Chapter Content
Okay, so, um, you know, Audrey Sutherland, right? What a story. So, like, this woman, she was all about "live immediately," and, honestly, she really did.
So, check this out, back in, uh, well, not that long ago, but, like, she was, like, thirty-six, recently divorced, raising four kids all by herself, you know, working full-time as a school counselor, right? And she flies over this Hawaiian island, Moloka'i. And she's like, "Looking down at it, it's just not enough!" She *had* to go there. But, like, the thing is, there's no road access to the part of the coast she wants to get to, right? Only by sea. And she couldn't, like, afford to charter a boat, so, like, what does she do? She decides to, get this, swim. Yeah, swim!
It took her a few tries, but, eventually, she did it. I mean, talk about a ridiculous journey, right? She went in the summer, hoping for calm water, which, like, was *not* guaranteed. She said, “In three hours, the sea can change from, like, a liquid lapping among the rocks to, like, an eight-foot shore break!” This was no ordinary swim, that's for sure.
And Audrey, she was no ordinary explorer either. Like, she was, uh, "inexperienced in aquatic journeys," at first, you know? But she was a good swimmer, had learned it in college, even taught swimming. She said, "Water came to be my element." And she'd been out on a commercial fishing boat, with her ex, which she described as a “hard, nasty, satisfying life." And she’d learned to love the wilderness growing up. So, she was, like, taking all these parts of her life and, you know, recombining them, after her divorce. Like, she was becoming a pioneering solo explorer, right?
And it wasn't just Moloka'i, either, you know? Later on, when she was, like, fifty-nine, she quit her job and, get this, solo kayaked like, eight hundred kilometers of the Alaska and British Columbia coast. And that was her first time in cold waters, a huge contrast to Hawaii. I mean, she looked down from an airplane again and was like, "I gotta do that!" And she kept going back to Alaska and British Columbia for years. Even in her eighties, she took a kayaking trip in France and paddled, like, sixty-five miles in Alaska.
She, uh, she spent a lot of time alone as a kid, like, in a cabin in the woods. Her dad died when she was young, but her mom loved the outdoors. They’d go up to the mountains all the time to the cabin. It just had a wood stove and no electricity, you know? She was raised to be able to catch her own food and, like, survive in tough conditions. She always had this instinct to get away, you know? One time, she walked, like, fourteen miles to the top of a mountain when she was only fourteen years old. It's probably why her friends said she was never a late bloomer, she was just, like, uniquely herself her whole life.
Her divorce, that was, like, a turning point, you know? That's when she moved her family to the north shore of O'ahu. And a few years later, when her kids could, you know, kinda take care of themselves for a week, she started going on these big explorations. She'd always hiked and swum. But now she was drawn to wild places. And she kept doing it, going to Alaska in her eighties. Age just wasn't a thing for her. Her daughter said, “I don't think any of us had the sense of ‘you're too old to be doing that.’ If she was still doing it, then she wasn't too old to be doing it.” And her son, he said that she always had the adventurous spirit, but, like, no one expected her to be exploring the coast of Alaska and British Columbia when she was older, you know? She started as an outdoorsy person, and she ended up as a late-blooming explorer, dealing with bears, orcas, and wolves all alone in these wild places.
She was, like, really resourceful, too. Her friend said that she was, like, good at planning, practical, solution-oriented. She would even stop her car to pick up stuff that fell off other cars to use it for repairs around her house, saving tons of money. And, get this, the hot tub on her deck? It used to be an army cooking pot! She was resourceful with everything, even making her own wine from Hawaiian fruit. And she was just naturally good at adventure, navigating hard situations almost instinctively, like she was, you know, adapted to the environment. Someone who paddled with her through some choppy water saw that she was, like, as agile navigating her landing as the crabs that live in the rocks there.
I mean, she was singular, you know, all her life. Marriage and life as a fisherman's wife probably held her back a bit. But it's not everyone who ends up exploring a coast that you can only get to by swimming. And it's definitely not everyone who makes it to Alaska in their sixties!
To get ready for her Moloka'i trips, she used a map from 1924, because that was the only one available. It took her years of climbing mountains, getting sick from bad water, flying on this tiny plane to a leprosy colony, staying in a cave where this philosopher lived. Like, she did all this to get ready for Moloka'i. And then, finally, she was ready.
Her first attempt went, like, totally wrong. She only had three days off work, she forgot her watch, she couldn't find fresh water one night, and her pack leaked. She tried to climb this big wall, and she couldn't make it, and she threw her pack, and everything scattered into the sea, and she almost died, and she had to be rescued. And she didn't go back for three years.
But, like, she wasn't *quite* the explorer yet that she was going to become. She said she learned young what she could and couldn’t do. But on those early trips, she was still learning her limits, you know? Preparing for who she was going to be. Later, she kayaked through the cold waters of Alaska.
She flew over Alaska, and she had that same feeling she had with Moloka'i. She said she’d been looking for a place with mountains, wilderness, and the sea, and there it was, right? She asked for a leave, to do a two-month exploration. She ordered a ton of maps to get ready. She had this inflatable kayak she had been taking to sea. It was light enough to carry. She said looking at maps was like musicians looking at scores. She wanted to go to Alaska, but she was stuck at her desk, feeling, uh, “fat and soft and white and mean.”
They turned down her request for leave, so she went home, and saw her plans on the wall and “paddle Alaska” was number one. She looked at herself in the mirror and said, “Getting older, aren’t you lady? Better do the physical things now. You can work at a desk later.” So, she quit her job. She said, “I was truly free.”
She went barefoot in her kayak in Hawaii, but, like, not in Alaska. It wasn’t easy. The wind blew her backwards. Some kayaking guide saw her out there, wet, being blown around on the water, and singing. He thought she was totally unprepared. And then he found out that she had way more long-distance kayaking experience than he ever would.
She was able to do these solo trips to Alaska and British Columbia in this inflatable kayak, which everyone thought was crazy, because she had gradually trained herself for it. From jumping off that wall in Moloka'i to launching out in Alaska, she had become the person she was, the pioneer of women's solo exploration, right?
She even became friends with a geophysicist and environmental scientist, and they would meet up and, like, pore over maps of the coast, exchanging information about campsites and cabins. Like, they were the only two people in Hawaii who were that into it, you know?
He said that Audrey's kayaking had given her this sort of wisdom, these instincts, that made her trips possible. She always told students they needed to be able to tie a knot backwards and underwater, you know? And each trip taught her more, and she expanded her consciousness into nature and reacted to things instinctively. It just became second nature. He said that because of her experience, she had this kind of wisdom, and that other people would have died trying to do what she did. Even *he* wouldn't have swum to Moloka'i!
She was always singular, always outdoors, always solitary. But, like, her expeditions were unpredictable. She never really set out to become this sort of explorer. Instead, she just constantly cultivated herself, expanding her interests to the point where they became something new and extraordinary. Her consciousness expanded journey by journey, and her instincts were honed. After her second Moloka'i trip, she decided that the power of Moloka'i was worth more than the bruises and cuts, and she needed to go back.
She was developing into a more accomplished explorer, learning new limits, getting new habits and instincts. Her transition took place over years, in all her preparation, as well as on her journeys. And that turning point? That was her divorce, you know? She then began developing into the woman who paddled thousands of miles in cold Alaskan waters, taking the preparation of her earlier life and, like, cultivating it into something unexpected. Besides everything else, she had worked as a vocational counselor, and it made her realize that exploring Hawaii wasn’t enough. She said that helping people plan their lives made her wonder what she was doing with her own, you know? That inconsistency drove her to quit and go to Alaska.
She started giving talks about her travels, and some guy met her at one of those talks. He said that she was kind of an evangelist for kayaking, you know? At the end of her lectures, she would tell people to close their eyes and imagine they had, like, five million dollars. And then she’d ask them what was stopping them from doing those same things without the money. She thought people should follow their dreams, not be held back by fear, you know? Someone said they had a wife, kids in college, and ageing parents. Like, that was their excuse.
But, Audrey? She was a single mother, raising her kids with barely any help from her ex. She’d get home late from work, and her kids had to make dinner. Her house was so remote that she didn't even have a television signal, her son would cycle miles to town just to get bread, she had waited to go on her adventures until her kids were older and she could afford to quit her job, and she had studied for a master’s degree. So, she just said, “What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?”
She took that attitude all the way to the end of her life. Even when she was older, she wanted to study biology and zoology, and she finished her book about paddling Alaska. And then, when she was, like, ninety-one, someone asked her about future goals. And she just laughed and said she didn’t have a lot of plans, but that she wanted to go back to Alaska.
She was able to achieve what she did because she was always learning something now that would help her achieve her goal later. She said it wasn't about can you or can't you, but about deciding what you really wanted to do and then figuring out how.
She worked through all the obstacles between her and Alaska. But the thing that never really went away was fear, you know? One time she slept in a field, terrified that the glowing eyes around her were lions. And then she woke up, and it was just cattle. She said that what we're afraid of are often very ordinary things. But she still had similar fears fifty years later when she went to Alaska. So she started managing her fear. She'd practice capsizing her kayak. That way, when she capsized in Alaska, it was just a reflex. She was prepared. She said that there was only one fear, and that was the fear of the unknown.
She was all about facts and practicality. She even thought that Thoreau was, like, a "namby pamby"! She knew what plants she could eat, she knew the natural history of the areas she explored, she read guidebooks and ecology books, you know? For her, nature wasn't a holiday. It was a challenge, something to be respected and engaged with realistically.
Someone remembered Audrey writing her book about Alaska, worrying that she would slip from being factual to being fictional. It troubled her, you know? She wanted to give a faithful and useful account of herself.
Someone once said that they'd been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures their entire life. And that was true of Audrey, too. She knew what to do by instinct. Her son talked about how she had faith that things would turn out, some spirit that kept her safe. In more day-to-day terms, Audrey is often quoted in inspiration books. Her writing was called more than an adventure tale, the book is a life statement. She's often understood as a spiritual, philosophical, Zen-like individual.
She seems to have believed that you cannot control the world but you can control yourself. She told her kids to list the things they knew how to do well, focusing on what you can control. By relying on her instincts in bear encounters, she accepted what was happening and showed herself unthreatening and unafraid to the animal. She would think about the different voices in her mind, the negative and the positive ones. And by choosing to listen to the positive, practical voice, she was focusing on simplicity, you know? Her life was pared down. Her camping gear was from second-hand shops. She said she lived on, like, three dollars a day during her trips to Alaska. She said that she didn’t need to get away. She needed to get to simplicity.
She broke down her fears into parts to help her overcome them, like practicing capsizing. She would think through all the bad things that might happen, to prepare herself. She would keep track of the wind and the tide, you know?
She remained fit all her life, but it was her mental attitude that enabled her moment of change.
And think of the advice she gave to the man with the wife, children, and parents, about how to pursue his goals. How close that is to what some people say: "The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” By breaking a problem down into parts, and working on them as we can, we begin to live immediately.
That's how Audrey cultivated herself, stoically transitioning into the explorer she became. By going simple, going solo, going now. Living immediately. So, yeah, Audrey Sutherland. Definitely one of a kind.