Four-Day Commute to Work Via Kayak
Adventurer Beau Miles has been focused recently on exploring near where he lives rather than in far-flung locales. He’s walked 56 miles to work a couple of times, adventuring and foraging along the way and recently posted a video of him commuting to work in a kayak. It took him four days. Miles explains:
I’m really fascinated by something as mundane as a commute to work. I think it can offer me a whole bunch of adventure. I’ve already walked to work — I stripped it right back and it was hard and challenging, and really insightful of me and humanity. Now to extend that idea, why don’t I try and paddle to work? I can get to work via the very water that falls on my roof. In doing so, I’m reinventing my idea of adventure. I no longer feel the need to go and paddle great distances down a continent shore, or go to the highest peaks. Your carbon footprint goes through the roof, just so you can go and find yourself, somewhere else. And so I really want to do these things in my backyard now, and why not my boyhood river that I want to reinvent with some adult ideas?
Update: Inspired by Miles’ journey, a high school senior did a kayak commute to school: The 54.5 Hour Commute.
Throughout the trip, Gralyn was offered help from friends and family — everything from transportation to Clif bars — but he accepted none of it. “That would be cheating,” Gralyn says, it would have completely changed the experience. He wanted to experience the full challenge, he wanted to be self-sufficient, and he wanted to know if it was even possible. “Water used to be so common for traveling everywhere and now we never use it. It’s the road less traveled now.”
Update: Back in 2007, Tom Chiarella walked to the mall in 2.5 days.
In the days before I left, everyone told me it was a stupid idea, pointless, fraught with risk. My brother called me an idiot. My golf partners cackled. Many people worried what would happen to me in the city. Another group of friends saw the isolation of the country as more threatening. My wife wanted to forbid it, thinking it incredibly stupid, a blatant invitation to dismemberment, a prelude to disappearance. I told her I’d be okay, that I wasn’t afraid. I was plenty brave enough to handle what came my way. “You think you’re brave,” she said. “You’ve always had a car. It’s easy to be brave when you have a car.”
(via @DavidNir)
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