Dear You,
Welcome to the new, new EME newsletters! If you’re coming over from the old subscriber list, good to have you back and thanks for taking the time to re-subscribe. If this is your first newsletter, howdy there! Thank you everyone, old friends and new, for following along as my life’s journey evolves with this expedition.
The last time I sent a newsletter was in June 2021 and I was deep in the throes of both making boat payments and acting as primary caregiver for my grandpa with dementia. I wrote some newsletters that summer, before Pápá’s dementia progressed to a point I no longer had the headspace to write. The newsletters remained silent ever since, though my life and the expedition moved on.
After caring for Pápá for 14 months, he moved into a nursing home January 2022. I finished paying off my boat and she arrived to the USA in May 2022. I transitioned from caregiver to adventurer again and prepared to get on the water.
August 2022 I unexpectedly got engaged to be married to a man named Aaron Duenke. My parents threw a huge party that was half going-away party, half engagement party. On Sept 4th, I began my expedition from the Highway 105 bridge on the Trinity River in East Texas.This is the same spot where I ended my 2020 expedition and the same spot where my brother Patrick and his friend Zach accidentally crashed a small airplane into the river and died Sept 3rd, 2016.
I rowed from that spot in Texas down to the coast and then eastward along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. I make it to Sarasota, Florida after nearly 4 months. On Dec 27th, my fiancé Aaron goes missing on the river in Missouri. I abandon everything to go look for him, but he is assumed dead. Three days later in Louisiana, my Pápá Raymond “Lala” Lalonde dies at the age of 82.
I do not attend Pápá’s funeral. I spend many months in Missouri dealing with the aftermath of Aaron’s death. I am a wreck. I retrieve my boat from Florida. My mother gets diagnosed with breast cancer. She has a double mastectomy and is ok now. My old filmmaker friend Hernán Ballard releases a documentary about the expedition and we tour it all over the country. I then relocate myself and my boat back to where I grew up in Texas. And now I am here.
I don’t know exactly where and when I’m going from here, but I am considering several different routes, all with departure dates sometime between January – July 2024. I am heavily considering the route options that have me departing in January. Regardless, all my paths lead to water. I still have my boat, I still have my body - and with those two things I can still row.
I often don’t know how I’ll do it, but I’ll figure it out – I always do.
Thank you for being aboard,
Love,
Ellen Magellan
