Believe that you can do anything you set your mind to.
Your passion should be your path
and your path should be your passion.
—Rosita Arvigo
IT HAS BEEN SAID that a person doesn’t take a trip, but rather a trip takes a person. The Inside Passage took me—in a kayak—from Anacortes, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska. The Inside Passage pulled me forward, into the now, as my past ebbed away and my future flooded in. In turn idyllic and epic, it took me through glacially carved landscapes and impenetrable forests, narrow channels and wide ocean passages, spellbinding seas and mixmaster waves. And it took me deep within myself, humbling me, reminding me that I had much to learn. I have still only begun to understand its impact.
In Spring 2010, with my world scaled down to an 18-foot sea kayak and a 1,200-mile ribbon of water known as the Inside Passage, I launched a journey of the sea and the soul that took me both north to Alaska and inward to the discovery of the depths of my own strength and courage. My journey took 66 days, during which time I lived in a wetsuit, paddled marathon distances for weeks on end, forged friendships with quirky people in the strangest of places, and pretended not to be intimidated by seven-hundred-pound grizzly bears and forty-ton whales. I lived my dream.
That dream entailed paddling through wild, steep country, subject to strong currents and wind, and extreme tidal differences. The realities of hypothermia, dwindling food supplies, nonexistent beaches, and alarmingly high walls of water rising over twenty feet were part and parcel of the journey. At times I floated in a magical world among whales and icebergs and immeasurable beauty; other times I paddled wildly with fear at my back.
I didn’t set out to research, discover, or prove anything, although the logistical planning often took on Olympian proportions. And, of course, the concept of paddling to Alaska was astronomical in itself. I’d never been to Alaska, let alone kayaked to it. Although I was an experienced kayaker and had some knowledge of the Inside Passage, I expected lessons would be presented along the way and prepared myself for mental, emotional, and physical extremes.
The “IP,” as those familiar with the waters of the Inside Passage refer to it, meanders along the western edge of North America. Touted as one of the most scenic and challenging paddling trips on the continent, its Holy Grail-ness seduced me. I’d first heard of the IP in 1992, when I met Jim Chester, a world-renowned adventurer whose own IP trip had blazed a trail for mine. He’d recently returned from his solo voyage, yet I thought nothing more of it, and certainly never intended to paddle the thing on my own. But life, I found, throws curveballs, and perspectives change.
In 2009, I watched my father, a once strong and comical man, deteriorate into a catatonic slump from advanced Alzheimer’s, finally dying in an upstate New York nursing home. Other unfortunate life events avalanched around me, heavy doors slammed in my face, and I lost my sense of where I belonged in space. I longed for a drama-free chunk of time where things would not repeatedly blow up around me. Then a book about a woman who kayaked the Inside Passage crossed my path. While devouring the pages, I wondered if my own life wasn’t on the cusp of something new and exciting, if certain opportunities had closed their doors so that life could simply make room for new doors to open. I finished the book, and in the privacy of my own company, defiantly proclaimed, “I’m paddling to Alaska!” Once I flung that door open, I began a new chapter—one that was dog-eared, highlighted, bookmarked, tattered and torn. After all, adventures are not tidy little things.
OVER TIME, JIM CHESTER’S own journey up the Inside Passage would prop open a few more doors—understated portals that stood patiently waiting for me to walk through them. Jim’s desire to share his solo experience led him to hammer out his entire handwritten journal on a Smith-Corona typewriter. These words graced the top of the first page:
They can’t understand. Can’t comprehend. Can’t relate. I existed on a different plane for a summer. Not necessarily better, nor worse, just different. My experience was personal. My very own. No one else’s. It cannot be adequately related to another. Case in point—it cannot even be successfully transferred from my mind to this paper.
When I first knew Jim, before I had experienced the Inside Passage myself, I thought that I understood. But it would take eighteen years for me to begin to comprehend what a journey of this nature meant and what could manifest along the way. As I began to chronicle my own experiences on “the Inside,” I slowly began to relate to all that his trip encompassed and how his complex involvement with mine would change my perspective—not only on this adventure we circuitously shared, but on all of life.
This is a journey through the physical, emotional and spiritual landscapes of the Inside Passage, told largely through my own lens of experience, but also, in part, through Jim’s. We supported each other through this cumulative adventure as it morphed into a story of two adventures. To fully engage in our stories, it’s important that the reader knows who this man was, and understands how he influenced me and what he meant to me and my journey.
Jim was a tall man, with large, square shoulders, and a deep, learned voice. Handsome in a disheveled manner, his chestnut-brown hair dangled halfway down his back, restrained in a scraggly ponytail. A thick salt-and-cinnamon beard kept company with a bushy mustache. His skin, weathered from elements and age, stretched taut over a prominent Adam’s apple. On his beak-like nose sat a pair of perpetually smudged glasses, and behind those lurked penetrating steely blue eyes that could pierce your soul.
A long-time member of the Explorers Club, Jim had the honor, on two occasions, of carrying the Explorers Club flag, once in 2007 and once in 2009. The flags were placed at the depths of the world’s uncharted, deepest caves. Jim had dined on chocolate-covered tarantulas and alligator sushi, petted exotic reptiles, and rubbed shoulders with New York’s finest glitterati in the heady atmosphere of the Waldorf Astoria where he stood groomed and polished, or at least as much as a country boy caver from Montana could be, waiting his turn at the podium—right behind fellow honoree Buzz Aldrin. The 106th Explorers Club Annual Dinner was a gala event where Jim would be presented with the Citation of Merit award, in recognition of his outstanding services to the Club, a professional society dedicated to scientific exploration of Earth, its oceans, and outer space.
In the eighteen years I knew Jim, I witnessed a marked adventurous streak coursing through his body. A voracious reader, he still had his childhood copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, read over and over, until, in Jim’s words, “its spine dropped off and the book’s pages threatened to scatter like a flock of surprised birds.” In the 43 years after Jim first opened that tome, he sea kayaked over two-thousand miles, dived thermal features in Yellowstone Lake, rappelled into a 240-foot well in a European medieval castle, and logged over 2,000 hours underground: long, sodden, and often miraculous hours that involved 475 descents and 210 caves. He loved to climb mountains, too. He dabbled in whitewater kayaking as a diversion from far-reaching hauls in his longer, lissome boat; and skied dry Montana powder when the water turned a bit hard during the winter months.
Undoubtedly, Tom Sawyer and his cronies were only one of many catalysts that hurled Jim into a life of exploration, risk and adventure—a life that he often shared with me. Together, we mucked about in caves, huffed up mountaintops, and careened down nerve-wracking rivers; but it was the sea kayaking, particularly paddling over longish periods of time, that enraptured me the most. It was like backpacking on the water, I thought, without the heavy weight on your shoulders and the blisters on your feet.
Without Jim, the Inside Passage would have just been something “out there” that I would not have experienced at the privileged level I did in 2010. His own Inside Passage journey was one of several catalysts for me to embark on my own adventure. From the conception of my plan to the very last paddle stroke, he became an integral player and wholeheartedly supported my desire to paddle the IP. I trusted Jim implicitly. He helped me find my true north—and my way back—and for that I am forever grateful. It’s my hope that throughout these pages, you will hear Jim’s voice and you will come to understand just how immensely he helped me with this journey, and through that you will also come to see, as I ultimately did, what a huge impact he had on my life.
TO WRITE THIS BOOK, I relied on my own memories—both written down and locked away in my mind—as well as on Jim’s journal. The myriad of email posts he wrote while I was underway, the responses to those emails, and the thousands of photos I took also greatly assisted in this memoir.
This is not intended to be a guidebook, nor is it a how-to book. The Inside Passage is an enormous place, and this book only scratches its surface. The route I chose, and the manner in which I executed it, represent a single option and only one experience: mine. Craving challenge, stability and enlivened potential, I chose this complex coastline to reawaken my sense of adventure, to find answers to questions I had not yet asked—and to live wildly. To abandon myself to the possibility of it all and to be open to all that it could teach me, to feel free and run with the wind, the waves, the sea itself.
Adventure yanks at all our shirtsleeves. It is my hope that the pages of this book will kindle your sense of adventure—whether you set foot in a kayak or not—and that by sharing the magic of this beautiful coastline, it will impart a stronger connection to the natural environment and inspire you not only to explore it, but to cherish and protect it. May that insatiable curiosity to know what’s around the next corner be your moxie, as it was ultimately mine.