This article is from the fall 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s quarterly print, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Caine O’Rear | Photos by Courtney Mason
What drives a person to climb Kilimanjaro or swim the English Channel? Why did Alexander Supertramp light out for the territories, only to meet his demise after ingesting the seeds of a toxic plant in the Alaskan wilds? Why did Huck Finn set sail on the Mississippi — was it to get away from the Widow Douglas and his abusive father, or was it something much deeper that called him down the river? Why do locals like Ryan Gillikin and Joseph Bolton kayak the Alabama 650 every year, pushing their bodies and minds to the point of exhaustion and delirium? And why did Forrest Gump decide to just start running?
It’s a mystery, folks. The biblical Cain was our first Great Wanderer, but he had little choice in the matter. After slaying his brother out in the boonies one fine autumn day, he was cast east of Eden, condemned to walk the Earth for eternity, branded with God’s own tattoo.
Unlike Cain, today’s explorers will tell you they do have a choice — at least some of the time. But what drives them to set sail upon the dark waters and traverse the barbarous lands remains somewhat of a mystery, even to them. For its part, America has a long tradition of explorers and wanderers. The conquistadors of Spain got the ball rolling in the name of gold, God, and glory. Lewis and Clark (along with Sacagawea) traversed the western frontier at the behest of Jefferson, while Mason and Dixon settled some important boundary disputes with their jaunts. Voyaging is a big part of the national character, from Kit Carson in the Rockies to more intellectually prone seekers like John Muir and Edward Abbey. And then there are the cultural titans like Jack Kerouac and the Grateful Dead, whose legions followed in the literal footsteps of their journeys, forging a new kind of adventurer along the way.
Today’s explorers seem to be as much about the spiritual quest, and not as much about clapping eyes on new lands. For them, it’s a test of will, a feat of the heart. Perhaps this is because today’s voyages can’t help but look and feel a little different, now that we live in the time of GPS and mobile phones. Alaska may still be the last terrestrial frontier, but in the age of satellites, civilization is never out of reach in the way that it once was. What about that Mars trip we’ve heard so much about? Well, that might be a while. So perhaps it is that after centuries of settlement and industrialization, the American wilderness is all but erased, but the wilderness within remains.
One of America’s great modern explorers is not a household name. He is a gentleman by the name of Verlen Kruger. A native of Indiana who lived in Michigan for much of his life, Verlen, who died in 2004, is credited with canoeing more miles than any other American — in excess of 100,000 miles. Somewhere in between the time of his relentless voyaging, he managed to design a specialty canoe, the Savage Loon, a thirteen-and-a-half-foot craft specifically tailored for long voyages. Reminiscent of a kayak, the Loon has all the tell-tale features of a traditional canoe in that the boat features a hollow shell with a raised seat and lacks the keel or fin found on most kayaks. With a cockpit more than eighty inches long, it was designed to be able to navigate rough conditions on extended treks. In canoe circles, the Loon is known as a “decked canoe,” meaning that the deck covers a portion of the cockpit — and indeed it is often mistaken for a kayak.
In addition to his contributions to design (he funded his voyages by leasing his patent to commercial canoe-makers like Savage), Verlen Kruger is known for having logged one of the longest canoe jaunts in human history, a 28,000-mile odyssey across North America that came to be known as the Ultimate Canoe Challenge. This was a feat that found Verlen and his son, Steve Landkin, paddling the length of the Mississippi and Colorado rivers upstream as part of The Great Loop. That’s a pretty long haul against the current when you are clocking a 6,000-mile route. In 1981, Verlen and his son became the first to canoe the Great Loop in reverse, or clockwise, as one sees it on a map.
“I’ve often thought about the results of making some of these big trips,” Verlen once said. “I haven’t done anything great for humanity; it was more that I’ve done something great for myself. But I do hear from other people who say they’ve been inspired by my travels. Hopefully, I can get them to look a little farther, a little deeper into themselves, into what they can do.”
The Great Loop is a circumnavigational route that winds through the eastern half of the United States (15 states) and parts of Canada (two provinces), taking “Loopers” through the Intracoastal Canal, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and a byzantine network of canals and rivers in between. Most undertake the voyage with a motorized craft, taking on average about a year to complete the journey, though it has been done in as little as six weeks. The great majority of voyagers elect to travel in a counter-clockwise direction, which allows them to move along with the currents, which can be especially helpful on powerful rivers like the Mississippi and Ohio. For the motorized set, the trip is typically one of leisure. The starting point is a matter of choice, but many opt to start in Chicago in the fall, which allows them to wind around Florida in the winter, when many parts of the northern route are closed.
Peter Frank was fourteen years old when he was run over by a car. It shattered his spine, and for a time, it looked like he might not walk again. The accident happened in Escanaba, Michigan, a small town in the Upper Peninsula on the shores of Lake Michigan at the mouth of Little Bay de Noc. Peter spent many tough months in the hospital in Marquette, Michigan. The road back was a long one.
Now twenty-three, Peter is attempting to canoe the six thousand miles of the Great Loop clockwise, much of it against the current. It has only been done once before — by Verlen Kruger and his son. When I meet up with Peter, it’s a few days after the Fourth of July. For the last week, he’s been staying on the shore of Mobile Bay, in Point Clear, just off the boardwalk. He’s been lodging with the Knapp family, who connected with Peter after he posted on social media about needing a place to crash. In that short time, he’s grown close with the Knapps. He celebrated the Fourth with them at a community shindig, and even enjoyed a night of Irish traditional music at McSharry’s in Fairhope, where John Knapp sometimes plays banjo.
He calls these periods of rest “grace days.” It’s a time to recuperate from the physical demands of the journey, stock up on water and food (he subsists mainly on beef jerky and Pemikan – a mixture of lard, berries, and dried meat), and make adjustments to his vessel.
“My No. 1 type of lodging is camping. No. 2 are posts like this,” Peter tells me. “It isn’t something I rely on, but it is something I take advantage of when I have to. I’m a year into the trip. To get in AC, it’s not something I have for weeks or months on end. But it is something that’s appreciated.”
Peter and I are chatting on the screened-in porch of the Knapp home, looking out over Mobile Bay, past a grove of towering oaks. He’s dressed in candy-striped pantaloons rolled up to the knee that he knitted himself (he makes most of his own clothes now), a Colonial-era tricorn hat, and a button-down tan shirt. A knife sheathed in a leather case is attached to his belt. I can’t help thinking that he looks like Kurt Cobain, if Kurt Cobain were built like a linebacker. I ask about his impressions of Point Clear and how it compares to other stops on the journey.
“The people here are quite terrific,” Peter says. “There’s a tight-knit community that you can find in other places but not this tightly woven. But coming here and being brought in by a family who has lived on the Bay their entire lives, you kind of see that community. John is always saying ‘hi’ to people. I feel like I’ve stepped into this tribe, this world.”
“You can’t help but be inspired when you spend time with Peter,” John tells me later. “His earnest, thoughtful, yet whimsical nature left a lasting impression on our whole family and the friends and neighbors who got to meet him. It is rare that you meet someone in such a chance way but know almost immediately that they will be part of your life from then on.”
Peter is scheduled to depart Point Clear the next morning at dawn. From here he’ll head up the Tensaw and Tenn-Tom before hitting the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and eventually the Illinois. He’ll then enter Lake Michigan through the Chicago Drainage Canal before coming to rest, finally, at his home in Escanaba. He started this journey on June 27, 2024, some 370 days ago. Since then he has paddled more than 3,400 miles. He has 1,600 left to go.
When asked why he decided to canoe “The Loop,” Peter says it was never just about the route. At some point, he realized he’d already been doing it two or three years ago when he canoed from Minnesota to South Carolina, a jaunt that took him down the Mississippi and around Florida — 4,700 miles over 11 months in the reverse direction.
“When I acquired my second canoe that voyage, I was in Florida,” he says. “I saw a canoe that was a model of Verlen Kruger’s from 1982 … Having spent so much time in a canoe, he nailed down every flaw or issue you could have in a boat.”
Within minutes of talking to Peter it’s clear that Verlen is a big inspiration for this trip, a kind of spiritual guide for the young Michigander. I try to steer the talk away from Verlen and back to Peter’s own expedition, but he stops me cold. “I’m getting to that,” he says. “This is part of the lore.”
He then explains the rigors of Verlen and Steve’s 1980 expedition, when they canoed three-thousand miles from the Rocky Mountains to St. Louis, down the Missouri River (our nation’s longest) in a span of just thirty-seven days — an average of nearly 100 miles a day. “The longest day I’ve ever had is 16 hours and gone 53 miles,” he says.
After the Missouri, Verlen and his son traversed the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, eventually reaching New Orleans a year after they set out. From there they paddled the entire Mississippi against the current, becoming the first canoeists to perform a clockwise navigation of the Loop. No one else has attempted that feat — until now.
“But I’m on a different kind of journey,” Peter explains. “It’s not about speed, it’s not about records. It’s not about being famous. It’s about following in the footsteps of great explorers. It’s about the challenge and the principle behind it. How almost every person who’s done the Loop has gone counter-clockwise. But to do it in a canoe, in the opposite direction of how you’re supposed to do it, out of season.”
I ask if this is a tribute voyage to Verlen and his son. “Yes, in some way,” he says, “but no one ever goes out to do it the hard way. They wanted to experience the most of what they could out of what they possibly had.”
I really enjoy the historical value of it so much,” he continues. “Coming out here to have this experience, similar to the way they would have experienced it. But there is so much different now. We have modern navigational equipment like GPS. We have everything mapped out already. We have cell phones. We have state-of-the-art, carbon-fiber ultra-light paddles. Walmart is across the street from every single road-access ever. There is so much now that we’re privileged with. And things we’re disadvantaged with now, too. We have weather patterns that are drastic and way more significant than they were twenty-five years ago — things like sporadic wind patterns and flooding of rivers. And the Corps of Engineers building dams and wing dikes that you have to navigate around.
When Verlen went up the Mississippi, it wasn’t as fast as it was today. The currents I’m going to be fighting aren’t historically accurate to the currents they would have been fighting. So there are advantages and disadvantages to each time period. These were people in 1980 who were deeply inspired by French-Canadian voyageurs and Native Americans who had traveled the country by canoe. And the people who built our country and waterways traveled by canoe to trade. There were communities that harbored these voyageurs and they would be stocked with rum and candles and whatever. They would give them supplies and a place to sleep and whatever they needed along the way. And nowadays we have $500-a-day hotels. I think I prefer the tent.”
Peter’s first great odyssey was not by canoe. When he was nineteen years old he rode a unicycle from Appleton, Wisconsin, to Phoenix, much of it along Route 66. It took him 99 days; his hair was completely dreadlocked by the time he finished. The trek was a mission trip to raise money for Beacon House, a non-profit housing facility in Marquette where his family stayed when Peter was recuperating from the car accident. He ended up raising thirty-four thousand dollars by the time he got to Arizona.
“After that, I went back to where I started, and everybody was still doing the same stuff,” he says. “I kind of felt like time had not really passed for all these people. But it felt like something had happened to me. And it almost felt like I outgrew where I was. Because I had gone on this journey of exponential character growth and I felt like ten years older, and nothing has happened … From almost dying that day in the leaf pile, I felt like I had been given a second chance at life, and I was wasting it [prior to the trip]. You try to change your life to fit everyone’s perception of what you’re supposed to do. But only you know how you feel on the inside. I was in a lot of bodily pain. I got to the point where I realized, I really can do whatever I want, within reason.”
When I ask Peter what stands out about the trip, he pauses for a moment and then relates an experience he had in North Carolina. At a coffee shop one morning, a man came up to Peter and asked him, “Why are you dressed like a pirate?” The two got to talking and Peter learned that this guy owned a sewing machine. He was invited to stay with the family for a few days and it was where, after tinkering with the sewing machine for a few hours and learning how to operate it, Peter sewed his first pair of pants.
“He’s a really great guy, and his wife was a phenomenal chef,” Peter remembers. “Extravagant dishes. I’m familiar with the kitchen, but to see it done on a professional level was just mind-blowing to the taste buds.”
Shortly after leaving, Peter crossed the Albemarle Sound, a large estuary at the mouth of the Chowan and Roanoke rivers. The day was dead calm. Forty-five degrees in mid-December with fog so thick you couldn’t see your hand. Peter managed to cross the sound that day by staring at the compass in his lap.
“It was quite terrifying. It was five miles from the other side. I was fighting. You had no idea where you were going, even when I did make it to shore. A few months after that an obituary came up and it was his wife.”
Peter’s eyes are now swimming. “I’ve been on this journey and I’ve made a lot of connections with some great people. But I think things like that are the reason I have to do this. If you don’t, you’re going to die; if you do, you’re going to die. You might as well.”
“People are so afraid of dying,” he continues. “That seems to be the leading motivation for why nobody does anything — innate desire for self-preservation. There must be some reason why I should not do this; they are so convinced they will die. Here I am a year in and I’ve watched people fall. It doesn’t matter what you do. People could die in a car wreck, or have a heart attack on the job. I think the concern should move away from not dying and move toward truly living.”
I ask Peter if he’s always been so philosophical. He says he never thought of himself that way. But it’s clear after spending some time with him that the man is a searcher. He occupies his mind at night with audiobooks by Roman stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And somewhere along the Atlantic Coast, he took up the harmonica, spending nights around the campfire belting out tunes to an audience of birds and bees.
In the course of our talk, I never get around to asking Peter if he gets lonely on the water. But he’s made it clear that on this voyage, the challenges are constant and the mind is always occupied. There are new things popping up around every corner, from “seasonal changes to landscape to topography.” He mentions the physical demands on the body, how you’ve got to use all your muscles — all day, every day. You’ve also got to stay sharp mentally, just to survive. How much food and water do I have left? Where am I going to sleep? How much does my boat weigh?
Early in his voyage, when he was canoeing through New York City along the Hudson River, Peter stopped at a yacht club sometime around four in the morning. He walked past a small camp of boatmen who couldn’t see him, but he was able to overhear them talking. It seems they had caught wind of the great journey. “Who does this kid think he is — dressed up like Daniel Boone?” one of the men said. “You can’t canoe through New York City. This kid is going to get himself killed. He’s a fool.”
Reflecting back on that morning, Peter says, “That stuck with me the rest of the day as I canoed the next sixteen miles, fighting the tide, through the heart of Manhattan, by myself. I stood there on Pier 26 later that day overlooking the docks and thought about what they said and about what I had accomplished to get to that point. I never had a name for the boat until that day, but I decided that was an appropriate time to give a name to my canoe. I named the canoe Fool’s Errand.”
You can learn more about Peter Frank’s adventure at whereispeterfrank.com.
