Paddle Is Still Floating! (Or His Namesakes Are)

 

Unfortunately, the newspaper's photos are copyrighted and cannot be reproduced here. This is Paddle's route as Holling envisioned it.

 I received a wonderful e-mail from Dr. Lowell Wyse this week that Paddle is still floating!  He attached a story from Michigan’s MLive.  Its headline reads “Wooden boat inscribed with message washes up on Lake Superior beach 27 years after launch.” 

 Reporter Brandon Champion writes about the hand-carved canoe launched from Duluth and found at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore near Ashland, WI, Oct. 7, 2020.

 

“Twenty-seven years, two states and one Great Lake,” Champion states.  That was the journey taken by one little red, white, and blue boat launched from Duluth, Minnesota’s Brighton Beach in 1993 and discovered nearly three decades later near Ashland, Wisconsin on Oct. 7.

Lynn BeBeau and her husband discovered the boat while hiking on Lake Superior.

 The boat was inscribed, “I am traveling to the ocean. Please put me back in the water. Will you send information on your whereabouts to Lakewood School, Room 116 & 118 5207 N. Tischer Duluth, MN.”

Ms. BeBeau did as instructed and put the boat back in the water. Then she contacted the Lakewood Elementary School in Duluth.  At the school, she found a class had been reading Paddle-to-0the-Sea in the 1990s.  Two women, Bonnie Fritch and Brenda Schell, then launched two replica boats in 1993 during a field trip. A friend of Schell’s had made the boats and their classes painted them and added the message to the bottom.

 “I am not sure what happened to Brenda’s boat, but mine was spotted a year later up near the North Shore,” Fritch wrote to the newspaper.  “The people put a second coat of varnish on the boat and relaunched it.  I thought we wouldn’t hear any more about it. Amazing it is still out there.”

Now back to Dr. Wyse.  He is writing an “ecocritical analysis of Paddle” titled Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature.  The book will be published  by the University of Iowa Press in the summer of 2022.

 He wrote us, “I thought you might enjoy this news story about a 27-year-old Paddle boat.  I see that you featured a similar story on the Holling blog recently.

 “Unfortunately, I never received permission from Houghton Mifflin to reprint Holling's map image in my forthcoming book. But I'm happy that my ecocritical analysis of Paddle will reach a (slightly) wider audience.  The book's title is Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature.  It will be published by University of Iowa Press in summer 2021.”

 Thank you, Lyle, and thanks to the many people who are keeping Paddle’s memory bright and shining!