On August 28, 1996, ten minutes before launching from a cove at Fort Wilkins State Park next to Copper Harbor, Michigan, I stood on the rocks next to the lake and let leaves of tobacco fall from my hand. When the dark leaves touched the surface of the lake, an offering was made to the water-god Mishipizhiw, the spirit which the Ojibwa say controls conditions on Lake Superior.

My mother and a handful of spectators sat on a stairway and watched as I slid my dry-suited legs into my kayak cockpit, taking care to avoid the thirty-six cans of fruit juice siliconed to the floor. Once again, my kayak was fully loaded with safety gear: manual and electric bilge pumps, GPS units, VHF radios, flare gun, energy gel packets, sea anchor, air sponsons, heat packs and other miscellaneous equipment. I was more mentally focused on this last crossing than I had been on any of the others. I hoped to finish my quest by crossing the crown jewel of the Great Lakes. Lake Superior, the most massive and infamous of the Great Lakes, rivals Lake Baikal in Siberia for the honor of being the world's largest inland sea. Lake Baikal is the deepest and most voluminous, but Superior has the greatest surface area. Superior is a fresh-water lake and is hardly affected by the moon's tidal forces.

One and a half hours after starting, I reached the lake's center and documented this with the GPS by saving a waypoint location in its memory. With over ninety miles still to cover, I paddled north repeating my mantra, "no stroke to strain." I reminded myself to keep my pace and paddling force under control. I did not want to injure my arm as I had on Lake Huron. My next task was the taking of a picture of the setting sun as it appeared perched on the horizon. I watched it completely disappear, then turned my head to the east to discover the full moon sitting on the eastern horizon. As darkness tried to descend, the moonlight held it at bay so that I was traveling in a water world with no day or night. Sometime during the night, I crossed the path taken by the Edmund Fitzgerald almost twenty-one years earlier. She was destroyed by twenty-five-foot waves. The weather was much calmer for me, but I still had to be concerned about hypothermia. I found I did not have to use the heaters siliconed to the sides of my cockpit because the air temperature was high enough to keep me comfortable with my dry suit on. At 2 a.m. I noticed a shimmering in the northern sky, and at first thought I might be hallucinating. But it grew in size while it appeared to come closer to me. Aurora borealis. Eventually, I was looking up forty-five degrees into the sky to watch green, purple and white pillars pointing to my destination in Ontario. I have been told that you can count yourself lucky if you can hold one memory from the past. I know that I will forever remember every aspect of sitting in my kayak and gazing at this vision. The sky stayed alive for hours as I forged northward, mile after mile. At daybreak, the winds increased to fifteen miles per hour from the north-northeast, but dissipated around 9 a.m. To stay hydrated during the day, I dipped my hand into the lake to drink its water. I would only do this on Lake Superior because the water is so crystal clear. After every hour of paddling, I took a five- to ten-minute break to log a GPS waypoint, eat a packet of energy gel and swallow it down with a can of fruit juice. I would notice a big energy boost for twenty minutes, after which I relied on my glycogen reserves during the rest of the hour.

Later in the evening, buoyed by doses of Vivarin at noon, 3 and 6 p.m., I started to make out my destination of Terrace Bay on the Ontario coast. As the end of the day came closer, I noticed that I had been so focused on paddling that I neglected to put any sunscreen on my face. I hoped that the burn would not be very bad but, as it turned out, I would bear physical scars from this crossing for a few weeks. As the second sunset of the crossing disappeared, I could see the signaling lighthouse on the Slate Islands to the east. A small campfire had been started on the beach toward which I was heading. The hot flames were mocked by the coldness of this vast lake. At 1:30 a.m., thirty hours and one hundred miles after starting, my bow came to rest on the pebble beach as cameras flashed around me. The feeling of being back on land seemed surreal to me as my friends dragged my kayak up the beach, set up my tent and cooked me food. I turned back to the lake and made another tobacco offering to my spiritual companion. Once the offering slid into the dark waters, I knew I had returned to the real world and had left the vision world behind.

Months later, in November, while paddling on Lake Superior along the base of a cliff near Agawa Bay, Ontario, I felt the same sense of peace I had gained after completing my final crossing. At the base of the cliff, I saw an ocher-colored pictograph of Mishipizhiw, placed there by another paddler long ago. I looked at the pictograph as I would a friend and thought about the person who created it. We both crossed Lake Superior for reasons that were important to us. We both increased our horizons by thinking of possibilities and not barriers. My quest was now over. As I paddled away from the cliff, a bald eagle flew by one hundred feet ahead, crossing my path.