Deep Water Passage: A Spiritual Journey at Midlife

by Ann Linnea

Overview

This "engrossing adventure and . . . story of spiritual awakening and inspiration" ("Publishers Weekly") tells the true story of Ann Linnea, the first woman to circumnavigate Lake Superior by sea kayak.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316526838
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	09/01/1995
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

The author's grueling, 65-day journey around Lake Superior was emphatically not adventure but a spiritual quest, a search for meaning in her life. For her first 43 years, Linnea had adjusted to her surroundings and accommodated others. With a husband, two children and a comfortable middle-class existence in Duluth, she felt unfulfilled spiritually. So in mid-June 1992, she set out with a friend in seagoing kayaks to paddle the 1200-mile perimeter of Lake Superior. The weather was unseasonably cold and stormy, and the journey proved to be a severe physical challenge. Linnea became discouraged and dangerously exhausted, yet her perseverance enabled her to make a break with the past. This account is both an engrossing adventure and a story of spiritual awakening and inspiration. Linnea is coauthor of Teaching Kids to Love the Earth. Author tour. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ecofeminist Linnea (Teaching Kids To Love the Earth, Pfeifer-Hamilton, 1991) recounts her 1200-mile, 65-day kayak paddle around Lake Superior. More significant than the numbers and the athletic challenge, though, is her spiritual journey of personal growth. Linnea writes, "All my life, I have sought wild places for adventure, for my livelihood, and for good counsel," and this trip indeed supplied all three. At age 43, she felt at a turning point and undertook this challenge in order to prepare for life's second half. Through high fogs, huge obscuring waves, disorienting fog, bitter cold, and 12-hour paddling days, she emerges at a place where body and mind are united. As well, the physical courage she summons eventually transforms into an emotional courage to take risks. Recommended for public library collections in women's spirituality or the increasingly popular sport of kayaking.-Kathy Ruffle, Coll. of New Caledonia Lib., Prince George, B.C.

Library Journal

On the day after her forty-third birthday, Linnea set out in a 17-foot kayak from her Duluth, Minnesota, home to circumnavigate treacherous Lake Superior. Independent wife of a local college teacher and mother of two adolescents, Linnea had always pushed her athletic body to new heights of performance. In this involving memoir of her landmark, ultimately successful journey, she recounts both the physical and emotional challenges of paddling through driving rainstorms, dense fog, and occasionally calm conditions in the dangerous, deep waters of the great lake, which is infamous for shipwrecks and other tragedies. As you might expect, competent kayaker Linnea made the undertaking more than a demanding athletic feat by using the time to reassess her life, especially her stilted relationship with her husband. The trip became a catalyst for midlife changes that eventuated in divorce and a new career. Linnea's "coming-of-age" adventure will especially interest others facing life-challenging questions like those she brought to her voyage.

Sue-Ellen Beauregard

"A fine piece of work....Linnea came to know the difference between going through the motions of life and being truly alive."

Seattle Times

"There are many memorable moments on this expedition....Not only does Linnea find her real self in nature, but she also enables her reader vicariously to share her pilgrimage. This powerful story of a journey both physical and spiritual will challenge readers...concerning the authenticity and real significance of life itself."

Chattanooga Free Press