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I Kayaked to Canada

Me in my kayak with radar reflector mounted on back as I prepare to cross the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It’s a new kayak, by the way. Like it? — Photo Credits to Emma Lanham.

 

Ah, Victoria. How many nights have I seen your lights shimmer like so many jewels above the dark water?

How many windless days have I squinted over the pale miles in the Strait of Juan de Fuca that lie between — days when I thought I should launch a boat and pay a visit?

How many times have I watched whitecaps rage out of the west, or watched you disappear behind cold fogs — fogs where unseen ships, tall as buildings, moan out warnings?

It has always seemed so easy to get there, yet also impossible.

But I got tired of waiting.

Eventually, I pushed my boat off shore, and put my paddle in the water.

 

As a straight line journey, it is possible to kayak north from Port Angeles, Washington to Victoria, British Columbia in about 18-miles.

The journey crosses a couple of busy shipping lanes, patrolled by seven story cargo ships, supertankers and cruise ships. The tides go west to east on the flood, and east to west on the ebb, so it is easy to get pushed well off course — not to mention the difficulties of what would happen when a wind picks up. There are plenty of shallow banks out there that create choppy, confused seas.

It wasn’t the distance of the paddle that intimidated me; it was the exposure to hazard, the fact that I would be a long way from shore if something went wrong. But this would only be a training run.

I recently signed up for the first leg of Race To Alaska, a motorless boat race starting in Port Townsend, Washington and ending 40 miles later in Victoria. Competitors who do the full race go all the way to Ketchikan, Alaska.) Even though I was only going only a short fraction of the 750 miles to Ketchikan, it was still a longer open-water crossing than anything I had attempted before. I was nervous about it.

I recently had a dream that I was out there in the middle of the crossing in 15-foot waves breaking around my boat. I remember asking my kayak buddy what the hell we were doing out there.

Dreams are typically inaccurate though. What kayak buddy? I was making the crossing alone.

 

I stood on Ediz Hook, north of Port Angeles, looking across to Vancouver island, trying to see Victoria out of the smudgy haze. The plan was to let the ebb current carry me to the west. Then at around 1:30 pm the tide would turn around and start carrying me northeast toward Victoria. This course had the advantage of spending less time in a north-south shipping lane, but it brought the total trip distance to 22 miles.

I almost put the kibosh on the whole voyage when I realized that the slack tide (the window where there is no significant current) in the middle of the Strait would be a couple hours later than I’d planned — pushing my departure time toward midday.

The winds were supposed to pick up slightly later in the afternoon. It was nothing near high enough to be a big deal. I would only worry if I happened to be alone in a kayak in the middle of the Strait, miles from land.

In the event of an emergency, I had a new hand-operated bilge pump, a spare paddle, a paddle float (which would help me get back into the cockpit if I got flipped out of the kayak) and some extra warm clothes, stuffed into a dry bag. I was also borrowing a flare gun and a VHF radio that I could use to signal for help if necessary.

My latest creation was a signal flag/radar reflector mounted on the kayak’s back deck. I fashioned it from an old ski pole, orange duct tape and some reflective foam I cut off of a windshield cover. The thing added visibility so ships could see my boat. Kayaks tend to hide out in the crests of waves, concealed to vessel operators and their radar systems. My jury-rigged contraption gave me a better chance of being seen, but also made my boat more vulnerable to wind, and made the prospect of rolling a capsized kayak back upright more dubious. I secured the pole upright with guy-lines attached to the deck cords. There was an awkward lean to the array, but I didn’t spend much time trying to fix it. The tides were going to turn around soon and I needed to hustle.

As I got ready to push the boat into the water, a voice called out, and I was surprised and happy to see my friends Jarrett and Emma coming down the beach to see me off.

“That’s Victoria, over there right?” I asked Jarrett, pointing towards the hazy smudge of land on the other side.

“It hope so” Jarrett said. “You have that new compass on your deck you should use.”

He helped me carry the boat down the last stretch of slimy rocks into the water. Emma took photographs.

I was glad to hear later that my duct tape flag stayed visible long after my kayak faded from sight.

With everything else loaded into the boat, putting myself in it was the last challenge, made more difficult by the seat sliding forward. It took a minute to stuff my leg into the cockpit and to find the pedals.

 

Final preparations onshore.

I paddled a slow loop around the bull kelp and then I pointed my bow northwest.

There water was glassy smooth. I paddled with my sprayskirt off so that I could vent heat from the cockpit. I paddled with fast, light strokes out into the open water.

About a half-mile out, I found an enormous stipe of bull kelp from last year, lolling on the surface like a rotting anaconda. I grabbed hold and broke two feet off the end of the tube, grimaced, and bit a hole in the top end. I lifted my new bugle to my lips and blew out a loud note: “Heeyaaaaawhnk!” It was about as loud as a ship’s horn and would be another way I could make my presence known on the Strait.

For the first miles of paddling I kept my eyes trained on Canada, occasionally looking left and right to watch for ships. I saw one cargo ship moving in from the east, but was comfortable that it would pass well in front of me.

Later, I passed within two miles of a large container ship, and cut about four miles in front of another one. There were a couple smaller boats out there also, but none got uncomfortably close.

I set my course toward a small white point on shore that turned out to be the lighthouse at Race Rocks. When I got there, I would have gone past the southernmost point of Vancouver Island and halfway to Victoria. I would keep well away from the rocks though; the area was known for dangerous currents.

Meanwhile, my kayak began to undulate up and down in four-foot swells. I swung my boat around rough patches where the water danced in swirls and sharp little ridges. The swells were still too round to crash over the front deck, but I worried that I would get nauseous if I stayed out in them too long. After about half an hour, the water smoothed again.

I was starting to see the Canadian coast in better definition: gently rolling hills, populated by pines.

I heard a short puff of breath, and looked to my left to watch a harbor porpoise roll out of the water. A second later, its companion popped up behind it.

“You are so awesome!” I declared. The porpoises went back under, but reemerged a moment later.

15 minutes went by, and then I saw another pair of porpoises come up to breathe on the other side, blowing out their puffs of air.

My nervousness about the trip began to subside, and I paddled with confidence.

I passed by Race Rocks without incident and started turning the boat more to the east so that I could take advantage of the flood tide.

Seeing no other large ships coming out of Victoria harbor, I decided not to worry as much about the shipping lanes. A buoy nearby revealed that the current was already flowing in my favor. I took a break to eat some food I’d squirreled away into my fanny pack as I cruised toward the final destination.

A large cruise ship marked the harbor entrance. A sharp current was moving into the harbor now and I swung quickly past a group of people hanging out on the jetty nearby.

The place was busy. There was a whole neighborhood of houseboats moored on some nearby piers. Tiny yellow taxi boats took people back and forth across the harbor while sea planes landed in and out. People on pleasure cruisers played tunes and lounged in board shorts and bikinis. I felt like a spaceman in my drysuit, out of place as usual.

Well, I was an alien here after all. I was legally obliged to report my presence as a foreign visitor to the local authorities. I tied up at the dock in Raymur Marina where there was a courtesy phone and a number to call Customs. I read out my passport number to one of the officials, announced my plans and received my own special number that indicated I had permission to be in Canada. That was it.

I sat down on the dock with an orange, watching a woman lead a kayak paddling class. The snowy reaches of the Olympic Mountains rose up above the buildings. I was starting to like this place. It would have to be a brief visit though.

I had about 20 minutes to enjoy paddling before I needed to haul my boat up and get to U.S. Customs at the ferry terminal so I could make the return journey.

The harbor went through a sharp narrows before it opened up again into the downtown. I flew through on the current.

The really tricky part was figuring out how to get my boat up to the ferry terminal. The only public docks in the harbor were a good distance away and metal retaining walls around the harbor cut off access.

The best way I could find to get on shore was a small park where I could get out of the water and lift my boat over a jumble of rocks. Two Canadians helped me out.

“Holy shit man!” one of them exclaimed when I told him where I’d come from.

They asked me how long it took me to get across the Strait, and I figured it was just about four and a half hours.

“That’s faster than the sailers make it sometimes,” one of them remarked.

Unfortunately, my awesome kayak is a lot less of a swift machine when it is out of water.

I was still nowhere near the ferry terminal and had to walk with my kayak and its radar reflector for about a quarter mile of busy sidewalk to get to the ticket booth and when I got there my spine was killing me.

 

Going through customs with my kayak was nowhere near as scary as I had worried   — no one checked the hatches for contraband maple syrup or hockey pucks. But I still had to wait 90 minutes to get on board the ferry back to the States.

One of the customs guys was a kayak fisherman and we talked for a while about our boating experiences.

I watched a tractor trailer get off the ferry and cut the corner a little too close around the customs pavilion. Crunch! Several pieces of board fell to the asphalt and a bunch of government employees went to chat with the driver while others took photos of the scene.

Poor bastard.

And poor me. I had to pick the kayak up and bring it back onto the ferry.

I went above decks and watched as the boat pulled out of Victoria Harbour. I paced around the deck in my spaceman suit, making note of different landmarks I would want to remember for the Race To Alaska finish.

Eventually I went downstairs for a victory beer. The greater challenge still lies ahead.

Victoria, it was a good visit, if a short one. Hope to see you again soon!

 

Me beginning my crossing. Vancouver Island is in the background. You can’t see Victoria, but if you squint, you might notice the large cargo ship  on the horizon in front of my kayak.
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Bikeyaking

Bikeyaking

I just wanted to take my kayak down the river and leave the car at home.

I do many things the hard way because I am stubborn. I was also convinced that with the right kind of trailer, I could use my bike to haul my whitewater kayak 8.5 miles to a put in on the Poplar River, do some whitewater, and bike back home. Why? Why not?

It was a different kind of challenge, one that I liked because it left my polluting car out of the equation while I was having fun.

A nice idea, but one that required technical knowhow that is beyond my ken.

Enter my friend, Jon the Bike Guy. A retired ranger from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, he sports a waist-length, braided pony tail and owlish glasses through which he diagnoses and prescribes remedies for faulty derailleurs, misaligned spokes and squeaky brakes. Woe unto anyone who borrows a tool from his organized bins and shelves and fails to return it to the proper place.

An expert level forager, he acquires and keep things until the universe reveals their utility.

There was a purpose for the old Burley bike trailer he’d hung onto. Meant for carrying kids, it could have a second life carrying my kayak around.

When I half-joked that I wanted to pull a kayak behind my bike, Jon’s eyes popped. He immediately thought of repurposing the trailer and began talking rapid fire about how it would come together. I could almost see the blueprints floating over his head.

Our first model looked promising until I started pedaling. The shock absorbing spring in the carrier caused it to buck wildly as I accelerated and decelerated. I grimaced every time I hit the brakes. After about a mile of lurching, terrifying riding, I turned around in defeat. Then, coming down a hill, the kayak took an enormous lurch and snapped the wooden handle that attached it to the bike. The boat rolled merrily down into a ditch where it landed in a mud puddle. It preferred water over pavement apparently.

I was far from given up and, unsurprisingly, neither was Jon. The bikeyak would ride. We went back to the design and scrapped the troublesome spring. Instead, John drilled a hole in the metal arm where I could insert the trailer pin. This model fared far better, with the only issue being a tendency for the sides of the hull to rub against the wheels now and again.

Fine-tuning and adjustment could wait however. Whitewater called. After a couple of trips to play around in the Temperance River (about four miles of travel from home to the launch area,) I set my sites on the Poplar River, which runs through a series of frothing rapids and drops that go through a ski resort and a golf course, before the canyon narrows into a log-choked death chute on the way to Lake Superior.

I planned to get out before this part.

One recent summer morning, I started biking with the kayak on the trailer toward Poplar. Puffy cumulous drifted through the crisp blue sky. The previous night’s rains steamed off the leaves and the sodden ground. The sultry air was rich with the smells of earth and life.

Pedaling my bike plus kayak through the humidity was slow, but the easy pace also meant I could look for wildflowers in the woods or listen to birdcalls. A few pedestrians shot furtive glances, then decided that it was best not to talk to the crazy guy.

“That’s an innovative transportation idea,” one walker told me.

He was the one with vision, obviously. When everyone else told those bike mechanics Orville and Wilbur their idea wouldn’t fly, he would have given them the thumbs up.

Everyone else was oblivious to genius.

I arrived at the Poplar River within 45 minutes. I ate some bread and stashed a dry bag full of clothes in some nearby brush outside a graveyard. I’d be back as soon as I dropped the kayak off at the put in.

This was the tough part. I had to climb at least 500 feet along the ski hill road and it’s steep.

The bike crawled along the highway shoulder. Cars and trucks sped past, some with mountain bikes on their racks.

Would I have been able to explain myself to them and, if so, would I believe myself? They’d probably file me under ‘loco’ long before I finished. Yet, everything I was doing had logic to it. It was the marriage of conflicting impulses that spawned the apparent absurdity.

On the one hand, I wanted to minimize unnecessary driving. Whitewater kayaking is a luxury, not a necessity.

However, if I skipped a kayak trip because of driving guilt, this would signal that my anti-driving philosophy placed a heavy tax on fun. If avoiding driving meant hanging around the house and not going out for some excitement, how could I sell it to people? Ergo, the trick was to find a way to take the kayak trip but not drive. Ergo, there I was crawling up the hill with a kayak in back of my bike, which, come to think of it, was not particularly fun.

After I reached the crest of the hill, I parked near a trailhead to the Superior Hiking Trail, close to the cascades I call You Will Die Falls.

I left the kayak in the  woods and biked back down the hill to the cemetery. Some may have considered it a bad omen that my kayak run was ending at the graveyard.

After I got the bike in place, I started back upriver on foot. I picked an arduous route along the river so I could scout the rapids and look for newly fallen trees. Any river canyon on the North Shore is exceptionally slow (or outright impossible)to explore on foot, because of the steep slopes. These tend to be populated by loose rock, slippery moss and dead trees that fall over as soon as you grab for one.

I scraped through briar patches, over spruce trees with impaling branches and under logs. Rarely did I put my foot down with any certainty that it wouldn’t slide or that the ground beneath it wouldn’t give way.

At two rapids, I placed stones so that I would see them on the way down. One of these markers reminded me to prepare for a series of drops, another to stay on the left side of the river and avoid a branch-choked channel.

I came out of the woods onto a golf course, where I walked down to a bridge above a Class V rapid known as Bilek’s Surprise on the American Whitewater website. The rapid is named after a paddler who had come around a corner not expecting to drop down a 100-foot-long chute of whitewater surging over jagged rocks. Surprise!

I didn’t plan to follow Bilek’s example, though I did spend some time looking at the namesake rapid, thinking about how to run it.

At this point, I skipped scouting any further upriver as I had already run by there the other day. Instead, I bushwhacked back to the road that I had biked up earlier and jogged uphill in my sandals.

My kayak waited at the top. I grabbed the end loop and began taking it down the treacherous slope to the river.

You Will Die Falls was in excellent form. The lines of ragged water plunged off the rocks in snowy gouts sending up the clamor of an express train. It was hard to look away from, brutal and beautiful at once, hypnotic.

I took a moment to confirm that the falls were a likely death sentence for a paddler. Some of the rapids at the base of the falls were more ambiguous. If I launched in one pool, I faced a decent chance of getting pinned up on a rock and sent for a battering ride down successive drops. Nah. I was there by myself, and freaked out by the risk.

Below, another pool, looked about as forbidding, but did feature a tiny eddy where I could launch my kayak. From there I would have to ferry against a full-throttle current in order to reach slower water on the other side, where I might be able to weave a path through some boulders and get set up for the six-foot drop that followed. If I was still upright at this point, I could look forward to several more drops and turns that would test my skills.

This launch plan had a high built-in fuck-up potential, especially because I didn’t know if I could resist the current long enough to get across and go through the rocks. I thought about it until I was sick of thinking and got in the boat.

My new neoprene sprayskirt is great for deflecting waves, but it is a pain in the ass to pull it over the kayak cockpit. I balanced on a narrow ramp of rock trying to get the damn thing to go all the way around without it slipping. Or the boat slipping. I almost fed myself to the river a couple of times, which would have been disastrous as soon as the first wave crashed into the boat opening. At this point I wasn’t even sure if I could get out of the boat without tipping in the river.  I felt tightness in my chest, blood rushing through my ears.

The final edge of the sprayskirt curled reluctantly over the cockpit edge. I looked up at You Will Die Falls and the angry serpent of water tearing downhill from its base. My hands pushed the kayak forward.

Go! Go!

The paddle clawed at the shallow water, digging for any momentum it could find. The current slugged the boat nose to throw it downstream. I tilted, got past it, swung around and paddled madly for the space between two boulders. The nose danced over a wave, came to the edge of the first drop and plummeted into frothing water. I had just enough time to brace and avoid flipping, but no time to congratulate myself before I was going over the next drop. I passed within half a foot of an outstretched branch

The water mellowed, but only a little. I picked my way through wave trains and rocks as I sighted the first bridge. It was a low one. I popped my head down as I went under.

A couple of gallons of water sloshed around the boat hull. What the hell? The new sprayskirt was supposed to fix that. I had a bilge pump with me, but there were no eddies in sight for me to pump myself. Finally, I found a place where I could park behind some scrub birches and pump water. I noticed that two screws that I had planned  (and forgotten) to tighten on top of the boat hull had completely rattled out. They left two holes about half the size of a ladybug right next to the cockpit for water to rush into.

I finished pumping and struggled my sprayskirt back on with much profanity.

The river widened out as I went, diminishing the current’s reckless force, but also exposing more rocks. I would try to swing around one rock, only to get hung up on another one that was partly submerged.

One of these unruly citizens caught my boat and turned it sideways so that the current began piling up on top.

‘Here comes the flip,’ I thought unhappily, preparing myself to be ready to grab the escape strap in front of the sprayskirt. ‘A real pro would be able to save himself with a hip snap.’

Then, I tried snapping my hips. The boat started turning back. I made a desperate slap at the water with my open palm and then I was back upright.

I paddled back into the current and found a place to empty the boat at the edge of the golf course near Bilek’s Surprise. I scouted the rapid, decided I really wasn’t going to run it, then started walking back to my boat. I hear a small crash and breaking branches. I whirled around in time to see a golf ball bounce onto the ground behind me.  A gaggle of silver haired business types looked down on me from the grassy knoll where their carts were parked.

Dangerous place. I was glad to be wearing a helmet.

Back in my boat I bombed a series of drops to beneath the last cart bridge before Bilek’s  where I swung into an eddy.

I portaged down the hill and into the woods and launched anew. The canyon re-narrowed so that the river was once again tight and powerful. I spotted a rock that I had left on a boulder earlier and swung my boat into another eddy to re-scout the rapid. After my run beneath You Will Die Falls, this section of river looked far less intimidating than it had earlier. I found myself making some quick moves, but also getting my boat more or less where I wanted it to go. Several of the drops sent water up to chest height, which was fun, though my boat started filling with more water.

Once again roaring water filled my ears. The river was about to plunge through its last canyon before Lake Superior. I was not.

I spun into an eddy near a cart bridge and flipped my sprayskirt up.

I pumped out my boat, got out, flipped it over and emptied the rest of the water.

The time I had spent on the river had been maybe 10 percent of the trip; the rest was biking and scouting, messing with cam  straps to get the boat on the trailer. Yet my work and Jon The Bike Guy’s expertise had meant that the trip had a certain style. I might well have executed the first bike/kayak run on the lower Poplar. Whether it was worth the trouble, well that’s another question. The thing had worked.

I hoisted the boat on my shoulder and walked it back to where the bike waited to take us home.

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Hitting the Meat

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That’s me going over the last rapid in the Cascade River before it empties into Lake Superior. Photo courtesy of Chuck and Sheila Noel.

 

I’m still afraid of going under.

That’s what I realized as I sat at the edge of a gravel bar in my new whitewater kayak, studying the rapid in front of me.

It was pretty straightforward. Shove off, hit the waves beneath the bridge, aim right, paddle like a lunatic as the nose of the kayak drops out, hit the standing wave and hope that it doesn’t tilt the boat over, leaving me thrashing in the icy water of Lake Superior.

This was the end of the line for the Cascade River just west of Grand Marais Minnesota. Immediately downstream of me was the bridge where Highway 61 passes over. It created a beautiful archway, a frame for Superior’s cold horizon, just a hundred yards away. Upstream were the real falls: 20+ foot drops that real life lunatics actually run. So what I was doing was kids’ stuff basically.

There were no rocks to dodge at the last minute, no undercut canyon walls or gnarly branches to get hung up on. The boiling piles of water might have flipped a boat, but weren’t going to recirculate me and drag me under.

Still,  my mind was haunted by a primal sense of unease, as I waited on shore, an unwillingness to accept that I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen, and I would have to let myself find out.

It was just like how Tom Petty sings it, in his lame-ass song: waiting is the hardest part.

So I shoved off and embraced the irrevocability of the current.

“Remember, that you are actually doing this,” I told myself.

The boat passed beneath the shadow of the bridge, waves slapped over the cockpit. I steered right to avoid the strongest part of the hydraulic at the bottom of the rapid, what we called “the meat” during my summer of rafting two years ago.

Then the yak tilted downward, and I paddled for what I was worth.

Chunk!

The wave came up against my boat. The nose plowed through. But then the rapid pulled a dirty wrestling move, twisting the boat and jerking me sideways in the current. I slapped the water with a low brace and came back up.

Gentle waves from the lake lapped up against my bow as I bobbed along the current. The river created a brownish path through the Superior’s blue waters. This was the tannic acid dissolved from fallen   pine needles and leaves. This also created the tiny dancing bubbles, which make me thirsty for a pint of nitro stout.

I spun my boat around to look at the churning brown maw of the rapid.

“Chicken,” it said. “You didn’t hit the meat.”

“I’ll show you.” I told the river. “I’m going down again, but it’ll be when I’m good and ready.”

The second run, I also avoided the meat. I hung entirely to the right this time and hit the wave at the bottom straight on. This time the rapid didn’t even come close to flipping me.

There was no excuse to not hit the meat now. I was prepared to flip and had brought a paddle float along to rescue myself if necessary.

The kayak, went over the edge again. I aimed at a glistening wave in the middle of the river, bumped over it and went down, following the triangular tongue of dark racing water to the center of the meat. The white boiling water raged up and now it was ride or die baby.

Wham!

This time the water slammed up to my chest. As I pulled out of the wave, the kayak did a wheelie. For a second I was worried that it was going to dump me backward, but again, the river god had mercy.

A couple of RV’ers on the river bank had seen it all go down, asked me if I wanted to do another run and get my picture taken. Well, playing to my vanity seldom fails.

The run went much the same as the previous one, only I tilted a bit at the end and had to brace myself against a flip. Having photo evidence from the couple was another nice plus and I was glad they were gracious enough to stick around.  Of course, I seem to remember the rapid looking bigger and more terrifying than that. Funny thing, memory.

Having hit the meat, I knew that I could sleep easier that night. But, I still had another thing to take care of: I hadn’t flipped yet.

I needed some more practice with my Eskimo Roll. I grimaced and turned turtle in the 38 degree water. I leaned back, snapped my hips and thrust my paddle down. I was about 80 percent of the way there, when I felt that fiend gravity pulling my back. It was then that I felt my paddle blade connect with the stony lake bottom. The tiny shove was enough to send me the rest of the way upright.

I sat there with a colossal brain freeze thinking about how the roll didn’t count, how I cheated and needed to do another one with better form. Then I needed to paddle straight back to the meat and fight it and flip, fight it and flip and fight it until I became a real whitewater kayaker.

I considered this, and then thought, maybe next time.

I was done for the day.

*******

You want to see what some real courage in a kayak looks like?

I was moved to hear about the recent Paddle in Seattle against the Shell Oil rig which is in port now. The rig is Alaska-bound with the blessing of the Obama presidency, which just made the shameful decision to approve Shell’s oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea — part of the Arctic Ocean.

Many others have pointed out the irony that there is a rush to drill oil in the Arctic Ocean as the ice caps have receded due to the global warming, which is a direct consequence of — hold it — oil drilling. But you knew that already. And you probably already know that oil has a nasty habit of spilling, like that time in the Gulf of Mexico, also in California most recently. Oil has spilled a lot these last couple years in the midst of the oil boom, and I’m sure no one will be surprised if it spills a bunch more times, destroying a few rivers, ecosystems and peoples’ livelihoods along the way.

So I’m just here to say that I, like you, think that this arctic oil drilling decision sucks. The stupidity of the decision, like so much policy these days is rooted in incredible short-term selfishness that fills me with despair.

And now, to everyone who had the courage to get into the boats, I want to say “thank you,” because you help me turn back some of that despair and because I think it is a responsibility of folks who love the outdoors (including me) to stand up for these important places and ultimately the planet that we live and breathe.

You took up that responsibility by getting out on the water and surrounding the rig, letting the world know that it wasn’t welcome in your harbor. Some would argue that this was just a gesture. And yet, even if that rig ends up despoiling habitat and contributing to climate change, it would have been far worse for it to gone off unchallenged with approval by default from citizens like you and me.

I wasn’t there with you, but I feel like you were there for me, and for that, I owe you one.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/paddle-in-seattle-protesters-gather-against-shell-oil-rig/

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Last Ice

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Portrait of the author from his alcove

The kayak bobbed up and down on rolling three-foot swells as I paddled along the basalt cliffs of Lake Superior.

It was almost 9 p.m. but at the end of June on the North Shore, that still left me at least a good hour of decent light before the darkness. The ostentatious lake homes to my right gave way to depopulated state forest, where raggedy birch and aspen flashed the underside of their leaves in the offshore wind.

Then I found my cool place. It’s a break in the cliffs where the millennia of pounding surf have blasted out an alcove. There’s a rock shelf, leading up to a living room-sized space, where a visitor can stand underneath an overhang, protected from any rainfall, wrapped up in the shadow of the stone.

I paddled closer.

Waves flew in at the rock and exploded up like fireworks. Water piled up on the shelf and then flowed backwards, creating a small outward current above the waves’ up-down motion.

Even bobbing in the surf, I could still make out the telltale patch of white in the alcove’s gloom. There was ice here.

Ice! And it was almost Independence Day.

The frigid legacy of the 2013-14 winter still lingered where the ledges protected it from the sun. Maybe 20 pounds of the stuff was left now, and it was vanishing drip by drip into the lake, which had pushed it up here.

Only a few months before, Superior had been completely frozen, all 32,000 thousand square miles of it. It was the first time this had happened since 1979.

I had to get out for a closer look.

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I approached the rocks with the caution of someone coming up on a dangerous animal. I would need to get up on shore right behind a wave and get out quickly before the next one crashed over me.

I popped my spray skirt off at 10 feet away; then got my feet out of the cock pit, while my butt was still in the seat, ready to swing out of the boat with acrobatic ease. Of course, nothing works as prettily as it’s supposed to.

I landed in waist deep water on an algae-slick stone slope. I almost fell over right there, but managed to steady myself against the boat — just in time for the next wave to slam it against my hips. Using a set of ballerina steps, I managed to mince my way up the rock while keeping the boat perpendicular to the waves. I finally heaved it onto the rock in front of me and dragged myself up after it.

The waves were still grabbing up the boat several feet up the ledge, so I ended up pulling it even further, before I decided it was safe to let go.

 

The alcove is hardly the grandest place around, not even on Lake Superior, which boasts massive sea-caves around the Apostle Islands and Tettegouche State Park. Still I was pleased to walk past the curtain of drips from above into the darker recesses. There, I could look back over the miles of water to the horizon line. The silhouetted rock framed this beautifully.

The waves had wrought a pillar out of one section of the wall, which was a nice architectural flourish. Then there was the ice. It was mostly white, though there were some transparent parts along the edges. I photographed it next to a kayak paddle to remember it. Soon it would be gone, and this made me sad.

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Some of the last ice left on Lake Superior, June 30

 

I was proud too. No one I’d talked to about the lakeshore had mentioned this little alcove. I’m sure I was the only one who knew that there was still ice here. The place was easy enough to overlook from a motorboat skipping along the waves at high speed.

As for accessing it from land, it would be difficult, dangerous work to try to descend the walls.

I found it. Maybe this could be my place.

No, I hadn’t carved the rock, or kept the ice sequestered there, but I still felt a strange sense of ownership. The feeling is familiar to anyone who “discovers” a dive bar, a band or maybe a continent and feels like he deserves some credit for appreciating it before his friends do.

Of course, I needed to bring said friends along so that they could appreciate it too. The problem is that then, the place is no longer undiscovered, it is no longer has the quality of being unique and unknown. Imagine John Wesley Powell revisiting the Grand Canyon to find tour buses and T-shirt vendors lining the south rim.

 

I wish I could say I was strong enough to be an exception to this trend. I’ve been guiding customers on kayak trips along the shoreline. Could I really keep this under my hat? Already, I thought about how cool it would be to show the people in my group the last ice on Lake Superior.

Sure enough, as soon as I got back to my apartment, one of my housemates asked what I’d been up to and I told him about the ice I’d found. I couldn’t resist showing photos of the alcove to the other guides, who — unlike me — had not discovered it yet.

I wondered if I’d keep my mouth shut for the next guided tour. When I found that I was with a stronger group and we still had plenty of time left at the turn-around point, I asked if anyone was interested in going to an interesting formation a bit further down the shoreline.

I pointed to the remaining ice in the alcove and got murmurs of appreciation mixed with wonder from the visitors. It was July 1 now and the ice wasn’t going to last much longer.

Satisfying as it was to see others enjoy the ice, I knew that it was just another part of the package for them. Rambling across it myself made me feel like I’d owned a part of it, though now the guests had a claim on it as well.

Well, sharing can be a virtue also, I suppose.

In any case, not many more got to say they saw the ice. The last of it melted off during the first hot days that rolled in ahead of the Fourth of July.

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Looking out at the kayak from the back of the alcove