The first time Audrey Sutherland explored the rugged northeast coast of Moloka’i, she swam the 20-mile stretch. Forty-one years previous, divorced, a mom of 4, she swam alone with snorkel and fins, wearing blue denims and towing behind her an Army duffel containing just a few necessities wrapped in a bathe curtain and stuffed inside a climate balloon: tenting gear and digital camera; meals she’d canned and dehydrated at house on neighboring Oahu; pink wine in movie canisters.
In this manner she traveled three to 5 miles a day, swimming in by way of the surf to camp, forage, and discover part of the island that was terra incognita in the summertime of 1962. She’d first seen Moloka’i from the air years earlier and have become obsessive about the island’s northeast coast, the place the world’s highest sea cliffs rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean, punctuated by spectacular waterfalls, steep valleys, and a handful of slender seashores. Details have been scarce. Her map, revealed in 1928, was woefully missing intimately, although on one level she was clear. “In Moloka’i, because the current and the wind blow west, you can’t go back. It’s the coast of no return,” she mentioned.
Sutherland, nonetheless, was hooked. She swam the Moloka’i coast once more in 1964. As common, she instructed the older youngsters to take care of the youthful ones and that she’d be again in every week. “We would joke and say, do we call the Coast Guard if you don’t come back in seven days on the dot?” mentioned the oldest, Noelle Sutherland, who was 20 that summer season. Her mom was certainly not a punctual particular person, however she completed the Moloka’i swim on time, already stuffed with plans to return.
“She said, ‘I’ve got to have more gear so that I can pack saws and things to fix up the shack I found in a valley halfway down my trip,’” Noelle mentioned. And so Sutherland discovered a six-foot inflatable kayak in {a magazine} and ordered it, sight unseen. Bulbous and sluggish, it was an unorthodox craft for the wild coasts she burned to discover, however it match her fashion completely. She may roll it up and pack it onto a aircraft, and he or she returned with it many instances to Molokai’i. She took it to Na Pali and Kona, and to Samoa, Greece, Norway, and Maine. When she visited Scotland, she introduced the little yellow kayak to Loch Ness to analyze the lake’s legendary monster herself.
Sutherland with the makings of an Alaskan feast. She most well-liked mussels as a result of they don’t transfer and are simpler to catch. Courtesy the Audrey Sutherland Estate
She was born Audrey Schufeldt in Canoga Park, California, in 1921. Her father died when she was 5, and her mom raised Audrey and two sisters by way of the Great Depression on a schoolteacher’s wage. When courses set free every summer season, the household decamped to a lopsided cabin within the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles. In a household picture from these days, a six-year-old Audrey perches on the cabin, shingling its roof.
“I stalked deer at dusk and fireflies at night, ran wet and exultant in cloudbursts and thunderstorms, and climbed to the tops of young pine trees to swing them in whipping circles,” she wrote within the first of her books, Paddling My Own Canoe.
At fourteen, she determined to climb San Gorgonio Mountain, an 11,500-foot peak 14 miles from the cabin. “I would go off by myself when I got mad at the family,” she recalled in an interview with Dale Hope of Patagonia Books. “I got halfway and then camped in the meadow and there were eyes out there all night and I thought about mountain lions and wolves.” At dawn, the realized the predators she’d imagined have been the truth is a neighbor’s cows. Sutherland laughed at herself and continued. The journey to the summit and again took 4 days. “In those days we didn’t have backpacks, so we put a blanket down on the floor and put our stuff across the blanket and rolled it up and then carried it over our shoulders,” she mentioned.
When she was simply 16, Sutherland began at UCLA, the place she grew to become a formidable swimmer and earned a level in worldwide relations. She predicted the approaching battle with Japan in her diary, and after Pearl Harbor she and her sisters took jobs as riveters in an plane manufacturing facility. In 1942 she married a younger Coast Guardsman named John Sutherland, who got here up by way of the ranks as a mustang—an enlisted sailor who grew to become an officer. After the battle they labored a business fishing vessel collectively in California, then moved to Hawaii in 1952 when John was known as again to lively responsibility through the Korean War, serving on a buoy tender that roamed all through the Pacific.
Audrey Sutherland realized that along with her husband away so typically there was no cause to remain on the town, so she drove from Honolulu out to the North Shore and commenced knocking on doorways, asking if anybody knew of a spot for lease. The search yielded a beachfront home in Haleiwa for $80 a month, the place she raised two daughters and two sons in the identical freewheeling fashion she had often called a lady.
The property overlooks a quick left-breaking wave known as Jocko’s, named in honor of Sutherland’s oldest son Jock, a legendary North Shore surfer. The complete household grew up within the ocean; Noelle remembers the day a wave picked up her youngest brother James as he crawled on the seashore. “He literally swam before he could walk,” she mentioned.
Sutherland and one among her inflatable kayaks. A person as soon as requested her, “Where’s the Donald Duck head and clown feet?” however through the years she paddled such craft greater than 12,000 nautical miles. Courtesy the Audrey Sutherland Estate
“She taught us that we may discover and forage and have enjoyable all on the identical expedition—as she would at all times name them—by cramming us all into the previous station wagon and going as much as the mountains on unlawful roads, or generally we’d get keys for locked gates and we’d go up into the mountains the place there have been streams and trails. My mother was typically late to issues, so our picnic lunches would invariably find yourself being picnic suppers, normally within the rain, normally after darkish.
Sutherland was a fierce proponent of self-sufficiency, and a lover of lists. One, nonetheless posted on her daughter’s wall, enumerates 31 abilities an individual ought to be able to by the age of 16. It’s a broad stock, starting from “Change a diaper, and a tire” to “Know and take responsibility for sexual conception and protection when needed.” The first merchandise is “Swim 400 yards easily” and the final is “Do your laundry.” In the center, there’s this: “Be happy and comfortable alone for ten days, ten miles from the nearest other person.”
Sutherland stored lists for herself, too. After coming to Hawaii she’d earned her grasp’s diploma and went to work for the Army, counseling younger folks about profession decisions. The work took her to Alaska, the place in 1980 one other aerial view of islands grabbed maintain of her creativeness and wouldn’t let go. “For years I had searched for a combination of mountains, wilderness and sea, and here it was. Clear, quiet water, snowcapped ridges and peaks, small bays—all in the Inside Passage, sheltered from the storms of the open North Pacific,” she wrote in her fourth ebook, Paddling North. (The center two books are eclectic guides to kayaking in Hawaii, detailing routes all through the islands and likewise such important abilities as opening coconuts and selecting opihi. Published a decade aside, each are titled Paddling Hawaii.)
She checked out charts of the usual route by way of the Inside Passage, 800 miles from Seattle to Skagway. It had a pleasant alliterative twang, however she discovered no poetry within the route itself, a straight line connecting cities and well-marked passages. Instead she charted a meandering course, additionally 800 miles however skipping every thing south of Alaska, a “roundabout route of hot springs, old cabins, small islands, and resupply towns,” as she put it. In her little kayak she would pack wine, good olive oil, and Hawaiian salt, with plans to forage and feast on mussels, berries, and salmon.
The journey would take two months, however when she requested for unpaid depart from her job, the request was denied. That night she went house and checked out her checklist of the 25 issues she most wished to do, so as of significance. Item One: Paddle Alaska. She stop her job the following day.
“Sometimes you have to go ahead and do the most important things, the things you believe in, and not wait until years later, when you say, ‘I wish I had gone, done, kissed,’” she wrote. “What we most regret are not the errors we made, but the things we didn’t do.”
Sutherland went to Alaska that summer season and for 23 summers after that. All instructed, she meandered greater than 8,075 miles round Southeast Alaska, from her first journey in 1980 to her final in 2003, when she was 82.
She died in February 2015, just a few days after her 94th birthday. She’d donated her physique for analysis (“I will still be able to teach even after I die,” she mentioned) and when her ashes got here again, family members gathered within the deep water exterior the reef, “Out beyond the deep blue water where she used to swim. ‘Out where the big fishes are,’ she used to say,” recalled Noelle, whose husband James Conti had additionally died lately.
“I had my husband’s ashes, and Jock paddled Audrey’s ashes out with several other surfing friends. The sun shone down into the water, and as the ashes swirled and sank my son and Jock’s son slipped into the water and twirled and swam in the sparkling ashes,” she mentioned. “Then Jock and other surfer friends surfed the ocean with the sunset behind them, and the waves standing up so they held the light as though they were turquoise.”
Top picture: Sutherland in Alaska, early Eighties. Courtesy the Audrey Sutherland Estate
Audrey Sutherland wrote a number of books about her adventures:
Paddling My Own Canoe
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Paddling Hawaii
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