OUT OF EDEN WALK

We are zipped, the argonauts and I, into watertight outfits that resemble blue spacesuits. A matchhead sun strikes the corrugated peaks of the Fairweather Range in southeast Alaska, lighting the dawn sky afire. We perform warm-up yoga on an empty beach. My knees crack. This is inauspicious: Today marks the launch of a Homeric journey spanning 1,700 kilometers of the western coast of North America. Corked into the cockpits of sea kayaks that can be hauled on a shoulder, we will paddle the distance between London and Rome.

There are three of us.

On my right, stretching in a cobra pose: Justine Bright, 30, a seasoned outdoorswoman and former kayaking guide on Alaska’s scenic Kenai Peninsula. (“I got tired of yelling at clients,” Bright says of her old job. “You know, just trying to keep them alive?”) She wields a degree in wildlife biology, a certificate in emergency medicine, and an inborn competence that trumps all manner of paper credentials—the sort of adroitness one might long for in a companion in war. To my left, doing power squats: Kevin Danielson, 33, a professional nomad. (“Originally from Eugene, Oregon, the ‘OK-est town in America.’”) Danielson is a song-of-the-open-road man. A rambler of no static abode. He’s been ricocheting about the continent—hopping freights, hitchhiking, biking, walking, sailing, paddling—for 15 years. A life of endless waypoints. Of hobo camps. Of dumpster-diving. Of strangers’ couches. I asked Danielson once about the weirdest employment he’d ever endured. “You mean,” he replied, “besides taking a journalist who’s never stepped into a sea kayak before down the Inside Passage?”

And it’s true.

But I’ve watched the YouTube tutorials. (“This next move is totally counterintuitive yet absolutely essential!”) And Danielson and Bright, saintly teachers, have drilled me for a week on boating fundamentals. Self-rescue. Loading cargo. Not calling a kayak a canoe. To suggest that this aquatic subculture—with its tidal clock and neoprene booties—is a novelty in my life would be an understatement. I can barely swim. Instead, for more than 13 years, I have kept my feet dry by walking continents. I am retracing the trails blazed by the early Homo sapiens who roamed out of Africa during the Stone Age. When big waters intervene, I happily climb aboard motorized ships: a camel carrier in the Red Sea, a truck ferry on the Caspian, and once, across the Pacific, a gigantic container ship. Science, however, disdains comfort zones. And Alaska presents a glistening new frontier: a liquid road.

Remember schoolbook accounts of the first peopling of the Americas? How shaggy bands of Siberian hunters led the way across the now vanished Bering Land Bridge into Alaska? And then pushed south through an ice-free corridor in what today is central Canada around 12,000 to 13,000 years ago? That theory has begun to wobble. Recent discoveries hint that ancient watercraft were also involved. The first Americans may have been people of the sea.

So far, the evidence is indirect. And tantalizing.

A prehistoric encampment of seaweed-eaters called Monte Verde, on the faraway coast of Chile, is so startlingly ancient (14,500 years) that it predates the opening of the vast glacial door that blocked foot travel through North America. This suggests that at least a few adventurous souls must have paddled down the west coast of the continent earlier than the walkers. Likewise, the owner of two 13,100-year-old human femurs excavated from the Channel Islands of California could only have reached that offshore site by boat.

“What their boats looked like, we don’t know,” says Bryn Letham, a Canadian archaeologist hunting for prehistoric settlements along the Inside Passage, a lush, amphibious maze of islands, channels, straits, and fjords that stretches from Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, down the solitary coast of British Columbia, to Puget Sound in Washington state. “We assume they were like the sealskin boats of Arctic people, and maybe further south they used log canoes.”

The problem is material.

Stone tools essentially last forever. But boats must float. And buoyant artifacts made of wood or animal hide decay with little trace. The oldest ship known to science, for instance, a stubby dugout canoe found pickled in boggy soil at a highway construction site in the Netherlands, is only 9,000 to 10,000 years old. Humans, we know, had gained their sea legs long before then. Stone Age sailors landed on Australian beaches at least 60,000 years ago. This part of the watery saga is a mystery.

I wish to honor these primordial seafarers. More than 28,000 kilometers into my trek across the planet, I take off my walking shoes. I stow my backpack. For the first time, I pick up an aluminum paddle.

Danielson and Bright will guide me on a route that some archaeologists call North America’s “kelp highway,” an immense inshore ecosystem fat with animal and plant energy that may have enticed ancestral paddlers southward all the way to California.

Our kayaks are themselves antique.

The second-hand boats are late 1990s or early 2000s vintage. They are five meters long and sleek as needles: a design lifted directly from the sealskin watercraft of Inuit, Yup'ik, and Aleut peoples of the Arctic. Made of sun-faded fiberglass, they remain incredibly strong. We plan to pull them with our muscles from Gustavus, Alaska, to Bellingham, Washington. A journey of months. We intend to camp in wild coves visited by few other humans. We will haul in at Inside Passage villages and towns to resupply. And enroute, we hope to meet the Native Alaskan and First Nation heirs of the continent’s pioneering sea cultures, the Tlingits and Tsimshians, the Heiltsuk and Haida. (A Tlingit migration story: Elders canoed the dark rivers flowing beneath inland glaciers to emerge at the shining promised land of the sea coast.)

Our thousands of paddle strokes will displace, on average, 1,200,000 liters of seawater a day—enough to fill half an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Between strokes we will wave at other widely scattered denizens of the Inside Passage: loggers and paleo-hippies, fishers and neo-barbarians, preppers and latter-day druids, not to mention members of our hardship-basking clan, sea kayakers. (“A guy came in here eating oatmeal with his hands,” one harbor master will tell us. “I gave him a spoon, and he nearly passed out with gratitude. A spoon! He cried. A spoon!”)

Mostly, I want to skim my hands through the sea’s skin of light, and imagine the continental edge as Paleolithic mariners first saw it—a world without names or destinations.

Even today, the sights of the Inside Passage would seem a hat trick were we not born into this world and inured to its magic. Like the massive, hard-edged cumulus glowing buttery yellow, as if lit from inside, racing low over the gunmetal blue waters like molten asteroids. Or the loud, pneumatic croaking and sighing of the sheltered sea amid swarms of its whales, sea lions, seals, and other mammals. (Did moving herds of buffalo sound like this?)

“Don’t use your arms so much,” Bright advises me, as we nose together out into Icy Strait near Gustavus. “Use your abdomen. Engage your core.”

I tell her I can’t locate my core. She gives me a look that says: You’d better find it.