Growing up, filmmaker Nathan Dappen heard the story of his dad’s canoe trip to Alaska so many times that it came to seem almost like a legend.
The story, as Nathan remembers it, goes like this.
When he was in college, Nathan’s dad Alan got a crazy idea. He wanted to travel up the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska, and he wanted to do it in a canoe. Everyone told him it was impossible; he would kill himself. But he thought it could be done.
So he gathered his brother Andy, his girlfriend Susan, and a few friends. Together, they built their own canoes. In the early summer of 1974, they launched them into the Pacific, and started paddling. They spent two months traveling up the Canadian coastline, and became some of the first people in modern history to paddle the Inside Passage.
But it turns out that wasn’t the whole story.
In 2017, at Nathan’s wedding, his dad Alan and his uncle Andy were telling the story yet again. And Nathan learned a detail he’d never heard before. His uncle Andy said they’d never finished the trip. The goal was to get all the way to Juneau. But summer was nearly over by the time the group got to Ketchikan, and they decided to call it quits. Andy had always wanted to finish the trip.
At that moment Nathan — along with his father Alan, his uncle Andy, and his brother Ben — decided to paddle the final leg of the journey.
In this story, Nathan and Alan tell the story of how they brought this family legend back to life. They talk about the majesty of the Inside Passage, the way time slows down when you’re paddling hundreds of miles, and the special quality of the time they spent together in the Alaskan wilderness.
Nathan made https://vimeo.com/272632802">a short film about their trip together, called “The Passage.”
