40 Years Later, A Family Revisits Their Epic Canoe Trip | Short Film Showcase

[Music] As a kid, I loved listening to my parents tell stories about their adventures. One story in particular captured my imagination. In 1974, my parents and my uncle Andy built their own canoes and, against all advice, launched their boats into the Pacific to become some of the first people in modern history to paddle the Inside Passage. That story became a foundation of my identity, shaping the way I saw my parents and the notion of what it meant to grow up. But as a kid, [Music] story [Music] [Music].

My first memories are from adventures in the outdoors with Mom and Dad. They taught my brother Ben and me to fish and make fires, and when we got bored, they'd bore us back into the wilderness with stories from their youth—stories of exotic places and adventure. I honestly don't know when they first told us about the passage, but this is the story I remember. It began in 1970 when my dad, after finishing high school, got a job as a deckhand on a yacht called the Thea Foss, taking guests up and down the Inside Passage, a labyrinth of straits and islands that extends from Washington up the coast of British Columbia and into Alaska.

Everybody thought I had the dream job, and I would smile and nod my head, but my dream was to go and be off the boat, canoeing along the coastline. The first person he shared that dream with was his brother, and my dad and Andy have an unusually close relationship as brothers. You know, they grew up as best friends—not in the sort of way that a lot of people say, "Oh, my sibling is my best friend," like literally they were each other's best friends. People think that it's weird that we went to college and roomed together; to me, that was just natural.

Up until that time, I was not aware of anyone trying the passage. Everyone we talked to said it was crazy. There were a lot of letters that literally said, "You would kill yourself; don't do it!" When he said that he and his brother wanted to go on a canoe trip but invited me along, it sounded like a fantastic adventure to me. Her parents thought it was a really bad idea, and they actually sent her to a psychiatrist with the mission that her job was to talk Sarah out of doing the trip. Andy and I were studying and going to classes during the day; we just basically would dedicate every evening for four months building these canoes with a dream of where we were going to go with these boats.

Alan and I had very little understanding of what our parents were going through. My mom, she wrote long afterwards that as they paddled off, she cried, and she wondered whether she'd ever see her kids again. The first start was, "I like music; drama, calm is a beautiful thing," and you just get this feeling like, "Oh yeah, I got to get a picture of this." I know in here that, and of course, everybody's excited, jabbering. It doesn't take many hours before all that quiets down—there by stroking away, quiet. [Music] [Music].

The Inland Passage is one of those beautiful places in the world. All you see are mountains rising out of the ocean, and the water is almost silent. But in that silence is an ecosystem just packed with life, and your boat makes these ripples, and the ripples then start reflecting the sky, the water itself, and the greenness of the landscapes, and it all has these moving, undulating shapes. It's so beautiful.

Ellen and I were together all the time; it was pretty romantic. Yeah, I was pretty hooked. If you're still paddling and talking with each other at the end of that eight hundred miles, then you better marry. Oh, of course, I can! The whole thing's awesome. [Music] For almost two months, they paddled, fish camp-tuned through one of North America's wildest places. [Music]

Changed. I didn't know it at the time, of course, but it really was a coming-of-age story. It was one of those stories where people said, "Don't do it," and to go ahead and do something that people said you shouldn't do. I mean, for us, that was incredibly empowering. When it was all said and done, it said something made me see that we could take a dream and move it into the presence of reality. That made it true—that's the story I heard growing up. This was my dad's journey into adulthood, and like all good stories, that adventure lived on in our imaginations.

The story about the original canoe trip—there’s something that Nathan and I grew up hearing a fair amount about. It's a legend in our family. It's something that Ben and I have told every one of our friends, every one of our girlfriends. We grew up with one of the original canoes as part of our household, and we really beaded it up in the Virginia rivers, which it really wasn't designed to do. Every time we took that canoe out, it was sort of a source of fascination to me that my dad had built it.

We had always talked about how cool it would be to redo the canoe trip, but as we took our own paths into adulthood, that dream got put on hold. Distracted with my own life, I hardly noticed my dad getting older. In my mind, he was still that young man who braved the Inside Passage in his handmade canoe, but little by little he changed. Every year that version of my dad seems to slip a little further away, and with it, my childhood dream of canoeing the passage with him.

Then, in September of 2015, I married Amanda. Maybe weddings have a way of making people reflect on their own lives; I don't know. But that day my dad and uncle Andy had this conversation. They said that they'd never really finished the canoe trip. I was shocked. That meant that the story I know still had chapters to be written. Dad, Mandy explained, that the original goal was to canoe all the way, did you know? But they stopped in Ketchikan when the summer ended. There were still 300 miles to go, and I think we all realized that if we didn't do it now, it would never happen. So right there at the wedding, we agreed that now was the time to finish what they had started 43 years ago.

[Music] One of the first things was how to get the boat ready. These boats are now more than 40 years old, and you know they've been through a lot. We packed up our gear and canoes and loaded them onto a ferry in Bellingham. From there, we traveled two days up the coast to Ketchikan to pick up where they had ended their journey in 1974. We paddled north as brothers, Ben and I in one canoe, and our dad and Andy in the other.

So the first job—I caught three fish all at once! Crazy! I thought I had a snag; I was like, so I had one on the jig and two of the cebiche. Then after that, I've almost never had to fish more than a minute to catch a fish. You kind of eat like—I came out here, you know, rockfish is an inexpensive fish. Yesterday, we pulled up a crab pot that was just packed with huge male Dungeness crab, and you pay a lot of money at the restaurants building like that. [Music]

This is a landscape with unbelievable abundance. [Music] It's rolling hills and trees in a maze of water. [Music] You feel tiny, and it kind of living previously in Spain. [Music] [Music] For all of us who get the outdoors and understand how it connects into the Earth, man gives you a state of wonder and a state of awe. It's a state of religion. This is the place where you think the world is a great place.

Hi, Mrs. M. Incredible! [Music] [Music] Yeah, when you're out here, you just have no awareness of time. You just paddle along; time disappears. Time is such an odd mistress that feels just like a few years have gone by since we were here in 1974. To believe that it's 43 years—I don’t know; it doesn't make sense.

When you age, it’s death by a million cuts; you know, you never really feel it going on. I think most of us feel young inside, and so coming back to this, a lot of it feels similar. But, you know, picking up the boats— they’re heavier than they were. Growing up with this image of our parents as sort of invincible figures, I think, as a lot of people do. To see our parents show the first signs of physical decline is something that's kind of difficult to come to grips with as a son.

Just yesterday, I was—we were getting camp together; he was carrying a pot out, and he just slipped on a log, and I could tell that he, you know, he wasn't a young man anymore. But it's hard to see that. [Music] As can be this, and I am an ocean value. I stand by me. My parents' stories taught me a lot about the kind of person I wanted to be, but until now, I had always known the characters in those tales as storybook heroes and heroines frozen in time.

I had grown up, and I struggled to recognize those adventurers in the past and my parents of the present. But as we paddled north, I discovered something I should have known all along—my dad had never stopped being that guy who paddled the Inside Passage in 1974. He just became other things too.

I don't think that adulthood is something that you do between the age of 0 and 30, and then that's it. That's where you are. I think that's a real fallacy. Though there are certain kinds of ways we grow during those first 30 years that are different from the ways that we grow in later years, I don't think that ever stops in life. I don't think it ever stops in life.

You know, not everyone can do the hardest route; not everyone can be the fastest. But everyone can do their own epic journey. Follow that voice in you that says, "Yeah, I can do this," or "I want to do this," or "I just want to give it a shot." Maybe 1974 was the end of one trip, but it wasn't the end of my parents' epic journeys. That voice inside them never faded. Some of their biggest adventures were still ahead.

That's the thing I was too young to understand when I first heard the story of the Inside Passage. I thought life was like a book: when a new chapter begins, the chapter before it has to end. But life story is more like a tree with branches; as the chapters, new branches don't replace the old ones; they grow alongside them. And the more branches, the more magnificent the tree.

Canoeing the passage with my dad is a new branch on my tree, growing alongside older ones, and every branch is a piece of the story I'll tell my kids—the story they're going to tell themselves—not lying. And before I know it, they will grow up watching me getting that—maybe they never really understood their dad's whole story either. [Music] You, you [Music]