Trail Tales: Deep Trouble on Isle Royale (1/6)
Last year our Isle Royale circumnavigation almost ended really, really badly
Horrible, life threatening accidents don’t “just happen” in the Outdoors. Usually, it isn’t one, glaring mistake. It’s not one make or break moment.
It’s a series of little, not obvious but very present mistakes, a slow burn of little errors and back luck, then all the sudden it overwhelms you and you’re in trouble for real.
It isn’t usually “we had no clue what we were doing and we knew it,” or “everything was totally fine and then it suddenly changed.” More often you find yourself saying “it was tricky but we were handling it, right up until the moment we weren’t”.
At least that’s my experience.
Now, after the fact, I’m obsessed with these stories. Some kind of horrible fascination with the way things deteriorate, because it happened to me. I need to hear them, to read how those little, forgivable mistakes added up. I need to pour over decisions and what I would have done differently, both in their stories and in my own.
I think the reality is that we all do the absolute best we can with the skills and knowledge we have, and I need to let all of the “should haves” go, because I really did do my best. I’ll do the “should haves” next time.
But for all that I’m addicted to the stories, the Into Thin Air, death on the mountains, I’m almost more caught up in the Island and its own stories.
For all of the trauma (and it is hard to write about things that ruined you a little, and Isle Royale absolutely ruined me) I cannot stop thinking about that island.
Not, I hope, in the gross way that a mountaineer claims he’s spiritually drawn and bound to Everest, or the way that a notable whitewater kayaker might claim a deep and sacred bond to a river he had previously only seen on Google Maps in Tibet. I don’t pretend to stake any claim, spiritual or not, to the island. But I am deeply obsessed and the Island has claimed me, first an innocent way as a kid, now as adult like a hallucination, like a drug.
Like something you dream about and your sea monster dreams warp into reality. Like an island that shimmers on the horizon and disappears into waves, like a panic attack at 2pm on a cold bathroom floor. Claimed like a haunting, like a sickness.
From the camp on Caribou Island.
All good stories start in high school. This one starts in the freshman science classroom, with a phenomenal teacher. Miss Cory started the year by showing us a slideshow of her time on Isle Royale researching the relationship between the wolves and moose. I was on the edge of my seat.
I grew up in a suburb, the sort of girl who cried in school enough to be known for it. More than anything in the world I wanted to be tough like my science teacher who spent summers on Isle Royale.
In college I started paddling, and visited Lake Superior for the first time. The Lake is huge and wild, and terrifying. I told a friend later that summer that I’d been reading about sea kayaking, about the people who paddle and thrive on the biggest lake in the world.
“I’m gonna be like that,” I told him.
He laughed and smiled a little.
“What?” I said.
“Maddy, don’t take this the wrong way but Lake Superior would eat you alive.”
I leaned back in my chair. Looking back, I know how my face looked. Guarded and hurt, like a put out fire.
“That’s a terrible idea,” he added.
I didn’t listen. Terrible idea or not, I wanted to be that person, the type who could sea kayak Lake Superior, the type who spent the summer on Isle Royale, and I had the means and luck to try, so I did.
Today, an Isle Royale map hangs on my wall, and my boat lives down by the shore. The Island itself is just out of sight from Grand Marais, the sleepy coastal town I’ve found a home in.
I wonder if this story, somewhere down the line of retellings, will ever not be about how badly I wanted to prove myself.
Connor fishes off a cliff near Two Harbors, Minnesota the day before we launch.
Our plan to paddle out to Isle Royale itself started a few years after this on a cabin floor, with maps and sea kayaking guides and a kind of crazy idea—
What if, and hear me out, we paddle 18 miles to then 110 miles around Isle Royale National Park?
It was my (stupid) idea. And it really wasn’t that stupid (but definitely at least a little stupid). Connor, Andy, and I were all strong paddlers and responsible guides. Andy and I were good navigators. Hadyn, the youngest, was a strong first year with other complimentary outdoor experience. Late September/ early October would be a little sketchy, but like I said, we weren’t so unprepared.
The part of the story I emphasize to other paddlers or hikers, or anyone in the backcountry is we weren’t inherently in over our heads. We know what we were doing, and we were skilled, and we still got in big trouble.
Our biggest mistakes were being young and a little foolhardy.
That, and I felt like I had something to prove.
Moonrise over Chippewa Harbor.
There are so many stories about using nature to work through things. And isn’t that a lovely narrative?
Nature does not like to be used. It’s not a plot device, and certainly not a therapist. It isn’t any of the metaphors you’ve projected upon it; nature simply is.
That I am obsessed with the Island is my own problem; that I need to prove to myself I am enough is all on me. The Island does not care, and Lake Superior does not care.
This post is the first post in a series,
and while this post is free, some subsequent parts of this story will be for paying Subscribers only. This is partly because writing this was a lot of work, and partly because this story and essay is deeply personal.
Click here to read the next part of Deep Trouble on Isle Royale.
*If you want to hear a brief and less deeply personal overview of what happened out there, you can hear me talk about it on a Lake Superior Podcast.