“CROSSING the Wake follows the waterlogged travels and travails of a woman willing to risk it all in a quest to bring some adventure to her life. A beautifully honest account or riding the waves of a journey, both physically and emotionally grueling, author Tanya Binford recounts her arduous six months with amazing detail.
“After leaving behind her work as a psychiatric nurse practitioner and saying goodbye to her grown children, Tanya Binford was ready to cast off. With an itch for sailing that had taken root decades before, she was finally ready to put her dreams into action- not even a lack of any real sailing experience could stop her.”
That is from the back of the book,
“Crossing the Wake: One Woman’s Great Loop Adventure.” When I finished reading this extraordinary story about an extraordinary person, I decided the blurb was entirely inadequate. While it is all true, Tanya deserves more grandiose adjectives.
The Great Loop is a boat trip around the eastern third of the United States. If you start in New York City, you travel up the Hudson River to the Erie Canal, then move through the Great Lakes and a canal system in Canada to reach Chicago, Illinois. From there, you boat down the Illinois River to the Mississippi, which takes you down to the Ohio River. From there you cruise the Tennessee-Tombigbee riverway to Mobile, Alabama, across the Gulf of Mexico to Florida, cross or go around Florida until you are back in the Atlantic Ocean, then up the east coast until you return to New York. Whew!
It is a tremendous undertaking about which many boaters dream but few accomplish. 5500 miles of strange and beautiful waterway plunging deep into the heart of America. Most Loopers, as they are known, are older and retired, or have independent incomes that allow them to sail unhindered for a year or more. But that does not describe Tanya. She was only 51 years old and very employed, and she decided to run the Loop alone.
Now, I don’t want to get all girl-power about this, but this is a voyage even most men would not tackle alone. I would not. I love Tanya for having the courage and confidence to do what she did. She found great inner strength to set out on a journey that, as Martin Luther King said, was like climbing a staircase when you cannot see the top. Tanya had no idea where her journey would lead, if she would even finish it, or if she would wind up at the bottom of the sea.
As I devoured the book, I picked up on what she was telling me. While running the Great Loop was a monumental accomplishment of seamanship (there are over one hundred canal locks along the way), and it was a story of nature and beauty and the intricate details of boating, Tanya’s Loop experience was mainly a story of people. She met thousands of interesting, confusing, helpful, dangerous, romantic, eccentric, intelligent, foolhardy, nefarious people along the way, all of whom changed her life in some way, some temporary and others permanent. She counts some of them among her closest friends even today.
Of all the people Tanya got to know on her odyssey, the one she got to know the most was herself. It is said that none of us knows what we are capable of until we push ourselves beyond what we think are our limits, and Tanya certainly did that. Along the way, she found out she was a stronger person than she knew, and having the heart of an explorer, her experience running the Loop whetted her appetite for further adventure. The last time I communicated with her, she was preparing to run the rivers of Europe.
Do yourself a favor and find a copy of “Crossing the Wake” by Tanya Binford. You will learn about an amazing journey you did not know was out there and you will get to know an extraordinary woman.
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for 20 years. He currently resides on the mainland U.S.
BC Cook
