Portland's canoe man paddled 100,000 miles

A bronze man kneels with a paddle on the bank of the Grand River in Portland, watching the water he loved. The statue honors Verlen Kruger, and the number attached to his name is hard to believe: over 100,000 miles paddled in a canoe. That’s the distance around the Earth four times, done one stroke at a time, mostly after the age when other people retire.

Kruger didn’t take up serious paddling until he was in his late forties. Once he started, he didn’t stop. He completed a dozen long expeditions, but the big one ran from 1980 to 1983 — the Ultimate Canoe Challenge, more than 28,000 miles across North America with his partner Steve Landick, which Guinness recognized as the longest canoe journey ever made. Later, from 1986 to 1989, he paddled some 21,000 miles from the Arctic to the tip of South America. He designed his own slim, decked canoes to survive that kind of punishment, and several paddlers still build to his patterns.

He also turned his attention close to home. In 1990 Kruger helped launch the first Grand River Expedition, a group paddle of the whole river from above Jackson down to Lake Michigan, meant to get people looking hard at the health of the water in their own backyard. That tradition of documenting the Grand has carried on for decades.

The memorial went up in June 2010, set in a brick compass rose where the Looking Glass and the Grand come together. Kruger had died in 2004. Stand beside the statue and you’re a short walk from the same current he paddled out onto countless times — a plumber from a small Michigan town who pointed a canoe at two continents and reached the far end of both.