Stephanie and I shared many
delightful day trips, leaving memories scattered along almost any highway
within 200 miles of Madison. Overnight trips we more rare than day trips, just
because a hotel room can be expensive, but once in a while we splurged. One of our
favorite splurges was the SS Badger — our last overnight adventure,
before Steph went on dialysis.
The Badger is an old-style
steamship ferry, which makes two round-trips daily during the summer months,
between a town you've never heard of on the Wisconsin shores of Lake Michigan,
and a town you've never heard of on the Michigan side of that enormous lake.
Both towns are tourist traps, but the real attraction is the ferry itself.
The ship is huge, old, and a little
rickety. It carries up to 600 passengers and 180 cars. It's the last working
coal-fired passenger ferry in America, so the engine spits a toxic plume of
smoke and ash that's probably bad for everything in the water, and will annoy
your eyeballs and lungs if you're walking on deck and the dark dusty cloud hits
your head.
Still, riding the Badger is a
blast. But we're getting ahead of ourselves in the story, so let's rewind.
* * * * * *
* * * *
The years of Steph's health problems
have blurred together in my mind, so I'm not certain what year this was — 2013,
I think. Stephanie had recently been hospitalized, diagnosed with kidney
failure, and she was still absorbing the bad news that she would soon be on
dialysis.
Briefly, here are the basics of
dialysis, for folks lucky enough not to know: Most patients who need dialysis
do it three times per week at a clinic, but people who are more — what's the
word?; competent perhaps, or adroit — can do dialysis at home, seven nights a
week. Steph was clever enough to learn the rather complicated procedures, and
follow those procedures safely every night, so she was planning to do
home-dialysis.
When we asked, the dialysis clinic
staff always claimed that travel on dialysis was no real problem, and I won't
say they were lying but they weren't truthing either.
Traveling while on home-dialysis is
possible, sure — in theory. The machine only weighs thirty pounds or so, and
fits easily in the trunk of a car. She needed about sixty pounds of special
fluids per night, though, and the fluids are in bulky boxes that took up a lot
of trunk space. Even before the dialysis started, we already understood that it
would make overnight trips much more difficult and less frequent.
* * * * * *
* * * *
For years we had talked about taking
a ride on the Badger ferry, but tickets are a little expensive, and
Manitowoc, Wisconsin (the near-side port of departure) is a two-and-a-half hour
drive from Madison. It's a sixty-mile crossing, and it takes about four hours
each way. We'd planned on riding the ferry someday, but we knew, someday had to
be soon.
Steph being Steph, she did the
research and noticed that passenger rates on the Badger are
substantially reduced after Labor Day, so — surprise, we could afford it! We
bought two tickets, but it costs a lot more to bring a car on board, so we
packed suitcases and left the car in the parking lot at dockside.
She'd been having increasing
difficulty walking, so we knew in advance that the ship's narrow, steep
walkways and stairways would be challenging for her. The vessel is approaching
seventy years old, so it far predates the Americans with Disabilities Act, and
thus there are no elevators. There is exactly one disabled-accessible ladies'
room on the ship.
Just about the only accommodations
for the disabled is a chairlift for passengers boarding and disembarking in
wheelchairs, but Steph wasn't in a wheelchair yet, and she insisted on climbing
the gangplank and stairways herself. She became exhausted and needed to rest ⅔
of the way up the gangplank from the dock, but after a few minutes leaning on
the short rail, letting people squeeze upward past us, she walked the rest of
the way to the ship's lower deck.
Here, take a look at the stairway →
and imagine a crowded ship with thirty or forty stairways just like it. The
ship is several stories tall, and we explored every level, but each time we
went up or down (especially up) we went slowly, cautiously. I helped her as I
could, gently pulling her upwards when she needed a hand, or offering my elbow
and shoulder for stability.
Mostly, though, it was Stephanie who
did the hard work, and it was hard work for her. At home we had four steps,
which Steph found difficult; the SS Badger had hundreds of steps, and
Stephanie wanted to climb them all, and she did. And it was tremendously
difficult for her.
Let me stipulate that at no point
did I talk her into anything, regarding this trip (or much of anything else in
our lives). Riding the ferry was Stephanie's idea, she knew it would be a lot
of work, and she adamantly insisted that this was something she wanted to do.
As we were planning the trip, after
the third or fourth time I asked if she was sure she wanted to do this, she
explained it to me plainly: "Riding the ferry is going to be difficult for
me now, but in a couple of months or a couple of years it will probably be
impossible. I want to do this while I can do this, and that's absolutely
that."
So we did it, and we loved it. Once
upon a better time, Stephanie and I sailed to Michigan and back on the SS
Badger, and we had a wonderful time.
It was mesmerizing to look out the
window or sit on the deck, unless the breeze changed and the ash whipped into
your face.
We read books on the sundeck,
listening and laughing at some loud, ignorant people having a loud, ignorant
political conversation a few chairs away from us.
The on-board food was rumored to be
expensive and not very good, so we packed sandwiches and drinks, and bought
only french fries at the concession stands (but they were yummy).
We marveled at the marvelous view,
because the middle of Lake Michigan might as well be the middle of the ocean —
you can't see either shore, just water everywhere.
Seagulls followed the ship all the
way, frequently landing and nibbling on the ship's litter and crumbs. We
enjoyed the people-watching, and water-watching and bird-watching and
fish-watching.
It was an unforgettable voyage to
Michigan, and then a night at some bland chain hotel, and then the voyage back
to Wisconsin the next day.
And after all the walking and
climbing Steph was exhausted, of course — eastbound she fell asleep almost as
soon as we checked into the hotel, and westbound she fell asleep as soon as we
stepped off the ferry and into our car.
She was right, that while riding the
ferry was difficult for her, it would soon become impossible. But she wanted to
do it while she could do it, so she did it. It's fair to say, that's a
recurring motif of Stephanie's life.