Apostle Islands Adventures: a weekend of fantastic failures

Recounting a successful and wonderful and fun weekend - full of failures.

We’d been planning a girls’ weekend for some months, and the time finally arrived. As the token unemployed member, I trekked to Bayfield a day early to claim a first-come, first-served site (I was not a first-comer. Fail.).

Selfie failures

Tents pitched at a 4th-order campsite, I climbed into my $20-down-quilt-turned-sleep-sack for a trial run of my sleep set-up for 55-degree nights in Spain. In roughly half-hourly increments, I raided my duffel bag for additional layers until I was wearing a modified hat, face scarf, fleece, vest, pants over shorts, and wool socks. I refused to get up to grab my sleeping bag because a) I inexplicably consider myself to be a loser if I leave my tent in the night for whatever reason and b) I didn’t want to wake the neighbors by unlocking my car with the lights flickering and horn chirping. I finally arose with the dawn and snuck silently to the car to drive to a Lakeside sunrise viewing. In my dozing throughout the night, I’d formulated the master plan to open my car with the physical key rather than the key fob to avoid the horn chirp entirely. This worked well - until I opened the door. It seems my car alarm goes off when I unlock it with the key. It also seems that I am easily flustered and unable to disable car alarms in the early morning.

I failed to make friends with my neighbors.

After sunrise and a day-long solo expedition to explore Madeline Island by bike (15 miles) and by foot (12 miles), I dragged my beleagured body back to the second-served campsite to strike a fire to await the arrival of my compatriots.

My friends are very generous and attributed the 2-hour smoke bomb to wet firewood. I attribute it to skill of failure.

I took a relative break from failing to enjoy a perfect day on Lake Superior, island-hopping via motorboat and tandem kayak under a delightfully sunny blue sky, with fantastic company. However, 24 hours failure-free would prove impossible.

It all started with a park ranger photo prop.

Ever since I was 10 years old - after moving on from my dreams to be an astronaut and my extended stint as a cowboy - I’ve wanted to be a NPS ranger when I grow up (note the continued future tense). So naturally, I was elated to discover the prop inside the visitor center on Stockton Island, our final stop of the day. I snapped a photo of my newly minted ranger friends, then swapped places to get my own pic. As I recombobulated my items after the shoot, I spied yet another NPS gem: a cancellation station. My national park passport has been collecting cancellation stamps at sites across the country since 1998, so a Stockton Island badge in handsome rusty orange was irresistible. I let out a squeak of excitement, spinning around the small visitor’s booth to search for paper to hold my circular proof-of-presence, and carefully stamped a couple circular seals for later cut-and-paste into my passport (which I’d left in drier places). I carefully folded the paper and clutched it in my hand so as not to set it down and leave it behind, and we trekked back to the boat for the 45-minute ride back to Bayfield.

It took me twenty minutes to realize I was missing my shorts.

Usually, clothing covering my bottom half is not easily forgotten. Perhaps it is a testament to the fortitude of the NPS Ranger that he/she is always neatly (and fully) clothed, even in the excitement of cancellation stamps and wide-brimmed straw hats (which, for the record, I REALLY want to own that hat). I swiveled my head back and forth, craning to look in the various crannies near my seat on the boat, looking for the post-swimming soggy crumple of thigh-length cloth that I’d swapped for dry pants while in the vault toilet stall on the island. My failure to find them forced me to retrace my steps from the vault toilet, to the visitor center, to the photo prop, to the cancellation station requiring two hands for operation… wuh-oh.

Until that moment, I’d failed to realize my shorts were on an island getaway.

Our boat docked at 4:25 pm, and I already knew the mainland visitor center was open until 4:30 pm (I knew this because it had a cancellation station as well; #NPSnerd). I passed off my alarm-accursed car keys and loadable gear to my boat buddies and headed off on a sprint to the ranger station. As I ran in what I assumed was the general direction of the visitor center (away from the water), I drew it up on a map app and found it to be nearly a half-mile away. I dialed the phone number and kept running, hoping to catch someone to radio the Stockton rangers and possibly get the shorts to the mainland that evening. By the time the voicemail beep sounded, I was out of breath and forced to pant my name and phone number in split-second bursts between wheezes. After leaving a likely unintelligible message, I pressed onward in my run up the hill, watching the time creep to 4:32 as I was reminded once again how much I don’t like running. I reached the locked doors and tested them with a hearty rattle that nearly outsounded the rattle in my bronchi. Dejected, I phoned my camping crew and asked for a pick-up.

We drove back to the campsite, I learned how to lose at cribbage, we ate a lovely dinner with high-BMI vegetables, and promptly crashed into our sleeping bags after a day in the sun.

After breaking camp and bidding farewells the next morning, I trekked back to the visitor center and filed a formal lost-and-found report. And added another orange stamp to my passport. :)

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Now I’m back to my normal life of failing - this chapter entitled, “Adventures in Auditing”.

Stay tuned...