere to go. So I blush and answer questions. I shake hands. I wave and take pictures.

It is strange to end the trip twice, but I’m glad that once was quiet and alone on that key ten miles away where I splashed in the water until a man in boxer shorts and a robe came out of the old house holding a rifle in one hand.

“Private island,” he said.

“That’s why I’m in the water,” I said then left.

But at least I had those few precious moments where I thought I was alone.

A blonde woman in a black bikini tells me she’s from Montreal. Like a voyageur, I say. She says the word back to me in French. We take a picture together. She feels delicate underneath my arm. I feel like King Kong brought to shore.

The line is thirty people long at the Southernmost Point. It’s an old piece of metal painted like a buoy, but it says Southernmost Point and 90 Miles to Cuba so it make for a good picture even if it’s a lie. I move to the back of the crowd, dragging the Looksha behind me.

Someone yells that I came from Minnesota and waves me forward. I feel awkward jumping ahead, but I go. People cheer. My head spins. There are so many faces in the crowd to focus. I feel out-of-place. Salt hangs on my clothes in white swirls. It makes the fabric stiff. Only the Looksha feels real. Nothing else makes sense. The Looksha knows. Frank knows. Ali knows. I cling to them.

Clean faces and t-shirts. Sandals flap on pavement. Cameras flash and click. Straws stick out of coconuts. I move away and sit down for a moment. I rest my hand on the yellow plastic. I answer questions and talk about nothing. I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t have words. People want to know how it feels. I say things, but no one hears anything real. They want quick answers. One or two sentences.

Real takes nine months.

And even then you don’t understand.

Stock Island, FL – March 8, 2013

———-

Sad the trip is almost over? Me too, but I’m sure the next adventure is coming soon. If you want to keep up to date, follow the blog via email (look for the link on the right side or bottom of every page), facebook, or twitter and you’ll know as soon as I’m lost again.

———-

I used the Ceronskys‘ house as a mailing depot and makeshift outfitter. By the time I flew into Minneapolis, a stack of boxes stood three feet high in their spare room. Kenna and Necky believed in me enough to give me a boat on my word that I would try to paddle it to Key West. The outfitter Hoigaard’s stored it until I picked it up. Jendayi and Dawn drove me to the Atlanta airport after a night of dancing. Ron and Jeanette thought I was crazy, but let me stash the boat behind their store in the Angle while I returned the rental car and hitched back to begin the trip.

A woman heading to a birthday party drove me from Grand Forks, North Dakota, to Greenbush, Minnesota after I got of a train from Minneapolis. Mavis showed me around Greenbush and bought me lunch. The high school custodian and his wife gave me Ali and a tour of the Greenbush Gators’ gym. A guy who hated his ex-wife gave me a ride further north where a couple from Badger picked me up and got me across the Canadian border. A man renovating his house on Moose Lake took me another ten miles and then a group of fisherman got me the rest of the way to Ron’s store and the boat.

The Hansens wouldn’t let me leave until the weather cleared and they introduced me to the wonder of fried walleye. Janet found me in the library and invited me back to her house to camp. Her husband Neal gave me home-made beef jerky and introduced me to Art who let me crash at his place up the Rainy River and helped me fix the rudder.

Friends, family, and strangers rallied over two-thousand votes to help me win a grant from Outside Magazine.

Emma figured out how to get the boat to her house in International Falls and her family took me in like a lost child. Ranger Drum at Crane Lake told me to go to Isle Royale. Canoe Country Outfitters at Moose Lake watched the boat while I went to Ely to resupply. Steve gave me a ride back even though Moose Lake was far out of his way. The Outward Bound ladies inspired me long after they disappeared into the Boundary Waters on a rainy day.

Jessica and Travis stored my boat in Grand Portage so that I could go see my dad in South Bend. Chris the fireman gave me a ride to Monica’s house in Grand Marais where I met Alden, Derek, and Becca, ate the world’s greatest donuts, and helped corner the market on granola. A hotel manager gave me a ride to Duluth. Two guys gave me a ride back to Two Harbors. A football running back from Silver Bay and a Thunder Bay politician got me back to Grand Marais. Renee sent me a bracelet that I still have on my life vest.

Four Canadian paddlers gave me enough food to paddle around Isle Royale twice. A different group of four cooked me lunch on a cold, windy day and told me stories about Ben Franklin. The crew of the Absolut-ly Knot caught fish and cooked meals and laughed a lot while we waited out the wind on Belle Isle. Dave, Linel, and Sara dressed up like Voyageurs and went to Rendezvous with me. Lucas bought me breakfast a year after someone bought him breakfast. Kenny, Keith, Lorry, and Jean made sure I had a second home in Two Harbors and kept reminding me this trip is like eating an elephant, just take one bite at a time. Four kayakers from Minneapolis shared their dinner and campsite with me on Rocky Island in the Apostles. The Monday Night Potluck Group in Corny had room for one more to join them. I shared a campfire and marshmallows with three people in Herbster. The WDIO Newsteam launched one of the craziest nights of my life in Duluth. Deanna gave me her apartment for the weekend even though we only knew each other for five minutes.

Ana made pizza and gave me a bed to sleep in off the St. Louis River on the recommendation of a volunteer named Ben from Isle Royale. Sam Cook fed me information on the Savanna Portage. A guy in Jay Cook pretended he didn’t see me and let me pass when he could have stopped the trip with a phone call. Steve in Floodwood drew me a map of beaver dams and old paths to give me a bit of hope before entering the Savanna Portage. A nice woman who works at the state park showed me a secret put-in on a lake so I didn’t have to walk another three miles. A guy handed me a giant Northern Pike he wasn’t going to eat when I was resting on the shores of Big Sandy. Mike and Wade welcomed me to the Mississippi with a warm campfire and steel-cut oatmeal (which is amazing).

Randy and Jess threw open the Chap Restaurant’s freezer door and told me to resupply out of it. Wilderness Bob rode his bike a few hundred miles out of his way to make sure my spirits would be high. Sharon picked me up in Coon Rapids and fed me amazing ribs because I hiked with her son on the Pacific Crest Trail. I danced salsa with Kimberly and she introduced me to David, whose parents let me stay with them in Illinois. The captain of the Minneapolis Queen taught me how to use a marine radio to talk to barges and locks. The Ceronskys welcomed me back to Minneapolis with open arms and many hugs.

Sally, Coni, and Cher met me at the Wisconsin border with a tray of hot lasagna. A woman gave me an apple on a dock, then Beef Stew’s mom brought me lunch in Winona. Judy, Bob, Ken, Sunny, and Jim made sure I would never forget Cordova or the taste of hot pumpkin pie. Harlan and Susie introduced me to the magic of Whitey’s Ice Cream and taco pizzas. Gesh and Junkfood made sure I didn’t fold in the middle of Iowa with winter at my heels. Marisol and Nerissa sent me packages that made me smile for weeks. Mr. Dickerson watched my boat on the ramp at Muscatine.

The tour guide at Fort Madison showed me every room in the museum. The captain of the Jerry Jarret waved at me once. The lockmaster at Mel Price called a tug on the radio just to make sure they wouldn’t run me over. Camille and JK ran around St. Louis with me and made me feel young again. Ralph picked up the boat in an old moving van. Tazu (a.k.a. Steve) got us in the City Museum. Larry and Genice took me to lunch at Blueberry Hill. Mr. French looked after the boat in New Madrid. Brenda had a dance off with me. The lady running the gas station restaurant there made sure I knew the food was all you can eat if I sat inside.

Marjorie, Frank, Joseph and the rest of the Memphis thanksgiving crowd introduced me to chocolate covered bacon, eggs stuffed in sausage, and fried turkeys. They also made sure I would always think of them on Thanksgiving for the rest of my life. Giulia, Gesh, and Imee added homemade cookies and handwritten notes to the festivities. Daniel and Tiffany took me dancing in Memphis until 3 AM.

Mike gave me water where the Ohio meets the Mississippi. Will and Allie picked up the pieces for me after a disastrous day near St. Francisville. Josh lent me a radio when mine broke so I wouldn’t get killed by barges south of Baton Rouge. A friend of theirs let me store the kayak at his place next to a giant garden.

The crew of the Virginia made sure every barge on the Mississippi knew I was coming and wouldn’t run me over near New Orleans. Dan showed me the city like no one else could, taking me to caroling parties, white elephants, and the sugar shack while making sure I knew where to get Cajun food and fried chicken that is close to divine. Jonathan put me in touch with Captain Lori. A fisherman stopped me in the marshes to warn me of an upcoming storm. Captain Lori, the Dolphin Queen, and Mike opened their doors on Christmas to two strangers. Giulia braved paddling with me for a week and survived. My dad, Donna, and my mom dropped off and picked me up a few times so that I could spend New Years in Tallahassee.

Kayak Dave shared his house in Navarre and introduced me to the inspiring Navarre Beach Science Station. Lesley, Robin, Rod, and the rest of Carrabelle made sure I saw a place I’d been a hundred times with new eyes. Yingxue cooked me the best Chinese food in Tallahassee. My dancing family danced me back to good spirits. Doug sent me notes about the Gulf Coast. Leroy, Ginger, and Carol showed me just how nice people are way down on the Suwannee River. Jo Dee loaned me her snorkel and mask so I could stare into a Manatee’s eyes. A group of folks outside Three Sisters Spring fed me key lime pie when they heard where I was headed.

Jarry and Chuck took me to eat Greek food in Tarpon Springs (home of Florida’s Greek spongers). Then they handed me the keys to their house in Big Pine so I’d have a place to stay there too. Mercedes, Larry, Warren, Cela, and Diego met me on a beach in Tampa and made sure I had a few terrifying talks with 4th and 7th graders and a soft bed to sleep in for a few nights. A podiatrist in Tampa sanded down my cracked and calloused feet. Margarete’s soup brought a community together on Valentine’s Day and she showed me the wonders and wonderful people of Gulfport. Owen, Doug, and the Industrial Arts Center in Gulfport taught me how to blow glass. Jo cooked the best Cuban food of the trip. Al and Cindy let me stay in their spare apartment.

Vicki lent me her sand sifting tray to look for shark teeth. Carey fixed my spirit with ice cream and taught me about Irish session music. Jeanette and Steve invited me into their house and showed me some of the amazing paintings of Florida’s wildlife she’s done. Tom Fair gave me a pair of sunglasses when mine broke that kept me from squinting in the Florida sun. Mark told me some of the history of the Ten Thousand Islands. John navigated me through the Everglades and said I was a rock solid waterman. Dan welcomed me to the Everglades and made sure I had a place to stay in Key West. Wanda’s family let me stay with them in Big Pine and take one last shower before the end. Glen and Kate opened their house to me in Key West and saved the end from turning into a disaster.

None of them will be there tomorrow when I paddle to Key West and land on a crowded beach a block a way from the Southernmost Point.

People will just see a single man in a yellow kayak and think I did it alone.

Ballast Key, FL – March 7, 2013

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Sad the trip is almost over? Me too, but I’m sure the next adventure is coming soon. If you want to keep up to date, follow the blog via email (look for the link on the right hand side or bottom of every page), facebook, or twitter and you’ll know as soon as I’m lost again.

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The end came quick, but not in Key West, not next to the crowds gathered by the red and black monument that people like to call the Southernmost Point, not at the crowded beaches of Fort Taylor packed with bronze skin and sun, not on Duval Street lined with bars, but beyond, past sunsets at Mallory Square, past cruise ships docked like skyscrapers, past the edge of civilization, far off, off through a sea of blue to a string of islands hanging in the ocean.

Key West is not the southernmost point. That is a lie, a fabrication, a gimmick of Conch paint and pride. Any map knows the truth. There’s an island to the south, a private key with a private house. Key West is a place to take photos and send postcards, a good enough spot that isn’t good enough, not after 4,000 miles. This trip has never been about being easy.

But the end still came quick.

It didn’t feel like the end. It felt like another island, another ocean, another moment in a long string of moments that reach back along the Gulf Coast, snake through the streets of New Orleans, and slide up the Mississippi past Memphis, St. Louis, and the Twin Cities, past the swamps of the Savanna Portage, the blue sea of Superior, and the granite rocks of the Boundary Waters, back to that chunk of land hanging on the Canadian border, back to the Northwest Angle.

This was all ideas once, scribbled possibilities, ink on a page.

“If I could get to Lake Superior,” I thought. “If I could get to the Mississippi River. If I could get the Gulf of Mexico.”

Now it’s all memories, memories and seventeen feet of yellow plastic against the last ten miles, against the deep blue sea, against waves and sunlight and islands rising on the horizon. Ten miles. Ten straight miles. Ten miles shooting like an arrow.

Ten miles that disappeared in a moment.

And it’s over.

Near Saddlehill Key – March 6, 2013

Nine years ago today, spring hadn’t reached North Georgia and the trees looked dead with winter. The air felt cold, crisp and cold, and I wore a black fleece hat that I’d stolen from my dad. The ranger station has a hook outside to weigh your pack. Mine weighed 45 pounds. I put it up and took it down in a moment, shy, quiet, not wanting anyone else to see. I felt intimidated and small and wanted to be invisible. I thought everyone stared at me, deciding if I would make it.

I told myself I didn’t care if I made it, that I would go as far as I could, that I would just walk, but I knew I was lying. I did care, I wanted to finish it. I wanted to believe in myself even if I didn’t.

Seven miles later, I saw the first white blaze of the Appalachian Trail, a rectangle of white paint on a rock, and froze. I stared at it for a long time. I camped by it. I woke up and stared at it again. I wondered how many others had stared at that same strip of paint hoping it would lead them to Maine.

And it did.

One blaze after another, one mile after another, one state after another, until I stood on a dock and jumped into a lake in mid-July.

It felt like summer. The kind of summer you see in glossy Madison Avenue ads, except it wasn’t on a billboard hung in the sky or folded in a magazine. It was real, the baking sun, blue water, friends laughing, our skin glistening in the light, a beautiful moment in the shadow of Katahdin.

A shadow I saw just a few hours before for the first time, a shadow heralding the northern end of the Appalachian Trail.

That white blaze had kept its promise.

I didn’t know what to think when I saw the end. Was I expecting neon lights blazing the answers to all life’s questions? Katahdin is just a mountain, simple and still, coated in so many hopes and dreams. I stared at it, waiting for an answer that never came, then I smiled and returned to the beautiful summer day, to my friends splashing in the lake, to the moment.

Maybe the neon lights are only visible from the top. Maybe swimming in a lake with your friends and laughing until it hurts, is more important than neon lights anyway. Maybe I was frightened.

If you knew where the end of the world was, would you walk to it? Would you leap off?

That is what seeing Katahdin felt like. It felt like the end of the world and my one goal in life was to reach it and jump. From the moment I saw the mountain, I knew every step ended what I loved, every step felt like happiness soaked in pain, the bitter bringing out the sweet. After months of struggling to get there, after rain-soaked days and blistered feet, after blizzards and blood, I didn’t want to finish.

Key West is glowing on the horizon and it feels like the world that started nine years ago is about to end.

Big Pine Key, FL – March 5, 2013

Four years ago, my friend Jonathan and I tried to paddle from Key Largo to Key West on a pair of sit-on-top kayaks. It took us four days to reach Seven Mile Bridge halfway down the keys. We looked at it on the map, got a hotel room, and quit the next day.

That was the only overnight kayaking trip I’d gone on before I started planning this one. We didn’t know what we were doing. Neither of us had paddled much. We didn’t have proper boats, just sit-on-tops that we tied camping gear to with bungee cords and some food we threw together after ten minutes in a grocery store. We spent two of the four nights in hotel rooms, we ate at restaurants and gas stations near beaches, and we couldn’t get across Seven Mile Bridge until we strapped the boats to a car and drove the rest of the way down.

Seven miles looks a lot different after 4,000. Now, seven miles is just a few hundred cement slabs strung out on pylons. Seven miles is just two hours. Seven miles is just seven miles closer to Key West.

Marathon, FL – March 4, 2013

“You gotta get out of here,” John said. “Or you’re going to be looking at lights on the horizon trying to find the keys.”

He knew I was delaying, checking bags, packing them again, not wanting to say goodbye. I didn’t want to leave six days of laughter and stories, six days of mosquitoes and mud, six days of feeling understood.

“Go finish this thing,” he said.

I gave him a last hug goodbye, pushed my boat off Little Rabbit Key, and slid into the water.

The tide in Florida Bay is vicious. It leaves long shallow banks miles long that you have to paddle around even when you can see the keys on the horizon–thin green lines over blue water–and want to point toward them and charge because for so long you’ve tried not to think about them, tried not to imagine what they’d look like, tried not to realize how far they were.

But now they are hanging in front of you, waiting, drawing you in, but you have to go around, backwards and around, because you don’t want to end up walking in an inch of water and two feet of muck.

So you go around, skirting the edge of the flats in Florida Bay, picking your way through shallow channels, moving, fighting, finding a route, knowing you will get there eventually, even if it’s after dark and you’re staring at electric lights on the horizon for the first time in a week.

You don’t care though. Light, dark, nothing matters but one thing. You’ve reached the keys.

Little Rabbit Key, Everglades National Park – March 3, 2013

Before dams, the widest spot on the Mississippi River was just over two miles, Lake Pepin in Minnesota, but anywhere you cross the river from Minneapolis down, it’s impressive. It’s a huge tongue of water, brown and thick, slicing through the landscape, flowing under bridges five stories high, moving earth, barges, and whole trees toward the Gulf. People stop and stare. They write songs and name states after it. They understand the Mississippi.

The Everglades is fifty miles wide and you can stand in the middle of it and wonder where the river is. No one even believed it was anything but a stagnant swamp until the mid 1900s. It drains the center of Florida from Disney’s theme parks to the southern tip of the peninsula, hiding in grasses and marshland, sinking past hardwood hammocks and mangrove islands, flowing like a water spilled across a limestone table.

It doesn’t look like a river–it looks like grass and mud and trees on the horizon–but it flows down that tilting table to Florida Bay with all the sins of a state in its grasp.

Developers cut pieces away, drained chunks and filled in lots. They dug canals and bulldozed trees. They sliced, gnawed, and tore away half the Everglades, turning it into suburbs and strip malls. They even tried to build the biggest airport in the world there once, right in the middle of the river–six runways for supersonic jets, Concords racing across the sky, a new commercial center in the heart of South Florida–but they only managed one strip of pavement.

Then Floridians stopped it.

“No,” they said. “No mortal blow.”

And for the last forty years, Floridian’s, the National Park Service, and environmentalists have pushed back to save what’s left of one of the most complex ecosystems in the world. Negotiations for water rights between big cities and environmental groups, land acquisitions and waste-water treatment procedures, a multiple decade effort to raise a road blocking the water flow, all of it trying to hold onto the wild heart of the state, to keep it from flat lining and slipping off the edge, to save a place where panthers are not a memory, where alligators and crocodiles slide off mud banks, and John Buckley and I can spill into Florida Bay on water from as far as Orlando feeling free and alive and lucky that the Everglades still exist.

A piece anyway, growing or shrinking with our collective decisions.

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The process to protect the Everglades is ongoing. Just this month, a new mile long bridge will replace a section of the Tamiami Trail, the first piece of an ongoing effort to raise the road and allow water to flow through the Everglades again. The Everglades are a key part of any effort to protect Florida’s Wildlife. Hundreds of animals rely on the ecosystem to survive. Without it, everything from migratory birds to the Florida Crocodile could disappear.

The Florida Wildlife Federation works every day to help protect these environments. Please visit their webpage, follow them on Facebook and Twitter, and learn how you can help wither through donations or calling representatives to promote legislation that recognizes how important protecting Florida’s environment is to our future.