Journey of a Lifetime: An Excerpt from "Paddling to Winter"

Our Yearlong Canoeing Honeymoon

"Three more minutes,” Charly shouted, tossing stacks of papers, files and documents into cardboard boxes. With plans to paddle our canoe 2,700 miles starting from our back door at the Sioux River Beach on Lake Superior in Wisconsin, Charly and I were almost ready to start our honeymoon – The Trip that I’d found unimaginable six years earlier.

We intended to paddle 1,700 miles to northern Saskatchewan, stay there for the winter, then snowshoe 200 miles farther north in the spring, and paddle another 1,100 miles to Gjoa Haven on the Northwest Passage of the Arctic Ocean. We would be gone 18 months.

From the second-story window I glanced across the highway at Lake Superior. We couldn’t have mail ordered a finer May day to begin: bug-free, sunny and calm.

Charly was the architect of this trip, designing the route; I was the general contractor, moving everything along.We had to leave sometime, and I had chosen noon on May Day, 1999. Charly would have preferred to stick to his noncommittal departure date of sometime between April 15 and May 15, but I needed a deadline.

The old alarm clock read 11:57.

We had prepared for 18 months of crisis: cold weather, smashed canoe, burst appendix. I had packed enough tampons to supply the female population of our county for a year. We had taken first-aid classes and studied wilderness medicine. I had taken swim lessons.

We had consulted with doctors about first-aid kits and talked to experts about emergency radios. I knew that, statistically, driving a car to the grocery store would be more likely to cause my demise than paddling a canoe to the far north, but still we prepared for the worst.

* * *

Two years of planning had narrowed to three insane minutes of details that had more to do with our regular life than with our canoe trip.

I laughed because I had lived with Charly for five years and had been married to him for the last eight months. Last-minute projects were his specialty. Pack the bags, load the car, start the engine, and Charly would lean ever so casually into the window on the driver’s side and say to me, “I was thinking I would rototill the garden before we go.”

“Rototill the garden? The rototiller hasn’t worked for months.”

“Yeah. But I think I have it figured out.”

* * *

But now was the big goodbye. Three more minutes.

My mom, dad, brother Link, and father-in-law, Herb, had driven north to send us off. They had been helping with last minute chores. …

I had taken my last indoor shower, packed away my civilian clothes and now wore the Army surplus shorts that would be a major part of my wardrobe for the next four months. Charly continued the process of shutting down his office, on the second floor of an old abandoned tavern we had transformed into Trip Headquarters.

We had baked, dried and sealed our food in the kitchen; sorted, piled, and packed our gear and clothes in the dining room; rolled and unrolled maps on the bar; and made countless phone calls from the office since disconnecting our home phone six months earlier – a cost-saving measure.

“I’m ready,” Charly said with a grin as he stumbled down the stairs carrying a cardboard box for storage.

* * *

In the world of canoe expeditions, the one we’d planned was not particularly ambitious or risky. Four things made our trip noteworthy: we were leaving from our own backyard; we had grown, harvested and dried much of the food for the trip; we planned to stay north through the winter; and we’d built our own wood-and-canvas canoe.

Charly and Herb arrived with Rick, a reporter from the Ashland Daily Press, my former employer. …

“Not many women would choose this for their honeymoon,” Rick shouted over to me.

“Not many women are married to Charly Ray,” I laughed.

No more minutes left. I looked at Charly and nodded toward the canoe. He gave me a wink. It was time to go.

* * *

It was 80 degrees with mile-high blue skies. The leaves of the aspen trees were just beginning to bud their bright greenish-yellow haze.

To the east, radically different temperatures between the recently thawed lake and the unseasonably hot air twisted the light into shifting mirages.

We’d planned an easy first day – just 8 miles to Bayfield, where we would camp at the city campground and meet friends and family for dinner.

Friends paddled ahead of us, forming a flotilla that included Herb in a borrowed kayak and Dad and Link in a red tandem kayak.

With every paddle stroke, the stress of the last few weeks lessened.

The forward motion carried us further from the chaos and tedium of preparations and closer to adventure and freedom and togetherness.

After months of scrutinizing maps, making our canoe, revising menus, packing and repacking food, sorting gear and clothes, we were really doing it.

“People are taking bets on how long you’ll last,” my friend Phyllis commented.

“The canoe trip or our marriage?” I asked.

“Both,” she smiled. “But I know you two will make it.”

* * *

On our fourth morning, I sat cross-legged looking out at Lake Superior, eating granola and reading the Ashland Daily Press with a picture of Charly, Knock-Knock (my Siberian husky) and me on the cover. I thought more about Rick’s statement that not many women would choose this for their honeymoon and my reply that not many women are married to Charly Ray.

I had grown up singing and choreographing dance routines to Helen Reddy singing “I am woman, hear me roar.” During my formative years my mother had worn a T-shirt that read “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” I had studied women’s history in college and considered myself a feminist.

“Not many women are married to Charly Ray.” What a stupid response.

True, this trip was Charly’s idea and one he knew how to organize and make happen. And true, without him I wouldn’t be doing it. But I knew lots of wild outdoorsy women. My friend Ann had dogsledded with her fiancé 500 miles to Nome, Alaska, said “I do” and dogsledded 500 miles back with her husband. My friend Gail had organized a kayaking expedition around Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union. At IPS, I’d known a woman who sat at the southern tip of Chile listening to a radio while her sister, Ann Bancroft, led an all-women’s expedition across Antarctica. I wished I could change my answer.

I thought about this as I sat on a long stretch of white sand beach next to the mouth of Lost Creek. Red pines towered behind me and no cars or houses were in sight. We were camped outside the small town of Cornucopia, home of the northernmost post office in Wisconsin, with our wooden canoe tipped on its side in the sand. We’d brushed on the final coats of red paint just weeks before and brought her down to the lake to make sure she floated. We’d named her Le Strubel for Charly’s mother, Carol Strubel, who had died during Charly’s sophomore year of college.

Her brother, Dick Strubel, and his family had given us a wedding present of cash for a canoe. We took the money, drove to the home of wood and canvas canoe builder Jerry Stelmok in Maine, and built ourselves a boat. An E.M.White Guide canoe – quiet, beautiful and steeped in history – Le Strubel looked stunning: cherrywood gunwales, cedar ribs and copper nails. I had tapped in those copper nails, sanded the cherrywood and knew each and every one of the cedar ribs intimately. If something happened to Le Strubel on this trip, we would fix her with materials from the forest – something we couldn’t do with Kevlar, plastic or aluminum.

I opened the Daily Press, which we had purchased in Cornucopia that morning: “Washburn Couple Embark on 18-month Paddle to the Arctic” …

“Well, Scoop?” Charly asked, looking over at me. “What’s your professional opinion?”

“I like it, particularly the Hobbit reference. Though he quotes me as saying ‘I fear timber wolves.’” I laughed. “Do I look like Little Red Riding Hood to you?”

“You do have a red hood,” he answered, referring to my anorak. “What did you say you fear?”

“I don’t remember. Polar bears. Drowning. The usual. But definitely not timber wolves. How about you? What do you fear?”

“That we won’t get to the second half of this trip,” he answered. I nodded, knowing he was thinking about his dad’s health.

At nine o’clock in the morning it was already 80 degrees, about 45 degrees warmer than the water. I should have told Rick that it was Lake Superior that I feared most, probably because I knew her best.

She was large, cold and unpredictable. Since moving to northern Wisconsin I had been fed a steady diet of shipwreck tales, including the wreck of the 729-foot Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, immortalized by a Gordon Lightfoot song.

* * *

“Should we stay or go?” I asked.

“I don’t know about heading out into this,” Charly said, looking at the 2-foot waves.

“It’s not that bad,” I replied, rinsing my blue enamelware bowl.

Charly pulled a hanky out of the side pocket of his tan cotton cargo pants and blew his nose. I pushed to go, anxious to at least paddle out of our home county. I won.

Charly loaded the canoe. I held the gunwales while standing in leg-numbing water. We carried 20 days’ worth of food, a tarp, a bug net, a canvas tent, a woodstove (just for the Lake Superior leg), clothes for the summer (for each of us: one pair of wool pants, one pair of thin cotton pants, one pair of shorts, a few shirts and underwear), a cook kit, two sleeping bags, two sleeping pads, a repair kit, a first-aid kit, maps, a fishing rod, two life jackets and a spare set of paddles.

We carried two wetsuits, but because it was 80 degrees we weren’t wearing them. Wetsuits wouldn’t save us if we spilled into the frigid water, but they would add critical minutes before hypothermia set in.

The previous day we had paddled through chunks of ice and past frozen waterfalls on the north face of the sandstone sea cliffs. At 35 degrees, the lake would claim the life of a submerged human who took more than a few minutes to get out of the water. Tipping over was no small deal.

The heavily loaded canoe was like an overdue pregnant woman – clumsy and unsteady, but full of anticipation for the days to come. Once the canoe was loaded, we snapped on Le Strubel’s red sprayskirt, covering the canoe and packs. I worked my way into the front opening of the sprayskirt, then stabilized the canoe with my paddle as the waves rocked it back and forth. Charly boarded and we headed into the waves, not looking back. I dug my paddle in deep, the cold water splashing onto my hands. A friend who was working at a construction site on Roman’s Point shouted our names from shore as we paddled by, but I couldn’t respond.

Charly flicked his paddle as a greeting. We both focused on keeping our overburdened canoe upright and moving forward, staying away from shore to avoid the waves bouncing back from the cliffs.

We rounded Roman’s Point, following 30-foot cliffs with pillars of sandstone carved away by the wind and waves. The morning sun lit up the white birch and aspen trees. On the other side of the point it was like another day. Since there were no waves or wind I peeled back the sprayskirt so it rested around my waist.

Fewer than a dozen paddle strokes later, as we entered Bark Bay, the air fell limp, and flies gathered in front of my feet – not a good sign if for no other reason than limp air intuitively feels wrong on Lake Superior.

And something about flies gathering at my feet gave me an Amityville Horror kind of feeling. Charly and I plunged into an uneasy silence, paddling faster. We cut across the middle of the bay to save paddling miles, then followed the shoreline up a narrow finger of red sandstone toward Bark Point. The breeze built slowly, fluctuating between puffs of hot muggy air and cold crisp air – an onshore breeze that gave us a bit of confidence.

Paddling on gently rolling swells, I looked ahead and saw waves breaking but couldn’t make sense of them. I checked for a place to pull out, but there wasn’t one – just a long stretch of large rocks on a shelf of red sandstone. The swells continued to break into frothy whiteness a little closer now.

“What is that?” I asked, leaning forward to refasten the sprayskirt.

“It’s waves breaking on the shoal off Bark Point,” Charly responded. “I’ll steer us clear of it, then cut over.”

I bowed my head and focused on paddling. One, two, three, four … all the way to 100, and then I switched my paddle from the left side to the right. One, two, three, four … Counting was something I would revert to in moments of stress for the rest of the summer, something I’d never relied on before.

Suddenly a breaking wave knocked the numbers right out of my head. The eerie stillness was over. Swells 4 feet high came at us and broke over the shoal just off to our left. Charly steered the canoe perpendicular to the waves. I knew that if a wave hit us sideways we would be upside down – and up that fabled creek.

Fear took hold. I didn’t have time to think or to look around, only to react. I kept my head down and my paddle in the water. One wave. Two waves. Three waves. Four.

Charly turned the canoe to the left to round the point. “We made it through the …” he started to say, then barked, “Draw right!”

Using my paddle I pulled the canoe right with all the strength I had and stared up at a wave.

“Paddle like hell!” Charly shouted.

I dug in with my paddle just as the wave lifted us into the air. We teetered on the top of a 3-foot crest, pausing for what seemed like minutes. It was long enough for me to look down at the shallow, almost tranquil turquoise pool below. There were smooth round rocks beneath the surface. I wondered how we would land on the rocks below without smashing our wood and canvas canoe into kindling. It was like being positioned at the top of a roller coaster for those few seconds.

I tried to remember where I had stuffed my wetsuit. I felt the fear and adrenaline and excitement all at once. And then the wave released us.

“Brace!” Charly screamed. The canoe crashed down, and the next wave broke right in front of me, smashing gallons of ice water into my chest. I. Couldn’t. Breathe. I was reminded of lying on a playground after a ball had hit me in the gut and taken my breath away, feeling like I’d never breathe again. My mouth was as dry as a maple leaf in November.

My heart pounded and my right leg shook uncontrollably. Water pooled on the sprayskirt in front of me. I couldn’t believe we were still upright.

I wanted to cry but there wasn’t time. I kept paddling. One, two, three, four. Charly took us through another breaking wave and then another and another until finally all that remained were rolling swells.

“How you doing up there?” Charly asked.

“I’m okay now that I can breathe.”

“Pretty hairy, huh?”

“That’s an understatement.”

“You know we would have been okay if we’d tipped,” he said.

He claimed that with the onshore breeze, Le Strubel may have cracked, but we could have made it to shore. I looked at the rocky shoreline and felt the cold spray of water and only nodded, doubtful.We did agree that it could have been the end of the canoe.

Would we have continued? I’d like to think so. We certainly were close enough to home to regroup.

As we paddled on, the sense of having closely avoided death got me thinking. How would my life have turned out if I hadn’t moved to D.C. when I did, or worked at the Institute for Policy Studies, or chosen to take the Good Society class, or if Dawn hadn’t invited us all to dinner that night, or if Charly hadn’t handed me a copy of Living the Good Life, or if I hadn’t paddled with him on the Potomac River, or hadn’t moved to northern Wisconsin? What would I be doing now?

Eight months after Charly had first shown me the map on his wall in Washington, I left the nation’s capital doing something I’d sworn I’d never do: move for a man.

Charly worked at a YMCA camp and found us a small cabin on the Manitowish River a few miles away. I moved in during one of the coldest winters in Wisconsin’s history.We had no clue what we were doing. I was writing and living in a cabin, but it was not the nonstop romance I had imagined.

Car batteries froze solid and cracked, water pipes froze and burst, jobs were scarce and we had no telephone. We also had to tend to the daily domestic chores of life like laundry, gathering wood, cooking and cleaning. I remember sitting on the bed in the loft, alone, crying because I was folding laundry instead of making love.

* * *

In the fall of 1997 we took a weekend excursion to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. While hiking between two lakes, Charly began to wonder aloud if his dream canoe trip would ever happen and if it should. It had been nearly 10 years since his 800-mile expedition.

His friends had moved on, married, settled, lost interest. Maybe it was time for him to do so, too. His dream was like a screenplay destined for the slush pile.

After years of living together, of settling into one another, it hit me that day that I was truly, madly, deeply in love with this man, and that I was willing to commit to a lifetime with him. What came from my mouth next was nearly as surprising to me and to him as when I’d said, “I’m so happy to see you.”

“Let’s get married and go on The Trip.”

“You’re serious?” he asked again and again. It took months to convince him that I was.

And so we’d been married atop a ski hill overlooking Lake Superior, only 20-some miles from where we just nearly went for an unexpected and unwelcome swim.

Once I’d convinced him that, indeed, I was serious, Charly had written letters to his three friends with whom he had paddled for 800 miles and with whom he had planned to return. The letter invited them to join us. Not one of them responded in the affirmative.

* * *

Not many women would choose this for their honeymoon, but neither would many men.

We rounded Bark Point and rode waves up and down for 6 miles to the next landing. My legs still shook, but less and less with each mile. I began to enjoy the rhythm of the rolling swells as they gently pushed us toward shore.

Later Charly and I noted that our near-fatal collision had happened only 20 road miles from home. We laughed imagining Rick’s follow-up story reporting on the canoeists who smashed and dunked on the fourth day of a months-long expedition.

We landed Le Strubel on the hot sands of a public beach and campground in Herbster, another lovely and sparsely populated town on Lake Superior’s south shore. I hopped out of the canoe and pulled us forward.

We collapsed onto the sand, giddy at being alive.

“I think that’s enough for today,” I said.

---

This condensed excerpt is from Julie Buckles' recently released book, Paddling to Winter, published by Raven Productions. Julie, also a contributing writer to Lake Superior Magazine, is the public and media relations specialist for Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin.