Embarking on a 2,000-Mile Kayak Expedition to the Gulf of Mexico with Ann Rose

0:00Ann Rose:It's so mind-boggling that I'm even saying what I'm saying. I'm a farmer. I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything. But I became just mesmerized with how the water flows out of the mountains because it all gets to the ocean at some point. I said, oh my God, that goes to the Gulf of Mexico. I bet I could paddle that. And that's exactly how it happened. That's how the idea came to be in my head.

0:29Anne Rose is a farmer who lives off the grid in rural North Carolina. She spent nearly her entire life in the Appalachian region and has always felt a deep connection to the mountains and forests she calls home. A few years ago, Anne's farm was hit by a series of droughts, which made living off the land a lot more challenging. She felt stuck and ready for something different. So at 58 years old, Anne decided to go on an epic adventure. The plan was to kayak all the way from North Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, Anne had to face unfamiliar waters, unpredictable weather, and more than a few alligators.

1:09I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:22Anne's farm is located in the tiny town of Lansing, North Carolina, which has a population of just 155 people. She's been based in Lansing for nearly 30 years. Growing up, Anne moved around a lot with her parents, living on homesteads and in rural communities across Appalachia. One thing has been constant throughout her life, though. She's always spent time in nature.

1:49Ann Rose, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Tell us about the wild idea you completed in 2024.

1:57Ann Rose:I kayaked from right downstream from my farm in Lansing, North Carolina, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Almost 2 ,000 miles. Dang, amazing. I still sometimes have to pinch myself because I'm not sure I did it. Some days I look back and go, did I really leave home? So you have this like amazing accent. And is this a North Carolina accent? It's a mix of a little bit of Yankee, a little bit of foothills and mostly Appalachian. Because I've been in Appalachia, like where I was born in Ohio is Appalachia as well. It's so fun. Was nature part of your life growing up? Nature? Oh my goodness. Since I was a very young child, nature has always been my respite.

2:43Ann Rose:my mom would go to church and I would run to the woods with my pony, never to be seen till dark, because I just loved being outside with animals and with my little pony I had as a child. How old were you when you had this pony? I mean, this is so different than the way I grew up, so I'm just fascinated. God, I was like eight. I was very feral. I call myself the feral, barefoot, tree-climbing, creek-wading, pony-riding tom girl. Okay, so you grew up really outdoorsy. Your parents moved a little bit for work or? A lot. Out of poverty. Just moving around for work for my parents, yeah. But then I read that you became a nurse.

3:24Ann Rose:Yeah. So after high school, which I didn't finish, I had three children, got married, then went to college. So I kind of have always done things backwards, which is totally fine. It worked out great. I went to college to get my nursing assistant certificate. And then I went back and got my licensed practical nurse and then divorced and moving. And then I got my registered nurse, the associates in science degree after I bought my farm. I'm curious about that decision to buy a farm because that itself is a wild idea. How old were you and like what year was this, do you think? 1996. I'm 58 now. do the math.

4:07Ann Rose:I was 30 something. Yeah, I got a divorce and a horse and I needed room for my horse and three kids. How big is your farm? 28 acres. Wow, that's a big farm. It is. It's my mountainside. It's pasture because it's too steep to do much with. But I do have some growing land where I do farm now full time. That's what I went into after I left nursing. And so I did some terracing, put in a bunch of garden beds, put hoop houses over them, and now I'm growing and selling full-time at the farmer's market. About 15 years ago, I sold the house that came with the farm and one acre, and I moved into the woods.

4:49Ann Rose:I have a tiny shack I built with a chainsaw. I've been off grid 18 years, and I'm not changing that ever. Wait, back up. You built a tiny house with a chainsaw? Yeah. So I used a chainsaw to cut like lumber and things to make my tiny house. It's like 400 square feet. It started out as an 8 by 12, but I've added on as time went by. So it's as big as it's going to get. No more building. And you built it yourself? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Anne's tiny house is completely off-grid and powered by solar energy. No matter the season, you can always find her outside on her land. She raises sheep and goats for meat production and grows organic produce like squash, turnips, kale, and tons and tons of tomatoes.

5:37It brings Anne a lot of joy to work with the earth and grow food for herself and her neighbors. But it's hard work, and things can easily go wrong. In fact, 13 years ago, Ann got very ill from eating some bad canned carrots.

5:56Ann Rose:So I got botulism, botulina toxicity, from some carrots I canned very poorly because I still did it like grandma did it. I didn't use a pressure canner. So 81-day coma, I was in the hospital on a ventilator, and it's very different being the patient after having been the nurse. but I was unconscious so my raft did not leave the bed rails basically so I got over that and got better and I knew that I wasn't going to recover fully unless I changed the way I ate but you were in a coma for 81 days the coma was 54 days it was 81 day hospital stay because I had to go through the ventilator weaning unit to learn to breathe again to get discharged you're saying this really nonchalantly like oh it's because I was a nurse I'm just saying I just had that attitude because of my nursing history that's been 13 years ago though so I've had plenty of time to recover from that but then six years after that I developed cancer I had lymphatic cancer oral lymphatic cancer because as a teenager I was a dumb little smarty pants who thought she knew everything and I smoked and I drank and I look back now at 58 my god I wish I hadn't have done that.

7:09Ann Rose:Okay, well, what do you think helped get you through? Do you think it was your faith or do you think it was more like what you ate? No faith. No faith. It was 100 % attitude because when they told me I had oral and lymphatic cancer, I said, cancer. I just have always believed that our attitudes, that personality we have is what drives us or doesn't drive us. And I think I have a sassy attitude. I always have. And my parents used to call me stubborn. I'm like, it's not stubborn. And this is independence. So I've learned to change up the language for myself to help me. And I think women are the world's worst at talking bad inside to ourselves.

7:48Ann Rose:And we have to stop that. You know, if I have a bad day and I've screwed up something, I'm like, I try to find the thing I did good and right and say, damn, Ann, look what you did. That was great. And I may be only talking inside my head, but it's changing everything on the outside when I do that.

8:09Just six weeks after her diagnosis, Anne had surgery to remove her cancer. She was lucky to recover quickly, and five days later was back to work on the farm. Even though she still gets short of breath, Anne stays physically active. For most of the day, she's on her feet, chopping wood, planting, and harvesting. In her spare time, Anne loves to kayak and explore the local creek and river near her home. She's been paddling for decades, sometimes with her girlfriends and sometimes alone. 20 years ago, Anne came up with a wild idea to take her kayak farther than ever before.

8:47Let's get into your wild idea. I could talk to you for days about so many things, but you had this wild idea just recently, right? 2024?

8:56Ann Rose:Well, the idea was 20 years ago, but I let it recede to the back of my mind and I gave up because I was working and raising three kids. So the idea had been there, but smothered under life, captors of life. Okay, what was this wild idea? Okay, so I live in the mountains, and I have a little stream on my property that runs into a bigger stream, into a bigger stream, into a river. And one day, when I was doing home health nursing, driving up through Ash County, up by the North Fork of the New River, I'm looking at that water, and I'm like, where is all that darn water going? all the time it runs all the time and I had just left seeing a patient who met me in their backyard he was 90 and wasn't standing on a cane and I was looking I was mesmerized I didn't hear him approach me from the house because I was mesmerized by this spring in his backyard a pipe eight inches across that was just shooting water out of it like a full stream of water into a little rock branch in his backyard and he walked up to me and he said yonas up and i was like excuse me and he said yonas up and i realized he meant do you want a sip of water because that stream coming out of the side of that mountain was pure spring water and he reached down and took a drink with his hands.

10:26Ann Rose:And I was like, oh, okay, I'll do that, which I drank out of springs before, but he invited me and I thought, why not? And when I left his home, I watched the creek from his house and I became just mesmerized with how the water flows out of the mountains because it all gets to the ocean at some point. So I started thinking about it and I broke out the old paper road atlas and I went, I said, oh my God, that goes to the Gulf of Mexico. So all of my water here goes to the Gulf of Mexico. I bet I could paddle that. And that's exactly how it happened. That's how the idea came to be in my head. What year do you think this was?

11:06Ann Rose:That was in 2005. So you had this idea in 2005. Were you still divorced at the time? Yeah, I'd already been divorced. I lived in Ash County with my children. The primary reason I probably put it on the back burner was because I was still raising my children. So once they were gone, I did think of it. And I thought, well, I'm farming full time. What season can I leave and not lose crops and not get crops planted? When is the right time? And I argued with myself for a few years because I was procrastinating. Part of that little voice in your head was going, you can't do that. You have too much work to do.

11:43The idea to kayak to the Gulf of Mexico had been percolating in the back of Ann's mind for years. She wanted to make it happen one day. But at the time, her life was too busy to take months away from her farm and her kids. In recent years, the region where Ann lives has been hit by several consecutive years of drought. Ann started to grow frustrated. The lack of water made it almost impossible to grow crops and maintain the farm. She needed a break from the daily grind. So she decided to turn her 20-year-old dream into a reality.

12:15Ann Rose:So it was in the spring before I went. I was just like at the coffee shop going, I think I'm going to do it. I think I need to do it. Because the four years prior to the trip, my farm was really scalded. We didn't have much rain. My farm was failing because I ran out of water. The temperate rainforest atmosphere of the mountains was diminishing. And it was hot. And it was muggy. And it was dry. And my pasture grasses were dry. And my spring on my farm had dried up. And I was pumping water out of the creek below my farm. and hauling it back onto my farm. So I had this f*** it day. And I'm like, f*** it, I'm leaving.

12:56Ann Rose:I'm not doing this another year and go in the hole and spend my savings and not have crops to take to the market after the month of July because it quits raining. So it sounds like you had a bad drought year. Like you had a year, no water. Four years and you're over us. So I was at the coffee shop whining on my laptop because I go to the coffee shop for internet because I don't have internet. And this young lady walks in and she said, my friend Brittany wanted us to meet. And I had mentioned it to a few people in the farmer's market summer before. And she says, I'm a documentrist. And I heard you're going to take a long kayak journey and I'd like to film it.

13:37Ann Rose:And I went, really? I'm just kayaking. You know, like I still didn't think much of the whole journey. For me, I was running. I was getting away from some failing farm business. You know, I was at that point, I was just like, F it, I'm leaving. And that was the attitude I had when I left. I'm like, I'm out of here, y 'all. I'm tired. I'm older. I can't farm like this anymore because I can't haul water like that magnitude of hauling water. And I was like, I mean, yeah, if you want to, you can film it. But I'm not sure why. She's like, it's a long journey. I think we should film it. and I said, I'm too old to wait.

14:15Ann Rose:I have to do it now or never. I'm leaving in three months. Can you be ready? She's like, I guess.

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15:28Ann Rose is a farmer who lives off the grid in Lansing, North Carolina. In 2024, she kayaked nearly 2 ,000 miles from her farm to the Gulf of Mexico. She started in a local creek in Lansing and paddled northwest to meet the Ohio River. From the Ohio, Anne connected to the Mississippi River, which she took all the way down to the Gulf. Anne worked with a filmmaker named Haley Mellon to raise money and document the journey. They rigged cameras to the boat, which was a 10-and-a-half-foot-long Hovi kayak. Most of the time, Anne used to paddle, but the kayak was also equipped with a rudder and foot pedals.

16:05The boat's internal storage could hold a few weeks of supplies. Since the trip lasted for months, Ann met up with Haley periodically for supply jobs and repairs.

16:18Day one, you had like 200 people come out to meet you in your hometown just to send you off.

16:24Ann Rose:Yeah. That had to have been really emotional. I mean, do you even know all those people? No. I might have known, maybe I knew 30 or 40 of them. But I didn't know them all by name. I recognized faces. It was pretty incredible. I was so touched and honored that they came out to to say, get out of town. So I didn't really realize that people would want to see me take off and go and do this. I told myself, they're just here to see me fail. So I'll show them. Like that's that voice in your head that tries to talk you out of doing things. So my sassy attitude said, I'll show them. I'm going to show them.

17:02Ann Rose:I'm going to make it to the Gulf. And the other part of my brain was saying, God, all these people gave me money. I can't let them down. They gave me their hard-earned money. I have to make it. I absolutely have to. So, you know, you have that little internal battle with your little voices and your, I do anyway, they never shut up. Do you remember those first few days? What were they like? It rained on me the whole first day. And I'm like, oh, why am I leaving? It's raining now. the first four days the film crew was with me. After that, I was just wearing GoPros. We had them on the front of the boat looking at me.

17:36Ann Rose:I had one on me looking out. And I just had a solar panel to charge batteries to keep the GoPros filming. And I had no idea if those things were even recording or not. I was going. Let's talk about what was on your kayak. What did you pack on it? I had a couple of dry bags, one full of food, one with kitchen gear. And then the bigger bag had a hammock and a small tent like a little cocoon tent that you just slide in two feet first but my hammock also had a mosquito net over it you could zip into that as well i took both of those and i took a couple changes of clothes i don't know why i stunk so bad the whole time i didn't even need to change because the water i bathed in the new river i was afraid to bathe in the ohio and the mississippi because of just the pollution there and there's no place really where it's not industrialized.

18:27Ann Rose:There's very little areas of those rivers that are natural. Did you have like safety equipment? Life jacket. In the state of Virginia, you're required to have a life jacket, a safety whistle, and a knife. I got to the Ohio River before I realized I needed a flag on my boat so the ships could see me because I'm so tiny on a kayak, which my cousin Kathy fixed up for me with some craft we bought at Dick's Sporting Goods with a bright orange hunting vest we cut up and stuck it on a piece of PVC pipe. And I took it all the way. It worked all the way. I had a Garmin, a mini Garmin, that my neighbor, who does a lot of large animal hunting, loaned me.

19:06Ann Rose:So my kids and my immediate family could track me and see where I was. So if I got like separated from my boat or my phone, I could still communicate with that with a short few words, text, and it gave me weather updates because I did not have much cell service the entire way. Very little. cell service. Where exactly were you sleeping? I did a lot of stealth camping. So that's like where you sneak and hide and don't let anybody see where you're at because you're a little freaked out about where you're at. So on the Ohio River, the river banks are covered by factories or channeling fence. There's not many places to get out.

19:42Ann Rose:So I'm paddling, it's getting dark, and I find this small tributary coming into the river, and it's between two barge stacks. and I paddle in there really hard and I get up in the waterway and it's I'm exhausted I am beat by the heat I get up about 50 foot of this little tiny tributary barely deep enough to float my boat and I'm so exhausted I pull my boat up and I lay down my camping mat and I lay down like I don't put up my tent my hammock I don't drink water I just lay down and I lay there just like all you can hear is the hum of the factories on either side, just buzzing and whirling and clanking.

20:22Ann Rose:And it just reminded me of some weird movie from the 70s. And I'm laying there and this little fawn comes out of the woods, steps over me, and I'm just looking at it. I didn't move anything but my eyeballs. I just laid there. A little spotted baby fawn steps over me and goes and gets a drink of water from the stream and comes back over me and hops back into the woods. And I just giggled for like an hour. I was so thrilled to see that there was a wildlife thing in that part of the river where it was so mechanized and full of industry and noise and stinking pollution and rotten fish. And this little deer just comes right out and steps over me.

21:09Ann Rose:It just gave me a lot of joy to see that baby deer there at that minute. That's amazing. And I just slayed there and slept all night. Cowboy camped. I love it. Yeah. Cowgirl camp. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

21:26After three weeks on creeks and tributaries, Anne reached the Ohio River, where she had to navigate around massive barges and ships. There were places where she had to take her kayak out of the water and drag her stuff over land because dams or turbines made the water impassable. While she saw a lot of friendly wildlife like the fawn, she also had a number of close calls with alligators.

21:52Ann Rose:The first encounter was Baton Rouge. I had paddled over to get out of the river, and something under my boat did a big swirly-whirly. And it was like, oh, that's a big damn catfish, is what my brain said. And I got out of my boat and looked back, and I went, holy shit. That was not a catfish. That was my first encounter. And then I was more aware, looking out for them, because they don't chase you down. But if you get in their home, you know, you could have trouble. Wow. Yeah. I wasn't prepared for that. I did not do enough alligator research before I left. Wow. It sounds terrifying. It was. What was the most difficult part of the trip?

22:34Was there ever a part where you just wanted to give up and turn around or no? Yeah.