In the summer of 2015, Traci Lynn Martin’s mom was in the final weeks of a battle with cancer. A hospice bed was set up in her mom’s living room in Kansas City. Traci would sit by her side and talk as they looked out the window.
Traci asked her mom about everything — her childhood, her memories, her wishes. And during one of those conversations, her mom surprised her.
“She said, ‘You know, I really regret not ever learning how to swim, and I really regret that I never learned how to play the piano.’ And she pointed to the piano, and she said, ‘You know, if you have anything you want to do, Traci, do it. Don't wait, because you don't know how much time you have.’”
Traci realized there was something she wanted to do: circumnavigate all of the Great Lakes in one year by kayak.
No one had ever done it before. This was it: a chance at total freedom and release on the water — with only herself, her body and her boat to rely on.
Traci just had to figure out how to make it happen.
Credits:
Producer: Ellie Katz
Editor: Morgan Springer
Mixing and Sound Design: Matthew Mikkelsen
Additional Editing: Dan Wanschura, Claire Keenan-Kurgan
Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.
In the summer of 2015, Traci Lynn Martin’s mom was in the final weeks of her life. She had cancer. A hospice bed was set up in her mom’s living room in Kansas City. Traci would sit by her side and talk as they looked out the window. Traci asked her mom about everything — her childhood, her memories, her wishes. And during one of those conversations, her mom surprised her.
TRACI MARTIN: She was laying in her hospital bed, and I was just sitting beside her, holding her hand and she said, ‘You know, I really regret not ever learning how to swim, and I really regret that I never learned how to play the piano.’ And she pointed to the piano, and she said, ‘You know, if you have anything you want to do, Traci, do it. Don't wait, because you don't know how much time you have.’
WANSCHURA: And Traci realized there was something she wanted to do: circumnavigate all of the Great Lakes in one year by kayak. No one had ever done it before. This was it. A chance at total freedom and release on the water — with only herself, her body and her boat to rely on. Traci just had to figure out how to make it happen.
Ellie Katz takes it from here.
ELLIE KATZ, BYLINE: This dream of kayaking the Great Lakes — it didn’t come out of nowhere. Traci bought her first kayak in her 30s and was hooked. A decade later, she was racing.
TRACI MARTIN: You have the Missouri River 340 — the 340 miles across the whole state of Missouri. I've done that nine times. And basically you just paddle day and night. You don’t stop, you don’t rest. If you're wanting to win, you stay in your boat. You just, you eat in your boat, you pee in your boat, you just stay in your boat. You just go day and night.
KATZ: And what did you like about that?
MARTIN: It's a challenge. It's a challenge to push yourself. Every year I'd be like, ‘OK, I can do it faster. How can I do it faster?’
KATZ: Traci won that twice. So, that was her life around 2015: Raising her kids. Working as a nurse. Saving enough money to take time off to kayak. But she always knew she wanted to do something bigger — she just didn’t know when. After her mom died, she knew it had to be now. She was 47, and she had rheumatoid arthritis. It wasn’t going away.
MARTIN: Every year I could feel it was harder to do the things that was easier to do maybe the year before. And I thought, ‘You know, I don't have the luxury of time to wait.’
KATZ: So she started planning. The whole thing would take 10 months. She saved up money to quit her job, cashed out some of her retirement. She made plans with her ex-husband to take care of their kids full-time while she was away.
MARTIN: All of my close friends and family thought I was going to get myself killed, and they thought it was a horrible idea.
KATZ: But she wanted to show people that her arthritis and pain couldn’t stop her from pushing herself — from doing the things she dreamed about. She posted online to drum up support. And people responded. They sent her donations — offered to paddle with her along the way. Some even said she could crash at their place. But not everyone. Traci found a blog someone created.
MARTIN: It was just, ‘What type of woman would leave her kids, what type of woman would go off and do this, what type of woman— she's going to get herself killed. She must not care about her kids. She must be selfish. She must be self-centered. She must be a narcissist, she must be—’ It was horrible, and I just stopped there for a while. I just stopped.
KATZ: Reading that deflated her. Her oldest daughter was in her 20s at this point, and her two younger boys were 10 and 13.
MARTIN: You know, I didn't think at the time asking for 10 months for myself when I had tried to give everything I could to my kids up to that point was asking for too much. And in society’s viewpoint, that was. That was really hard to read. At some point, I finally just had to say, ‘They don’t know me, and I don’t care,’ but if I say that didn't bother me, I'd be lying, because it really did.
KATZ: By early 2017, she was ready. And with a small gang of supporters she drove north, ready to attempt a new world record. Traci started her journey in early March — doing all the things early March does.
MARTIN: Cold, gray, windy, raining.
KATZ: But she felt good. She launched from a beach in Fort Gratiot, Michigan: the very southern tip of Lake Huron.
MARTIN: It was just amazing that I showed up there, and there was a newspaper guy from the Port Huron newspaper. You know, a lot of people, 30, 40 people, just on the beach, people with signs saying, ‘Go Traci!’ and stuff.
KATZ: There was no doubt in her mind she could do this. She would mostly follow the shoreline, cutting across some bays. All in all 4,200 miles of paddling.
So, she took off. Huron was cold and icy. But the route went according to plan that first month. And she settled into her 9 to 5: Get up, pack up, cold coffee, cold breakfast. She’d put on three layers of wool, and then zip up her drysuit on top. Then she’d paddle all day long. Listening to audiobooks of classics she’d never had a chance to read: like Wuthering Heights and Dune.
People could see where she was with a GPS tracker. She posted videos and updates almost every day. And at the end of the day, she had her support driver Bill, who met her with a camper and a hot meal. It took her about a month to finish the western shore of Lake Huron.
MARTIN: Lake Huron was mostly calm until I got to the Mackinac Bridge. Lake Michigan was a beast.
KATZ: Traci paddled into Lake Michigan in April.
MARTIN: It was rainy, it was cloudy, it was windy. I had big waves that I wasn't used to.
KATZ: But she wasn’t worried. She had a surf ski kayak, designed to ride ocean waves.
MARTIN: I'm out there and I'm surfing, and I'm just having a great time and laughing. And the waves just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I'm just surfing and then just, bam!, that just flips me over.
KATZ: Traci gets thrown from her boat into 35 degree water.
MARTIN: It was cold. I thought, ‘I gotta get back in my boat.’ And there was no fear, because I knew I could, because I've gotten back in my boat a million times. And so I swam over. I pushed up, and the waves that had flipped me the first time, came over and flipped me over again, and then I'd get re-situated, pushed up, flipped over, pushed up, flipped over. And then I started to get scared.
KATZ: What happens next, after the break.
KATZ: Traci’s been out of her boat and in the water for about 35 minutes. Her drysuit won’t keep her warm for long.
MARTIN: I’m getting really cold. I'm choking on some water, and I'm like half a mile from shore. So it's not like I can just hold on to my boat and hope these big waves push me to the shore. I started saying, ‘I'm OK. I'm OK.’ I knew if I panicked I was dead. And I held onto my boat and let some of the waves go by. And then I finally was like, ‘I've got to get out of this water.’
KATZ: She takes a deep breath and pushes up. This time, she makes it. But she can feel hypothermia setting in. Her teeth are clicking in her mouth. She paddles to shore, makes a fire, sets up a tent and crawls into her sleeping bag. That’s when it all hits her. Minutes earlier she could’ve died. She started to cry but was angry at herself, too.
MARTIN: I flipped my boat because I got cocky in the big waves. I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't taking it seriously. And I knew I had to get better, and it made me work harder to get better.
KATZ: Traci started to learn from the new world she was immersed in.
MARTIN: You know, there's these big waves, like three foot waves. And I was just white-knuckling it, but there’s these little brown ducks just bobbing up and down, bobbing up and down. And these big waves wasn't even phasing them. And in my head, I said, ‘I need to be a little brown duck. I need to stop being afraid and just have faith in my boat, that my boat's just gonna bob up and down like the little brown duck, and I'm gonna be OK.’ And I was.
KATZ: As she paddled around Lake Michigan, she posted about what she saw – like amazing sunsets.
MARTIN IN VIDEO: This is the most beautiful thing. The whole world just— is glowing pink.
KATZ: Sometimes people reading about her online surprised her. Like, one day she just wrote about how much she missed McDonald’s fish sandwiches and Coca-Cola.
MARTIN: I had this one lady who came out, and she was like, ‘Hey, are you Traci Martin?’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah.’ ‘I've got you a McDonald's fish sandwich and a Coke here for you.’
KATZ: That happened more than once.
MARTIN: It was so cool that, you know, a stranger cared enough that they took the time to one, read the post, and two, look up my position and then take the time to go to McDonald's and get me a fish sandwich and a Coke, and then drive along the shoreline looking for me and give it to me.
KATZ: At the end of June, Traci finished Lake Michigan then paddled into Lake Superior.
MARTIN: Lake Superior was the calmest, the best lake, and I whipped around that in like eight weeks.
KATZ: She fell in love with the caves, the islands, the beaches, the clean, cold water.
MARTIN IN VIDEO: So I found a ledge on a cliff, and I’m sitting here on the ledge. My boat’s floating on the water, and I’m just watching this family of loons swimming by. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight — I believe there’s eight of them.
KATZ: She’d go days without seeing anyone. Sometimes she’d just close her eyes and practice paddling by the feel of the waves. And at night, she was alone with the sky and her campfire.
MARTIN: I had more peace in my life in those remote areas than I've ever had at any other point in my life.
KATZ: By late August, Traci was done with Lake Superior. Now it was back down to Lake Huron to finish the eastern shore. But trouble hit when she was in Georgian Bay. A big storm was coming through: six and seven foot waves were predicted. She needed to get past the point of Tobermory to avoid the storm. So like with everything else, Traci pushed. Hard. She was halfway there.
MARTIN: And then the next thing I knew, the sun started to go down. The storm hit. The waves were getting horrible. There was lightning and thundering. It was dark, and it was nothing but cliffs. And then it got dark and I couldn't see nothing except for the lights of Tobermory 20 miles ahead of me.
I was out in that storm in the dark for about three hours, and it just really messed with my head. All I could hear in my head was the wind and the waves crashing, and it was dark, and I was just praying, nonstop praying.
KATZ: Traci made it to her support driver, Bill, who had to shine several lights onshore to guide her in. But she wasn’t the same after that.
MARTIN: I started having anxiety. Like, I was OK when I first went out. But then as the sun started going across the sky, I started getting really anxious, and I thought I was losing my mind.
KATZ: She started to get panic attacks out on the water. And her body was giving in too: Her hands were swollen. She had a hard time lifting her right arm. The weather was getting colder and her arthritis was flaring up.
MARTIN: So by the time that I hit Port Huron, and I landed on the same beach that I started at in March, I was physically wrecked and emotionally wrecked.
KATZ: Traci made it back to that same beach on October 15th. She finished Lake Huron and became the first known person to circumnavigate the three upper lakes by kayak in one year. But that wasn’t her goal: she wanted all the Great Lakes. And a dark thought, one she hadn’t had before, started to creep in: she wasn’t going to finish. But she couldn’t stop.
MARTIN: And then it was just like, ‘Maybe I'll quit tomorrow, but today I just want to get to St. Clair Lake.’ And then it was like, ‘OK, well, maybe I'll quit tomorrow, but today I just want to get to the Detroit River.’ ‘Well, maybe I'll quit tomorrow, but today I want to say I made it to Erie.’
KATZ: She did. She crawled along the south shore of Lake Erie in October and November. Fall storms kept coming and so did her anxiety.
MARTIN IN VIDEO: Oh shit. *thunder* Yeah. Time to pull off. And there’s nowhere to pull off at. OK, three miles. I got three miles. Time to haul ass.
KATZ: Traci finished the bottom half of Lake Erie then paddled up the Niagara River. Her plan was to circumnavigate Lake Ontario, then come back to finish Erie at the very end. On November 18th, she walked for eight hours to the other side of Niagara Falls. A crowd joined her as she put her boat back into the river in the dark.
VIDEO SOUND: Yay, Traci! Woohoo!
KATZ: But her body was failing. The walk around the falls took a toll on her knees and ankles – that’s where her arthritis was the worst. She also had pneumonia.
MARTIN: I was about as weak as a kitten. It was just hard getting out on the water.
KATZ: But her mind wouldn’t let her stop. She finished the Niagara River then headed to Lake Ontario’s north shore. And on a night in early December, she made it to Toronto. She posted a video of the city skyline glittering – her boat bobbing up and down in the black water.
MARTIN IN VIDEO: Doing a night paddle because the wind’s really calm tonight. And, God, it’s just magical. It’s just beautiful, awe-inspiring— I don’t have words to describe how beautiful this is. But it’s damn cold, too.
KATZ: She pulled off to rest for the night, planning to get back out the next day.
MARTIN: I had hope. I kept hoping the weather is going to get warmer, the winds going to die down.
KATZ: But a snow storm moved in and ice filled the harbor.
MARTIN IN VIDEO: I think I've reached the end of the line here. It is so cold. My rudder lines keep freezing, and it took about 45 minutes to unthaw them, and then they froze right back up again. I guess I’m done. I tried so hard. I just really thought I could do it. I really thought I could do it.
MARTIN: It just was crushing: No, you're not going to finish Ontario. No, you're not going to finish the Great Lakes. It's just— it's over.
KATZ: Two years of planning: quitting her job and cashing out her retirement. Ten months on the water away from her kids. All of it ended one cold morning in Toronto. Without any audience or cameras, Traci and her support driver Bill loaded up her kayak, and drove unceremoniously back to Missouri. Traci spent six months recovering. She needed antibiotics for the pneumonia, physical therapy to regain full use of her hands and right shoulder.
MARTIN: But I went out there knowing that that was probably going to happen. And I was willing to sacrifice that in order to accomplish something that had never been accomplished before.
KATZ: But she hadn’t accomplished it. And life went on like it had before. She got her job as a nurse back. Her kids kept getting older. But she kept thinking about the Great Lakes. And in March 2020, she set out to circumnavigate them all over again, only to be cut short by the pandemic a few weeks in. Now, she says, that door is closed.
MARTIN: At this point I won’t— I can't go back and do it. I'm too old, and the rheumatoid arthritis has taken too much from me, and I will never be able to just do that like I could have.
KATZ: Traci’s 58 now. She’s still not satisfied with how her 2017 attempt ended. In black and white terms: she failed. She didn’t reach her goal. She’ll never be the first person to circumnavigate all the lakes. But maybe that’s OK.
MARTIN: I paddled every single mile around those Great Lakes and pushed myself when I'm not sure how many people would have, and kept going when I'm not sure how many people would have. And so it taught me how to be strong and how to believe in myself. You know, I'm not going to let someone tell me I'm not capable now, because I know I am, because I proved I was.
KATZ: Traci paddled 3,592 miles in 2017. She saw more of the Great Lakes than most people who’ve spent a lifetime on them: the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, the remote wilderness of Lake Superior, the glittering skyline of Toronto and the steep underwater cliffs of Lake Huron that gave her vertigo. She didn’t get what she wanted: a world record. But she got a lot of other things: lifelong friends. A bunch of McDonald’s fish sandwiches. And she found her partner, Marv. He started helping her out on Lake Huron then kept coming back throughout all those months. They started a relationship, and eventually sold their houses to buy one together in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Every month, Traci drives back to Kansas City to work as a nurse and see her family. But the U.P. is home now. Her back deck there overlooks a clear, cold river.
MARTIN: I can put my kayak on the river in my backyard, the Au Train River, and I can paddle out to Lake Superior, and from Lake Superior, I can paddle anywhere in the world.
KATZ: In other words, she has what she was looking for all along: freedom.
