QC, THAT'S WHERE!
QC, THAT'S WHERE!
An Epic Canoe Journey with Dana Starkell: From Childhood Adventures to Record-Breaking Feats
Do not attempt the feats described in this podcast unless with a trained guide or professional. Always practice safety on the water. Find paddlecraft info on the US Coast Guard's website, here
Adventurer Dana Starkell shares his awe-inspiring journey, starting from his unique upbringing with an eccentric father who turned ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. Listen as Dana relives his vivid childhood memories of rescuing crows and exploring forests, which ignited his lifelong passion for nature and animals.
Dana takes us through the monumental canoe trip he undertook with his father, which doubled the existing world record. Dana emphasized the value of shared experiences over mere records. From navigating ice-laden rivers to crossing Lake Winnipeg, Dana’s story is a testament to mental stamina and the psychological advantages of focusing on the ultimate goal. Discover the critical safety measures they took, like maintaining water supplies and dealing with food scarcity, and how these adventures shaped Dana's unrelenting spirit.
Finally, explore Dana's multifaceted life beyond canoeing as he recounts his journey as a musician and his eventual move to the Quad Cities. Learn how he turned his father's travel diaries into the best-selling book "Paddle to the Amazon," and how a chance connection during a book tour led him to a new chapter in his life. Dive into the charm of the Quad Cities, from its extensive bike trails to community events like FloatZilla, and get inspired by Dana’s continuous efforts to foster community spirit and record-breaking participation.
Find the Paddle to the Amazon book here
Watch the Paddle to the Amazon documentary here
QC, That's Where is a podcast powered by Visit Quad Cities. Through the people, partnerships, and personalities woven throughout the Quad Cities region, you'll meet real Quad Citizens and hear the untold stories of the region.
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you, you Thank you. Where do you find a family of communities connected by the storied mississippi river, where young explorers and dreamers, investors and entrepreneurs thrive? Where can you connect with real people living and creating in a place that's as genuine as it is quirky QC? That's when.
Speaker 2:Welcome to QC. That's when I'm Katrina, your host, and I'm so pumped today to be talking to adventurer Dana Starkel. Dana, I want to toss it right to you immediately because you've got some really awesome background. You've got a world record under your belt. You've got some great experience with activating our Mississippi River. You're a musician by trade, so I want to start where you want to start. Who is Dana?
Speaker 3:wow. So you know, typical kid when I was, when I was, you know, growing up, but the the big difference, I would say, is that my dad was very eccentric, um, and I mean eccentric to the point where that's like, when you live in a neighborhood, everybody knows that house, it's the house where the crazy people live, and and when I say crazy, I just mean I really mean eccentric, like you always knew that when you passed by our house there was probably something weird going on or something's up, you know.
Speaker 2:Like what. What was going on?
Speaker 3:Well, infinite numbers of things. But as an example, like you know, we had a neighbor whose, whose yard our next door neighbor, nice guy, and everything he had, his, his whole yard was like a golf course. It was so trimmed I mean, we used to joke that he would get his scissors out to make sure a blade was just right, you know. And then we had my dad's house, where I live, our whole, our whole yard in Our whole yard in a big city of a million people looked like a square area, like a quarter acre of wild forest, you know, we had giant poplars and everything blowing into his yard and everything imaginable that could drive this poor guy crazy.
Speaker 3:And he thought my brother and I were a bunch of wild Indians and I was going to attack and and then, anyways, when I was a young kid, I had big imagination. I was always looking at things I wanted to do when I got older. And well, one of the things that I wanted to do was be a veterinarian. I liked animals and different things, and my dad knew that too. So when I was a young kid, I remember one time we went out.
Speaker 3:We used to go for long, long, like five, six, seven mile walks every weekend and we noticed there was a bunch of crows going over towards this farm field, across this farm field and then into a forested area. So my dad said you know, when I was was a kid, I had a pet crow. Um, I bet you they have some crows over there. We should go check it out. So we did and sure enough, we found some nests way up this really, really high tree. So my dad had me climb up to the top of this thing to to check out the nest and I said, yeah, there's eggs in there and everything, and of course the crows were attacking me and everything. We'll come back in a little while. And he says typically a lot of times if there's three or four crows uh, young ones, they will starve. One of them will end up starving to death.
Speaker 3:They'll just feed the strongest ones, he says so we can, we'll pick the weakest one and we'll save it, you know. And so, sure enough, we went back and I climbed back up the tree, but this time I built a little tiny, almost like a little birdhouse, with a little roof on it and that, and a little opened up and I climbed up to the top and I remember I went up there and I was, I was looking at these birds that are getting dive, bombed and everything, and I picked one out and I had put it into the straw and and then my dad, from way down below, he goes dana, don't forget, pick the smallest one. Because as I was putting them into the net, into the straw, because my dad's had a crow, his name was timmy and we were going to call this one timmy too. So I'm putting him into the straw. I'm like, oh, timmy, you know.
Speaker 3:And my dad says, don't forget to pay for this one. I'm like, oh, so I took him back, put him back in the nest, took another one, the smallest one. I said, oh, timmy. So then, anyways, we took them all. But you can imagine, like my neighbor, this is like a typical event. And we're coming home, we got this big birdhouse I'm carrying, and the next thing, you know, we got a crow flying around attacking his tomatoes and everything, and it was always something.
Speaker 2:So all of this sounds like, first of all, excellent bonding with your dad. I want to talk more about him in a little bit. So just like a wild experience growing up and we talked before we started recording You're from Canada and you said 150 miles north of Grand Forks If you're trying to visualize it.
Speaker 3:you know, if you think of Fargo, there's the TV show Fargo and then you go about 75 miles north of that, you would get Grand Forks, okay.
Speaker 3:And 150 miles straight north of there, almost on a straight line, is Winnipeg and that highway there, that interstate highway that goes to winnipeg, and that, that highway there, that, that interstate highway that goes to winnipeg. Well, the last section of it in canada is not interstate, but that's the old, that's the old pioneer walking roads, any of the innate, even the native walking roads originally, where people used to walk along before there were roads and everything else so that's what eventually became those highways so, growing up that way, you know, I mean, what kind of?
Speaker 2:what kind of piqued your interest into what you ended up doing? Um, as an adult like you, you have a fabulous um canoe trip record that I want to ask you about. But what kind of um? What led you to being this adventurer?
Speaker 3:well, it was my dad, I mean, you know. So he had a, you know, really tough background because when he was a young kid, growing up in winnipeg, he was with abusive, an abusive family who drank a lot, used to lock him out of the house in the middle of winter 40 below weather type thing and he got taken away by children's services and then he was in a in a children's home, which was kind of like an all-over twist type experience for years. And then him and his sister, who were both there, although he never, hardly ever, saw his sister because all the girls and boys were separated he eventually got adopted into a family and the lady, after a couple of months she, died. Then he went back there and then he got adopted again. But to make a long story short, he just he was just a young kid.
Speaker 1:That didn't have family.
Speaker 3:He didn't know he had any ability to do anything. He was very insecure about a lot of things. But when he got adopted the second time it was a real strict family. They were Welsh and he had a couple of stepbrothers and all of his stepbrothers were involved in canoeing and were part of this canoe club up in Winnipeg and my dad was kind of curious about it, just because his brothers were, you know, but he hadn't really thought about it that much.
Speaker 3:But then what happened was they had this massive flood in the city and it flooded all of the homes around where he lived and a lot of the people like they had cars jacked up into trees to save their cars and stuff like that and um, and nobody could get their groceries because they're all the roads were blocked.
Speaker 3:So, having canoes, my dad jumped in a canoe and he went around, he started delivering groceries to people and for the first time in his life he had this sort of a sense of freedom and something that he could do that was meaningful, like helping people, and people appreciated this, and I think that little experience of just having that feeling was the first time he ever had this sense of himself.
Speaker 3:You know, you know, and so then, as he got a little bit older, he knew he had a chance to join this canoe club and start racing, which he really wanted to do, and and so he did that and he started entering a couple of the races and he started winning, but not not just winning like against young kids, like he was at his age, like I think I don't know how old he was then, he was probably 17, 18 years old but he started beating some of the top canoeists in Canada and he didn't even really think about it, but there was an Olympic kayaker who was a part of that club and he my dad had beaten him in one of these races and this guy had been in the Helsinki Olympics. And he goes who is this guy, you know? And so he came up to my dad, he said I'm going to start training you and he said we're going to go in the Canadian Championships and then go on to the Olympics in a few years, and my dad just couldn't even believe it, you know.
Speaker 3:but anyways, they became racing partners and they raced for years and different things, but the thing that my dad used to say about that experience.
Speaker 3:He says, you know, like growing up when he was younger, the biggest problem was that he never had anybody to really give him a kick in the rear end and to tell him that he could actually do things, that if he put his mind to something, whether it was sports or anything else, that he could achieve something. But he, if you worked, worked at it, you know. And so that was the thing that he got from this. Uh, olympic kayaker, bill brigden was this started to have some self-confidence with winning these races. It really helped him a lot. And then, as he got a little bit older, the thing was he kept thinking about well, I didn't know that I could do any of these things what else could I do?
Speaker 1:and?
Speaker 3:and how far could I push myself? So he would start making these little personal challenges like he's like. Well, in the spring, I'm going to put on a wetsuit and I'll jump into the river with ice and I'll swim.
Speaker 3:You know, 15, 20 30 miles down the river and see how far I can go in the ice flow, wow. And he would just do stuff like that and just see, and he would do these things and people would think say well, that's really a crazy. He says yeah. He says I know, it's just uh, I just I would. I thought it would be interesting and fun to do, you know he wanted to swim across. Lake Winnipeg, which is this massive like, he ended up swimming almost 30 miles across this lake, um, and he did it with another guy, but the other guy eventually got hypothermic and he had to drop out, but my dad was able to get across it.
Speaker 3:He would just love challenges like that and one of the things that he started thinking more as he got older and say like he said well, you know, I set myself these goals I I set it to be something that I think would be really a good challenge.
Speaker 3:But I, he says, it seems like whenever I set these goals I always achieve them and that's great and that's fun and everything he says, but it always leaves me with this empty feeling that I should have set it a little bit higher the bar, you know we're going a little bit further. You know so in 1970, partly because of all the craziness of my dad going off on, like, for example, a 104 day canoe race when my brother and my sister and I were all just a year apart, 10, 9 and 8 years old, actually 67, 67,. I was only 6, so 6, 5, and 4. So imagine my mom had three kids all by herself for 104 days and my dad's off gallivanting around Canada going off on his big canoe race.
Speaker 3:Well, things like that eventually my parents split up when I was 10. So now my dad was in a situation where he never wanted to be because he had come from a broken family.
Speaker 3:He didn't he never, wanted that for his kids. And at first all three of us were living with my mom, and after after my dad came back from another race that he was on, I just came back home. I wanted to stay home. I thought my mom would come back home too, you know, but that never happened. But my dad now I'm at home, and then a year later my brother came to stay with us too. But my dad says you know, we need something more than just kind of going to school every day and, you know, then going off to university. We need something that's kind of monumental.
Speaker 3:And he was looking for a real big challenge. And when I was a young kid I had this crazy idea of walking to the jungle because I had read tarzan.
Speaker 3:I became like when I was in grade six I just became so thrilled with this involved with that book and I had this crazy idea I was going to just walk to the jungle and live like tarzan thing. And my dad took that idea and his love of canadian and of history of all the old explorers and he put together this idea of going from winnipeg following a total of 6 000 miles of rivers and 6 000 miles of coastline and combined it into one big, monumental canid trip that at the time was double the world record. My dad was curious. He said, well, what is the world? And it was like our trip was double almost that, but that wasn't. It was really nothing to do with the reason why we did it.
Speaker 3:We did it more for the experience and you know, later on we're going to be talking about Closilla and that's an important element of that too, because I think you know the idea of breaking a world record like a Guinness World Record. It's a fun thing to do. It's kind of neat. You know, you could look at Quad Cities and see that we're in the Guinness Book of World Records. We broke the record of our all time with Godzilla. That would be really cool, cool records.
Speaker 3:We broke the record, we're all time with them, so that would be really cool, but I think over time that's not really going to be the thing that people remember the most I think, that what they will remember the most, if we do it will be the shared experience of being there with a friend and and other friends, and, and that day, and and and just whatever's happening that day. It may be, it may be what happens that evening when they get together and have dinner or something. Something interesting happens, but I think that's really more about what it's about trying to figure out, because my strategy is everybody that goes this year needs to find one other person that they can bring in, and if everybody that goes this year can bring in one more canoe, just one.
Speaker 2:We'll break the world record so floatzilla and and other experiences that just kind of bring people together. I think I agree it's. It's about just being part of something bigger than yourself. Um, it's something that is going to be, um, you know, maybe not necessarily a life-changing experience, but for sure a memorable one, something that you can tell a story about. Um, I, yeah, and I, I think you have the right mindset going in about the ideas you have to make this dream a reality for FloatZilla this year and really, like, kick up attendance to kick up excitement, kick up, um, just community involvement. I think there's.
Speaker 2:I'm interested in hearing more about what you have up your sleeve. Um, as far as, like the you know the record piece, you know it. It sounds cool to do, but there's like a picture behind it and I'd love to kind of track back to, to you and your dad, don, the record that you guys set. I mean, you were painting a beautiful picture of. You know it's. It's an experience. It's going to be double of what the current record was. So, just, I have the, the stat it's 12,181 mile canoe trip, um, guinness world record. Can you take me back to that time? It was 1980, uh, what yeah, 1980, june 1st 1980 okay, so take me back to that time.
Speaker 2:I mean, were you, were you anxious? Did you know that you were going to be embarking on something so monumental? Like, how did it all, kind of like, happen?
Speaker 3:Right. So going back to when I had finished reading Tarzan, and had this idea that was around the time. So in 1970, my dad was involved in another big canoe project and he was going to be gone for x number of weeks and that's when my mom let my dad know that that was going to be it, you know, and my dad even was going to cancel that, but she had already made up her mind.
Speaker 3:It was just too many years of strangeness. And you know what? My dad was just very eccentric, that way you know. And then so he told me, he first asked me if I would be interested in doing that when I was nine years old and my dad said I said so, when are we going to do that?
Speaker 3:He said, well, we'll have to wait until you and your brother are out of school. And I was, because of my age, I started school a year early. So, even though my brother was just a year younger than me, I had to wait. I graduated in 78. He didn't graduate until 1980. But that was the thing. My dad says well, we can't really go until you guys are out of school because we're going to be gone for two years. And so I'm like well then, I said, well then I'll be 19 years old. And I'm like, oh, my goodness, I'll be like years old. And I'm like, oh, my goodness, I'll be like an old man, you know. And I was like that's that's really. My dad says well, danny says that's really the only way that it's going to work. I said 10 years, yeah. He says yeah, and of course, 10 years when you're nine years old, this is like a million years, right?
Speaker 2:For sure, it's more than your current lifetime.
Speaker 3:That's right and so you know. But I never for one second, ever doubted that. Once I said to my dad that, yeah, I wanted to go, that we would go. And not only that, like he picked relatively right when I said it, I was going to do it, he went and checked calendars and stuff and he said we're going to leave on June 1st 1980, which will be a sunday.
Speaker 3:He wanted it. He was hoping it would be a sunday and it turned out it wasn't sunday, it was just a fluke, I don't know why. He wanted like the idea of it being a sunday when we left, just because it would be kind of a downtime day and not a bunch of hubbub going on and and so from that day forward I knew this is what we're going to do Now, even when we left. When I was 19,. I had a pretty good sense of geography. I collected stamps when I was a kid. I had stamps from all over the world. I mean literally almost every country in the world had stamps, and I had them all organized by continent. My dad was very detailed organized. I had every stamp in perfect order and all this kind of stuff. Like I had to have every stamp in perfect order and all this kind of stuff, and so I knew I had a sense of this geography. But there is just no way you can visualize that distance like you know, you look at it on the globe.
Speaker 3:You know, one way I like to sort of describe it as this is that sometimes I'll go to do a talk at a school and they they'll say, well, can you keep it down to half an hour? I said, well, you know. I said it's hard for me to keep it down to six hours. Really, I said, if I do it in an hour, like, let's say, if you give me an extra half hour, if you give me a whole hour to try to explain this story, our distance is 12,000 miles. That means I'm going to have to be speaking at 12,000 miles an hour. The distance, like you know, it's hard to visualize that distance. You know when you're a young kid and I remember my dad saying to me um, well, because I could reach my hand across the globe, from Winnipeg all the way to the jungle.
Speaker 3:He says well, how long do you think it would take you to go there? You know to walk all the way to the jungle and I thought maybe a few weeks. But you know, you just can't visualize what 12,000 miles is.
Speaker 3:And so anyways that's kind of how it started, and even when I was 19, I knew about a lot of these countries, but my dad didn't want to spook us before we even left, you know, because he was following what had gone on in Jonestown in Guyana, in South America, where all these people drank the Kool-Aid and, and you know, the Sandinistas were had taken over in Nicaragua.
Speaker 3:they were bringing in Russian tanks there and there was all kinds of turmoil going on and you know. But people used to say to my dad well, what, what are you going to do when you get to the ocean? Like how are you going to paddle this canoe in the ocean? You know my dad's well. He said I honestly. He said I don't exactly know because. And he said I'm not really that worried about it because we may not even get to the ocean.
Speaker 3:He said we got a long ways to go just to get all the way down to to uh port isabel, texas, before we get into mexico. He says that alone is over 3,000 miles, he says once we get down there, you know a lot of people paddle the Mississippi, but not too many people go from Winnipeg to the Mississippi and then from there to New Orleans and then from New Orleans all the way along Louisiana and Texas to Mexico. That's a big difference. But that was still really just the start of our trip.
Speaker 2:So along the way did you feel confident that this was going to happen? You guys were going to complete the goal, the full thing.
Speaker 3:In some ways, yes, but mostly because I really didn't know what was ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which, in this case, I mean, was it better to have some of the unknown and not necessarily have it all mapped out? I mean for me, I would maybe cause some undue anxiety.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Well, that's, that's interesting what you say there. But yeah, no, I think it's absolutely true that that not knowing all of the things that could go wrong was very helpful.
Speaker 3:You know, and and at the same time, you know it's not like you want to go into something blindly and not be prepared, but the truth is you just really can't prepare for these things yeah you know, and I think you know, the problem is if you look at a lot of things that people do want to do, and whether it's traveling or anything, really, if you just even wanted to be, you know, in any particular profession, that's, that's at a really high level. If you try to anticipate all the things that could go wrong and that won't work out, I think in a lot of cases it could easily defeat you you know because your mind just plays games with you after a while.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, you know, I think my dad had the right strategy. He knew that there was a lot of really serious things that we would have to deal with along the way, but I think he realized that it's just, you know, we'll have to deal with them and in most cases the things that we had to deal with were things that we really couldn't anticipate that much.
Speaker 3:And the things that most people would think would be problems were never problems at all. You know, one of the common things people say to me like did you do with, like the snakes and crocodiles and all of these different things that could get you right, never was a problem. Like like on it. We are 6 000 miles of coastline through some areas that are just loaded with sharks. Never had a single incident with a shark, but 6,000 miles of coastline.
Speaker 2:It sounds terrifying, you know, knowing that all these dangers are around you and you guys had a decade plus to prepare. And if we could just like take a moment right now, looking back, obviously you made it and accomplished it and you lived to tell the tale, um, like what, what safety measures just kind of being somebody who's um, you know, avid and in water and adventuring? Like what safety measures should people who you know kind of have a wild side and want to explore what things would you recommend that they just make sure that they're aware of or have or do?
Speaker 3:right. So I mean the things that that we that helped us be successful on our amazon trip.
Speaker 3:As far as you know, survival things go yeah um, you know you, I could kind of group it into two different sections. One would be when we're on the ocean, traveling like along the coastline, and one when we're in the rivers, because in they're very different situations. Yeah, you know, like when we're traveling along the coast, what probably the most important thing that my dad was always focused on our, our biggest danger was running out of water yeah, okay and we never ran out of water.
Speaker 3:You know, he um, we came close a few times but we never did, and partly that was because of my dad's years of canoe racing.
Speaker 3:A lot of times when they race they cannot stop for a drink of water, else they lose the race. And they would be in these long marathon type races up in northern canada and they just couldn't stop, you know, to get water and and and, uh. So my dad never wanted to run out of water. He's so paranoid about that. Every time we had an opportunity to get water we would be loaded to the brim. I used to always think my dad was crazy. Like he said, dad, like we, we've had no problem with water. Like we don't need to carry this, it's so heavy, you know. He said, dana, listen to me, we always keep up our water supply, you know. And and we never ran out of water. We never ran out of food.
Speaker 3:We came close one time. We were down to eat rice all day long and we had just a little bit at one point. I remember dropping a single grain of rice in the sand and picking it up because I was thinking I don't know when we're gonna see our next meal, you know. And we even had a dead fish that swam up on the on the beach and we put that in the canoe and eventually it was like rotting in the canoe and we still had this thing because we didn't know if we're going to get any more food. You do weird stuff when you're hungry and you know and um. But you know, the biggest thing for our trip, that the number one thing that we prepared for was our minds, because that was the number one thing that would defeat us on that trip.
Speaker 3:It would be allowing the day-to-day, month after month, like I mean, even when we were gone for a year paddling almost every day, you know, with good conditions, and that you look at the map and you look oh, my goodness, it's like, it's like we haven't gone anywhere. Oh, my gosh paddle like every day 30, 40 miles, all like on the ocean. We would paddle till the sun went down. Sometimes if we had good conditions, we wouldn't even eat all day because we just, we just wanted to make our miles and think maybe the next two days the wind's blowing, you can't even get out on the ocean yeah and and still no matter.
Speaker 3:It's just like day after day and you look at the map and you go like we didn't even go anywhere, like because the scale is so huge. You know, to kind of give an idea of the scale of the maps. You know, here's a sort of a simple way of thinking about something that everybody kind of has in their mind pretty much, but it's not really the way it is. Like. So you can imagine, like you think of Panama, the country of Panama in Central America, and you imagine going in a boat, say a ship, through the Panama Canal and you start out you're on the Caribbean side, so you'd be on the eastern side, and you paddle through the and you go through the canal in the ship and now you're out on the Pacific and the question would be what direction did you go and where are you? Like?
Speaker 3:In other words, you went from the Caribbean on the east to the Pacific on the west. You've gone through this long, long canal which is miles long, right, where are you? What direction have you ended up when you've gone through there? And the crazy thing is you go through from the Caribbean to the Pacific. You actually end up further east. That doesn't even seem possible, right?
Speaker 2:No, it drives me for a loop, yeah.
Speaker 3:But if you look at it on a map and you blow up the map and you look at Panama, you realize that Panama doesn't run north to south, it runs east to west and when you cut through the canal you cut through on an angle from west to east.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And you end up actually further east. You are on the other ocean, but you're actually further east than when you end up. Actually further east. You are on on the other ocean, but you're actually further east than when you started yeah and it's just what you know.
Speaker 3:But the thing is when you're standing there on the beach after you've landed in the canoe and you're looking out at the ocean and I've got my map there and I'm thinking like I'm looking straight north and yet the coast is this way. So it's just weird. So that's the beautiful thing about traveling the way that we did. Everything is so slow and it's so blown up. You look on a map, you think Panama, you just think of this little country down there. You don't realize there's 365 islands off of panama, just on the caribbean side wow and that and the only people that live there are indian people these kuna indians and they live like primitive people from, you know, a thousand years ago.
Speaker 3:They have all the traditional clothes and stuff and we come in there they think we come from outer space. They're stealing hairs out of our head and stuff you know oh my god, what a, what an experience, my gosh.
Speaker 2:And then you know, you just knew along the way just keep keep going. The course you're maybe looking north when you feel like you've been. You know, paddling and paddling, but just that mental stamina is really what got you guys through. Yeah, you know that's and paddling, but just that mental stamina is really what got you guys through yeah, you know that's, that's really a big part of it is that you know the bigger the the project you have, the more that it's.
Speaker 3:It's a mind thing you know, because you you have that. You know that that is like our strategy was simple. It's like we get up every morning and we try to see how many miles we can get done that day, like on the rivers we would say pretty much what we're going to paddle 30 miles, depending on how the current is like, if we're going against it or with it right huge difference, but we kind of knew how many miles or what time of the day we would stop.
Speaker 3:we used to like to start stop in the early afternoon, before the sun was really extremely hot, but on the ocean then it was different. It was like ocean was always like if we get on the ocean we'll paddle as many miles as we can, as long as the weather is good, because we never know how many days it might be before we can get back out again.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Through the breakers. But you just know like. You know like, as an example, like there was times on the ocean where we couldn't paddle because the way the wind was, and so we knew that from the as soon as we got up in the morning, we look out at the ocean. We're like there's no way, we're launching today, so we're going to spend all day at home at on the beach. So I'm going to have lots of time to practice guitar and my dad's going to be wandering the beach looking for coconuts or whatever he's going to do, that and which he loved to do, and and that's it, you know.
Speaker 3:And so the end of the day comes, and the problem is is that now you've still got 7 000 miles to go, and yet you didn't go an inch yeah and you don't travel at least one inch.
Speaker 3:So what we used to do is my dad and I, we grabbed the canoe and we pull it a foot forward. Now I know that that sounds so crazy, but at least we could go to bed that night thinking we're a little bit closer. Yeah, and like literally, when people say, like you know, you know these long distances, all done one inch at a time, it's true, like as long as you have this mindset that every day you're going to push forward and find some way to make some form of progress, then you, in most cases, if you keep going, you're gonna, you're gonna achieve your goal so two years, you guys are out there.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about that last mile, when you finally you got there, you did it, you set foot on land and your journey was done. What?
Speaker 3:was that feeling? It was a very sad feeling. Yeah, in a lot of ways it was a very sad feeling, because can you imagine? So I started the trip I was 19 and now I'm 21.
Speaker 3:So for me, thinking back, like how much we put into planning that trip, like my dad put 10 years of planning into it, for me 10 years of mentally preparing for it and and then we actually were able to do it. But for the whole two years of that trip, every single day, we were on the adventure, we were in it and and so we were living this incredible adventure. When we got to Belem, in the mouth of the Amazon, that's it, the adventure's over the like, even though I was. It was a relief to be there and it was over. It was. It was sad in the sense that I knew that there was never probably going to be a time in my life when I would ever do anything like that again. But it's not like something you just go. Well, next year let's go to the Amazon again.
Speaker 3:But even by the time we finished the trip, things had changed so dramatically in the world that if you did that trip a second time, it would be a completely different experience. You'd stop in all different places, the telecommunications would keep improving, people would know that we couldn't bluff them anymore. If we tried to do that today, you couldn't bluff the pirates that came out with their guns and say, oh yeah, the United States Army is following us and they know where we are and everything. No, they would get on their phones and make a few calls and they'd go. These guys have nobody protecting them, just you guys out in the open, yeah.
Speaker 3:We can do whatever we want. That's wild.
Speaker 2:I didn't expect that, uh, that sentiment of sadness, but it makes so much sense. Um, you know the all the prep and and everything you put into it and, um, you know, going forward, you know you had mentioned that you had brought your guitar with you, so did you like, did you leave that trip knowing this is my next chapter? I mean not that adventuring was going to end, but I mean it sounds like you really put a lot of hours probably into like harnessing that skill while you were accomplishing another bowl.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, music was always kind of my number one. My dad was a canoe adventurer and canoe racer and all that and I loved canoeing. The funny thing about canoeing is, I think of canoeing like similar to like walk. It's like you know, if somebody walked somewhere to have an experience, it's the experience that you had. You wouldn't talk every day about how many steps, many steps they took.
Speaker 3:You know it's yeah, it was very much about canoeing, but in a way it really was as much as not anything to do with canoeing. It was all to do with the people we met and the experiences we had and all the rest. You know, um and, but for me, music was always my big thing, you know. So I had stacks of classical guitar music that I brought along. I was memorizing measures every day and.
Speaker 3:I had this goal of coming back and playing in a restaurant. I just had this crazy idea that if I got back and I had a whole bunch of pieces memorized the classical guitar music I could find these really nice quiet restaurants where there was no smoking because I was asthmatic and I couldn't be playing in the bars at the time when they still had smoking and I could play in these restaurants and I could make a living playing guitar. That was the idea and I got. When I got back home I phoned every restaurant in the whole city and I only got a few people that even were interested in doing it.
Speaker 3:The first place was a pizza place and that didn't work out very good. The wrong atmosphere yeah and then and then I got into this place called the round table, which was set up like a like an old uh castle, oh, and it had like uh, six dining rooms with fireplaces and I would sit at these fireplaces and play class. It was perfect.
Speaker 2:I ended up playing there for seven years oh my gosh, you were the house guitarist, the musician.
Speaker 3:That's great yeah, prime rib dinner every Tuesday night.
Speaker 2:I was like this is the best yes, they better feed you for being the entertainment. Oh my god, so so did music propel you further. I mean, where along the line? I apologize for jumping, but like, where along the line did you end up in the Quad Cities?
Speaker 3:so what happened was um, our book. After my we got back home, my dad wanted to write up his diaries. He just wanted to have a good record. So he had diaries that he kept. There were 1400 pages of diaries and he wrote it all out in, because now he was, you know, sitting at home with a good pen and everything and he wrote, went through the whole diaries and wrote it out legibly and clearly and fleshed out some of the things that he was too tired to write out at the time and I helped him along the way. Like so, for two, for almost two years, I would my dad was writing this out and I was helping him and he was doing it all he did all it all on typewriter.
Speaker 3:He did the whole thing on typewriter. He was constantly redoing pages because he wanted it to just be right.
Speaker 3:Then we put it into the hands of a publishing company. It was just too big for them. They couldn't figure out what to do with it. There were too many pages. We got it back from them. Then we got it into the hands of a writer who we didn't think had hardly ever been out of his living room, but for some reason he was just a really good writer and he could make sense of this stuff. And he put our book together and it ended up becoming an international best-selling book.
Speaker 2:And the book is called.
Speaker 3:Paddle to the Amazon.
Speaker 3:So it came out in Canada in 87, five years after we finished the trip, and then two years later in 89, it came out in the United States.
Speaker 3:So we ended up doing about a two and a half month book tour, traveling to all the major cities in the United States, radio and TV and television shows, just yacking about our adventures and just telling the story and that's all we were supposed to do and we had so much fun doing that, it was just endless. But on that trip when we were in New York, we ended up doing an interview with Jane Pauley on the Today Show and a lady from the Quad Cities just by coincidence she was watching TV that morning and she thought oh, and she was kind of a really adventurous type. She saw it and said I've got to get that book. So she went and got the book, she read it, she really enjoyed the story and so she. She said I need to thank the author. So she phoned up my dad in Winnipeg and said you know, I just finished reading your story and they ended up talking for like half an hour on the phone and my dad says, well, you know, if you're ever up this way.
Speaker 3:You're always welcome to come by and say hello or whatever you know, and she goes I'm coming up to the morning thing. So she got her mom. Her mom at the time I think was in her 80s and her young daughter, young kid.
Speaker 3:They jumped in their car and they drove all the way up to Winnipeg. I think it took them two days to get there from the Quad Cities and they ended up staying with my dad for a little bit. They end up staying with me. I had just bought my first house and they were staying with me for a few days and then she says well, you know, if you ever want to come back to Quad Cities.
Speaker 3:You always got a place to stay here, you know. So that that winter came coming up, I had bought my first car when I was 28 years old. I was trying to wait till I was 30 years old, but I bought a car when I was 20 years old. I couldn't drive the stick shift on it. My brother told me to get stick shift. I couldn't figure this out. I was teaching at a school and there's a teacher there, the teacher. I said I was in the staff room.
Speaker 3:I said this guy looked like he knew how to timer guy. I said hey, do you know how to drive stick stiff? He goes. Sure, I think he's from norway, I said. I said do you want to go to the quad cities this winter for holidays? He goes where. I said quite city. I said where is that? I said it's in iowa, on the mississippi, and he goes yeah, maybe that'll be fun. I said, okay, great, let's do it so.
Speaker 3:So we came up and here in in christmas of 89, 89 or 90 I think it was 89, though, and yeah, it must have been 89 and um. And so this lady, her mom, lived on forest road right across from jimmy leach's house, the, a congressman who was the longest serving congressman, I think, of all time. He was from Quad Cities but he was in Washington, of course. But then he came home for the holidays and she said you know, he's going to have this big shindig over at his mansion there overlooking the river, and you know, it'd be really nice if you could go over there and play classical guitar for his party, and I'm like that would be amazing, like you know.
Speaker 3:So that's what happened. And then, when I was there, he found out about our story. He thought it was a good story. He thought it would be good for me to go and speak at some of the schools and inspire the kids to follow their dreams and different things. And so he said I can get you a special work visa. You know, because you're doing, you'd be doing something. That's like we have special visas for things like that.
Speaker 3:Where people they're, they have a unique ability or something, and it would be good for the United States and yeah, so that's how, and I always wanted to get away from the cold because I grew up in Winnipeg, which is, for me, is too cold in the winter. So I thought this is my ticket to the excited my dad used to call it the excited states of America.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's fun, I love that. Oh my gosh. So did you continue to do music? Then? Here you find that to be a staple for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean when I first got got here, just shortly after I got here, it took me about a year to get my work permit and all that. And then my first place that I started playing was this little restaurant in East Village called Christie's. It was like a nice little restaurant there and so I started playing there and I was only there maybe, I think for maybe a year or two years, and then they ended up moving up to the East Coast, but that was my first thing.
Speaker 3:And then I started doing the wedding things again and then, before you know it, I was doing too many weddings. There was just so many weddings.
Speaker 2:Oh sure, so all the while now, okay, so now you're in the Quad Cities and I have to tout the Quad Cities. I think everybody who lives here and everybody who visits I mean you can't deny the majesty of the you know the mighty Mississippi River and so that's now at your fingertips, which I'm sure was incredibly exciting to you given your background and your interests, and so you know the activation that we have on the Mississippi River like visit Quad Cities. We want to be a world-renowned Mississippi River destination. I think our community does a fabulous job of activating that asset. There's there's river action, you know there's. You know Float Zillow, there's events like that. There's our other river, the Rock River. You know the Backwater Gamblers. They put on shows and kind of, you know, have fun just honing their water ski talents and things like that. I mean, I'm sure you found at that time there was just so much coming up to do to really appreciate that natural asset.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I mean one of the reasons that I'm living in the Quad Cities and I know that some people might think this is crazy but one of the main reasons that I love living here is because of a bike trail could go easily over a hundred mile bike ride if you wanted to go in a single day. Go straight, uh falling, towards clinton and further out you could. You can have these incredible bike trips, and all along the river and every time you go there's different boat traffic. You know, sometimes you'll see these paddle boats. I think one of the the coolest things that the quad cities has done in recent history was designating the quad Cities as a port so that we actually have these tour boats that come all the way from New Orleans and stuff will stop here, and I think that's also some a thing that is that maybe is a treasure that is not utilized as much as it could be, because getting on one of those cruise boats and traveling to New Orleans and back what an amazing experience to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely, and it's so fun for us and you know our business partners who host them and do tours and show them around a little bit while they're like stopped here. It's fun for us to see the experiences that they have and take back. And you know, the Quad Cities is kind of like a hidden gem, like you know. You said to you know people back home like I'm going to the Quad Cities, well, where is that? It's funny, because we are such a significant like metro area with a pretty good population in the Midwest remains so unknown to so many and um, and I think we're trying to combat that because we know we have a lot to share and a lot to experience here. And when people come here, um, a lot of times they come with no expectation, simply because they just haven't had the exposure, and then they leave with a positive um memory or experience and then want to come back yeah, there's, I mean it's in quite cities.
Speaker 3:It's an interesting the way the whole, all those cities come together. You know, like each city, like Moline and East.
Speaker 1:East Moline and.
Speaker 3:Rock Island and these different areas. They all have their own kind of like. When I go on my bike and go across the bridge, I sometimes feel like I'm always going into a different country.
Speaker 2:It's it feels different, you know, I know what you mean from, yeah, from city to city.
Speaker 2:Like it's funny because, as well as they work together and and hold events together, like you know the QC marathon, which which runs across you know the bridges and into each different city, um things like that, like they work so well together and yet each of them still carries their own vibe and their own um like points of interest and attractions, and it's super cool, um the people who live in each different city, kind of you know, have different like industry that they work for, and yet they all work together so succinctly yeah, exactly, yeah it, yeah.
Speaker 3:It's interesting for me because, I mean, I grew up in a city where I'm in the center of the country and even to get to the border of our province forget it, I mean it's 150, 200 miles each way. So that never happens. But here you know on a daily basis. You know you go across to a different state and different, you know different. You see different flags and stuff and the streets are different.
Speaker 2:The way that they organize their streets is different, just little things oh yeah, the Illinois side streets are mainly numbered and then the Iowa streets have actual names.
Speaker 3:I've always found that kind of funny yeah, it's different, yeah, it's interesting and also oh, oh, yeah, oh no, I was just going to say I noticed a lot of times in the Illinois side, like a lot of times I would go on these streets but I could never get anywhere because they always end up in a big hill somewhere, you know. So, they'd have to like how the heck am I going to get from point A to B? I can't figure this out.
Speaker 2:And eventually I'd get to a main thoroughway, would go through, but a lot of them didn't. You know, yeah, and it kind of speaks to like just like the deep-rooted history here. I mean this this community is old, like we've we've seen a lot and and have you know, um, a lot of like streets that were made a long time ago that have later been incorporated into, like, our larger network of, you know, connecting the Iowa and Illinois side and everything. So it's cool that we still have those streets, that kind of you know, dead end or whatever, and you know, you know, say, rock Island, just because you know there's the historic district and they're very, very old homes and very old streets. Um, but yeah, it's very cool to experience kind of the different the modern, modern side, the historic side.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wait, katrina, I'm just. I'm getting the the heap hole here from the librarian. I think I've got like 10 minutes left All right, let's do yeah.
Speaker 3:So maybe, if there's any I could, we could always continue this on. Like I I'm not. I just happen to be at this library today, but we could always find another place if you have more questions to ask. But I was just thinking if there's any like with Floatzilla or anything, if there's anything in particular that you wanted to take care of, just in case I do get booted out of here.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, we can definitely. We'll wrap this and get to the final nuggets and I appreciate your time, so start here. So I do want to hear about your ideas for Floatzilla. You've mentioned everybody. Bring a friend. How else are we going to make this record happen this year?
Speaker 3:right, you know. So the way that I think of it is this is that right now, we're in July. Before you know it, in a blink of an eye, floatzilla is going to be here. So maybe the the easiest thing we could, it could do collectively, is this Everybody starts off with saying, okay, in the next, say this week, or this week, or by the end of next week, I have to find one more person that has a canoe, even if that person doesn't want to go in Floatzilla, but they just they have a canoe, and and then to find somebody that also would be willing to pick up that canoe and join in for the event. Right, so that would be step number one for everybody that plans on going this year to put it in their mind this week I've got to find.
Speaker 3:So every time you're in a conversation with a group of people, or whatever a number of people, do you know anybody who has a canoe? Oh, are they going to Float Civil this year? No, okay, great, because we're breaking the world record this year and I need to get one canoeist to join in that wasn't there previously, or or that wasn't going to go this year. And and that's the first step. And then the second step is to, of course, just make the plans that how am I going to get this canoe down to the, to whatever boat launch or wherever I'm going to put this canoe in? And if I'm not really good at paddling, who can I find? Who's a good paddler who can join me? And you know you, I think you can literally almost put in right at the location and just kind of be there.
Speaker 3:I'm not exactly sure of all the logistics of how that starts there, because I've never been to it myself. I've already got another canoeist lined up who I want to join me this year, so I've got myself it's going to be new, I've never been there before and I have another canoe lined up that I know has never been there before too. So I've kind of got my two already in place. But the idea is for everybody to do that. And if everybody did that, that would.
Speaker 3:That's all. That's all it's going to really take.
Speaker 2:I love that idea and I think our community is really good at building in that way with just person-to-person connectivity, so I'm hoping that that tactic works. Um, we'll, we'll help push that out as well. And then I'd love to hear, before we wrap up and I let you get on with your day, I'd love to hear what you've got going on with river action for the rest of the summer okay, good, so going.
Speaker 3:Just one quick last thing about Godzilla.
Speaker 3:What I was going to say to say is imagine a person's here in the Quad Cities, and I don't really know anybody in the Quad Cities that has a canoe, but I do know somebody over in Madison who has a canoe and it's a good friend of mine, and what you do is say, well, hey look, I'm going to call them up and they're going to come to the Quad Cities with their canoe. We're going to go up and we're going to come to the quad cities with their canoe.
Speaker 3:we're going to go up, we're going to break the world record and they're going to have a great barbecue this that evening with our friends who we haven't seen for three years or whatever, and you just make it into a really cool event and we accomplish both things like that um as far as um, you know the as far as river action goes, the thing that I've been involved with them off and on for the last number of years is the channel cat talks and it's just so much fun because, you know, sometimes there's a lot of people who've never been on those channel cats but but if you get on there they have a nice, the captain takes you on a nice tour around the river locally and the last captain I was with we ended up stopping on shore having a little shore break. People got out into kind of a really remote area on an island. Never experienced that before. It was really cool.
Speaker 3:And I'm just telling all my crazy stories about the Amazon trip. I've been down to Mississippi three times so I just sort of add in different little stories about the Mississippi, because that's really what it's about Channel Cat talks about the Mississippi. So I kind of do a mixture of Mississippi adventures and the Amazon trip. You know, kind of relate them together.
Speaker 2:Love that. It's like the back of your hand, the experience you've got and what you have to share on those talks. So we will get those posted on our events calendar so that people can find those and interact with you as well. Floatzilla is August 17th, so find a friend, get there, make a memory out of it. And on that note, dana, I just want to say thank you so much for everything that you've done to help harness this community's excitement and everything that you're going to be doing forward with Floatzilla. I would love to have you, per tradition on this podcast, fill in the blank.
Speaker 3:QC, that's where. Okay, oh, that's this. Okay, so QC, that's where. And I have to figure out something that I've experienced in the Quad Cities that's really cool, that happens here. Yeah, yeah, or, or you know just what.
Speaker 2:What makes you tick in the Quad Cities? That's really cool, that happens here, yeah, yeah. Or you know just what makes you tick in the Quad Cities? Anything, it could be music related, it could be eagle watching. I mean anything that strikes you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know, if I had to say about the Quad Cities, when I think about the Quad Cities, at least on a river basis, the Quad Cities where the, where the Mississippi runs east to west as opposed to north to south, which is kind of there's only a couple places on the entire Mississippi that are unique that way, and also the Quad Cities, which is one of the I think it would be last major city on the entire Mississippi that doesn't have a complete flood wall.
Speaker 3:So, you can actually go down to the downtown riverfront and you can get out there and actually see, you know, kind of walk down to the river. Most of the major cities these days, a lot of them, even smaller ones. The whole riverfront has got a big mass of seawall.
Speaker 2:That's a good point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so people don't always have that luxury, and I know that's something that the quad city says. You know, of course we, we pay a price for that with, yeah, with look, with flooding and uh and I sometimes make the joke that we should have the annual flood fest, but, but, but if we also have the advantage of actually being able to get down to the, to the riverfront, and see it kind of like it used to be, you know, like where you can actually get right down to the river.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's kind of a neat thing. As far as you know my experiences, I think you know the big things here are the music there's, you know there's all of these different music festivals we have here the jazz festivals and stuff fix and the seven mile run there's. There's so many cool things that happen here, but for me, I my my thing will always be the bike trails. I just love the bike trails, the how they go up and down along the side of the river and you can go up there and just go as long as you want, all day long and just biking and very peaceful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where the American discovery trail and the great and very peaceful yeah, where the American Discovery Trail and the Great River Trail collide. I love that, and it sounds like you have numerous QC. That's when instances, so I'm excited to hear that you've landed here and you're having a great experience, and so thank you again, dana, for this awesome chat. I really, really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Oh, you're so welcome, Regina. Have a great day.
Speaker 2:You too. I'll really appreciate it. Oh, you're so welcome, regina. Have a great day.
Speaker 1:You too. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you again. Sent straight to your phone, that's V-I-S-I-T-Q-C. One word to 38314. Message and data rates may apply.