ELLEN MAGELLAN I rowed the Mississippi, a journey that ended up being broken into two sections. Because halfway down the Mississippi, my grandmother became ill with cancer and I got off the water to go be with her. She passed away a few months later. At this point, I was already planning what I would do after I finished the Mississippi River - the ocean. I already knew I would be getting a different boat. Before my grandmother passed, I asked her if I could name my next boat after her, and she said that would be nice. So my ocean rowboat is named Eve - which is short for Evelyn. I know she will be with me in some way at sea.
ISSUE #6 | INTERVIEW
When did you first come up with the idea to row around the world? When I was rowing on the Mississippi, I thought a lot about the ocean. After all, that was where the river was going. I thought about what my next expedition might be. I felt the urge to be off the rivers, and graduate to salt water. The Mississippi ends in the Gulf of Mexico, so I thought perhaps I could do a lap of the Gulf. I determined it would be wise to get an ocean-going vessel; there are two open-water crossings I did not feel confident doing in a canoe, not to mention the miles of surf I would have to launch in and out of, should I be in a boat I couldn't sleep in. So a bigger boat was in order. Well, I thought, if I get a boat that's capable of traversing Open Ocean, why stop at the Yucatan? Why not keep going south? And if I get far enough, I can make it to Panama - then I can go through the canal and I can be in the Pacific. And if I'm in a boat that's capable of Open Ocean, I can cross the Pacific. And at that point I'm almost ⅓ of the way around the world...if I just keep going west, I could row until I'm all the way back to where I started. That's not impossible at all.
© Ellen Falterman
The next year, I still had ½ of a river unfinished, and an ensuing journey along the coastline to my childhood home in Texas. So I picked up where I left off in my rowing canoe - named Edna after my other grandmother - and rowed down the rest of the Mississippi River, then west about 500 miles along the coastline to Texas. I finished my expedition in a river in East Texas. I ended the trip in the same spot on the water where my brother Patrick had died. It was a full circle that I had never planned, but was clear to me had been the plan all along. I was just following the water.
40 | The Wave Rowing
© Ellen Falterman
© Ellen Falterman
That was literally my thought process.
‘If I go far enough and long enough in one direction, that makes my destination the very place I am traveling away from. There's something hopelessly poetic about that’.
@TheWaveRowing
