Erin Cranston is standing up for a better life

Paddleboards Lake Powell to stop smoking

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Erin Cranston was facing a big, difficult change in her life. She was trying to quit smoking.
Again.
She knew it was going to be very hard and painful to do because she’s tried to quit smoking more than a dozen times already. Each time she lasted a few weeks or a few months, but one circumstance or another always drew her back into her smoker lifestyle.
“I have been smoking close to 20 years,” Erin said. “I have quit so many times, and every time is so hard. Every time is mental hell.”
She found that even the thought of trying to quit again was rather exhausting.
But whatever hell and anguish lay ahead, she was ready to try again. For Erin, her smoking habit had become a sort of wall, and she felt like the rest of her life, her best life, lay on the other side of it.
“Yeah, I’m getting older. l still want to find a meaningful relationship. I still want to have kids. I think everything I’ve been through in the last year is leading to that,” she said.
Going into her latest attempt to quit smoking, this time she had analyzed the factors that had drawn her back to it. Some were physical, some psychological. To be successful, she had to address both. To be successful physically, she had to be away from a smoker’s atmosphere and influence long enough for the nicotine and other addictive chemicals found in cigarettes to leave her system, after which the cravings would subside to a more manageable level.
“I needed to be away from society for a while,” she said. “I considered hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. I needed to be out there. Away from temptation.”
The psychological factors would require some kind of gesture or symbol that was large enough not just for herself but for everyone else in her life to see. A symbolic line in the sand that said, once I step over this line I’m not coming back.
She says the idea — something that would satisfy both the mental and psychological demands — came to her last August.  
“Most of my family was resistant to the idea,” Erin said.
The endeavor seemed too extreme. Too dangerous.  
Exactly, thought Erin. Already people were taking notice of her line in the sand.
“But my little sister said, `Yes! Let’s do it!’ She didn’t hesitate.”
Her sister is Lindsay Cranston, 31, from California. She came to Page specifically to help her sister paddleboard to Rainbow Bridge, and cross that hard-to-cross line in the sand.
“I will always support Erin,” Lindsay said. “I knew she’d quit smoking some day, and when she told me about this idea, I thought it was a great idea. This way she could concentrate on the journey and leave all that behind. Plus I’m into roughing it and camping. I was down with it right away.”
It was the first week of November 2016. Erin and Lindsay lashed their gear to their paddleboards and pushed off from Antelope Point Marina. Their plan was to spend a week paddling to Rainbow Bridge, and another week paddling back.
But nature has its own plans. In November, nature holds the trump card. As anyone who lives in Page knows, early November can be a wonderful time to be on Lake Powell. But in November, the weather can change from beautiful and mild to nasty and dangerous in minutes.
And Erin’s and Lindsay’s naievete was playing into Mother Nature’s hand.
“We took too much stuff,” Erin said.
The two had gone out ahead of time and cached food, water and other supplies along pre-destined campsites along their route, but still brought many items with them to make their journey more comfortable. Lashed to each paddleboard each Cranston had a tent, a camp chair and snacks. And for protection they also brought knives and a pistol. And Lindsay brought a camera to capture the journey’s moments of serenity, magic, tragedy and absurdity. The trip would supply an ample supply of each.
Erin fell in love with paddleboarding the year before.
“I’ve always wanted to try it, and when I tried it I loved it!” she said. “It’s great workout and it takes patience. Wherever you’re going on a paddleboard, you’re not going to get there fast.”

For someone trying to eliminate nicotine from their body, few things could meet those requirements better than the rigors of two weeks paddling a slow stand up paddleboard across an uncooperative lake; a lake that a week later would definitively turn against them.
“It was a rough trip, but I’m glad it was rough,” Erin said. “There were times when I was focused only on survival. There were some times when I cried it out. There were times when things just got weird.”
And constantly doing the same repetitive motions with no change in stimuli can grow boring. Or meditative, depending on one’s state of mind.
On her second day paddling, Erin had fallen into a meditative state, but her consciousness was instantly brought back to the fore with an unexpected bang on the bottom of her paddleboard.
“Some kind of fish kept coming up and hitting the bottom of  my board,” she said. “Then it got even weirder. Other [fish] came to the top of the water and then just stared at me.”
That night they made it to mile marker 14, their pre-determined camp; a spot where they had cached food, drinking water and firewood.
For Lindsay, it was her first real time paddleboarding. She had tried it a few days before paddling out to a buoy.
“I’m always up for an adventure,” she said.
Day one was one of only two smooth days of their trip.
After that, even though they had cached food and other supplies along other beachheads along the way, they failed to recognize them.
“One beach looks a lot like the other,” said Erin.
At the end of their second day of paddling, they still hadn’t found the beach with their food cache and it was getting dark.
“We were tired, hungry, our feet were wet and we were started to get a little bit scared,” said Erin. “All we wanted was to make a fire, warm up, eat and go to bed.”
The two sisters camped on an unfamiliar beach. Lindsay found enough wood to make a campfire and they still had some snacks they were carrying on their boards.
The morning of the third day they paddled seven or eight more miles closer to their destination, but when it came time to camp they once again couldn’t find the beach where they had cached their food. By then they were out of water. But they flagged down some passing fishermen who gave them some cold bottled water.
They made camp on a strange beach and made a small meal of what was left of their snacks.
“We were so exhausted we didn’t care,” Erin said.
Things got better the next day. After traveling about a mile they recognized the place where they had cached their food. They stopped there and rested for the day.
“We were exhausted,” Erin said. “Part of it was physical exhaustion and some was mental. I hadn’t had a cigarette in three days. I’m also used to having an espresso every day.”
On day five, after a much-needed day of rest, the Cranstons got on their paddleboards and once again pointed their noses in the direction of Rainbow Bridge, but before leaving camp they lightened their loads.
“We were carrying a ridiculous amount of unnecessary gear,” Erin said.
They left behind an extra sleeping bag, a tent, a book, a change of clothes and some pots and pans. They had purposely left behind their camp stove at camp one and afterward cooked over the fire.
After their trip, they came back after by boat and picked up the gear they had left behind.
Day five was a great day, Erin said.
“We were rested, the weather was nice, the wind was at our back,” she said.
But once again, they failed to find the beach where they had cached their food. They camped on another beach, ate what snacks they had left and went to bed.
The next day they paddled to Dangling Rope and there they met a fisherman who offered to take them to Rainbow Bridge. They hid their paddleboards on a beach and went with the fisherman to Rainbow Bridge.
They hiked to Rainbow Bridge and when they returned to the fisherman’s boat, his friends had arrived in their boat.
The three treated Erin and Lindsay to a meal of cheese, smoked meats, fruit and crackers.
“It was awesome,” Lindsay said. “After eating mac and cheese from a can for several days in a row, it was really nice to eat some nice food that wasn’t from a can.”
The fisherman took them back to the beach where they had stashed their boards and gear and they camped there.
On day seven, they started paddling back to Page.
“We wanted to haul butt, but the wind was now against us,” Erin said. “We only made it five miles.”
They found their food cache and camped for the night.  The weather turned bad and got worse as the night progressed.
“We didn’t sleep at all,” Erin said. “The wind was blowing so hard that it smashed the tent down on us and sand filtered through the tent walls. The wind was so loud we couldn’t hear each other.”
When they stepped out of their tent the next morning, they found the wind had blown their paddleboards away. They found them after a few minutes of looking but Erin’s board had some holes in it.
The weather was still bad. It was cold and the lake had whitecaps.
“I’d promised my family that if things got too dangerous that I’d come home,” Erin said.
Erin called the park service who sent some rangers to get them in a boat and bring them back to Page.
“I was disappointed,” Erin said. “I really wanted to finish the trip, but I felt good that I accomplished what I set out to do, which is quit smoking.”
It’s been eight months since that trip and Erin is still a non-smoker.
“It’s for good this time,” Erin said.
She says she’ll always look back on that trip as an important turning point in her life.    
Even though the trip had several rough days and things that didn’t go as planned, the trip still has numerous highlights, Erin said.
“Of course the lake is so beautiful and it was so amazing to be out on it paddling,” she said. “The best part was spending time with my sister. Even though we were going through hard times, we still cracked each other up the whole time.”
Erin says she couldn’t have done her trip without the help of Joe and Jordan Lapekas, owners of Lake Powell Paddleboards, who gave her and her sister use of their boards without charge.
“The deal is if I don’t smoke again the boards are free, but if I start smoking again I have to pay for the boards,” said Erin. “That’s a pretty good deal.”