“I made you, Paddle Person, because I had a dream. A little wooden man smiled at me. He sat in a canoe on a snowbank on this hill. Now the dream has begun to come true. The Sun Spirit will look down at the snow. The snow will melt and the water will run downhill to the river, on down to the Great Lakes, down again and on at last to the sea. You will go with the water and you will have adventures that I would like to have. But I cannot go with you because I have to help my father with the traps… The time has come for you to sit on this snowbank and wait for the Sun Spirit to set you free. Then you will be a real Paddle Person, a real Paddle-to-the-Sea.”
– from Paddle-to-the-Sea, by Holling Clancy Holling
There are those who walk by the water’s edge to be present with the wind and the waves. There are others who are searchers, walking with a purpose to find something — a rare stone, sea glass, a message in a bottle. Lynn and Mike BeBeau found a red, white, and blue toy boat on the Lake Superior coast near the Apostle Islands, presumed it a buoy, then realized from an inscription that it was a piece of local lore: “I am traveling to the ocean. Please put me back in the water. Will you send information on your whereabouts to: Lakewood School Room 116 & 118 5207 N. Tischer Duluth, MN.”
The discovery captured the imagination of Lynn BeBeau’s social media network. One of the posts from Bonnie Fritch gave it some historic, and literary, credibility: “In 1993-1994 Brenda Schell and I did a unit of Paddle-to-the-Sea. We mapped out the travels of the canoe through the Great Lakes. A friend of Brenda’s made the boats for us and our classes painted them and added the message to the bottom. On our end of the year field trip for our Duluth unit we stopped at Brighton Beach to launch the boats. I am not sure what happened to Brenda’s boat but mine was spotted a year later up the North Shore. The people put a second coat of varnish on the boat and relaunched it. I thought we wouldn’t hear anymore about it. Amazing it is still out there.”
The odyssey of this toy boat revived interest in the classic children’s book. Paddle-to-the-Sea was written in 1941 by Holling Clancy Holling. Holling was a native of Michigan and won the Caldecott Honor for the book. It captures the young reader’s attention by the story of a “real Paddle Person” whose imagination navigates the waters of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean by setting a foot-long toy canoe. The book serves as an educational tool by adding line drawings in the margin that provides bits of trivia. For example, an image of cascading water from a wooded elevation down a series of pools: “The Great Lakes are like bowls on a hillside.” The reader will spot a diagram of a ship lock, or a freighter, or a factoid that defines the shape of Lake Erie as a piece of coal “in a land of coal mines and steel mills.”
In 1966, a Canadian motion picture by the same name,Paddle to the Sea, further popularized the tale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhjb1IG1pnQ.
The inscription on the bottom of the toy boat was taken from the inscription under the toy canoe in the book, “Please put me back in water. I am Paddle to the Sea.”
Wistful stuff of legends, the discovery gave Lynn BeBeau comfort at a time of great cultural turbulence: “I think the biggest takeaway from this is that this little boat’s on a trip to the ocean; well, I think it’s made its goal. It didn’t reach the ocean yet, but it’s already crossed it. It’s been on a journey of its own and it has reached so many people and put a smile on their face. What greater journey is there than that? And in this day and age, we need that.”
Photo courtesy of Lynn BeBeau.
