Eighteenth Installment: The journey's end

I woke at 5 a.m., at the first sign of dawn, and switched on the small TV. The weather forecasts reported a major storm front lined up on the Minnesota/Wisconsin border, moving east rapidly. No forecast pinned down the exact time that the severe weather would arrive, but it sounded like it could reach Lake Butte des Morts by early afternoon. This final paddle of the trip would be about eleven miles, five of those miles on the very open water of that lake.

Lake Butte des Morts, named “Hill of the Dead” by the French for an nearby Indian burial mound¹, was large, about five miles long by three miles wide, or almost 14 square miles (36 square kilometers). Being shallow, the wind could quickly whip up large waves of short interval. One guide book was specific: “In windy or uncertain weather, Lake Butte des Morts is not safe for canoeing.”² It was imperative to start early so as to beat the worst weather. I did not have a “bomb proof” roll in case I got tipped – far from it, and I did not relish trying to right and reenter a loaded kayak on a storm tossed lake.

I had half packed the night before, and now, in the wan light of early dawn, I wolfed down the last of my power bars and quickly dressed. In a few minutes more the kayak was packed and I was wheeling it down to the boat launch. As the boat slid into the current, my watch said 6:10.

The last leg of my journey would end in Oshkosh, where the river entered Lake Winnebago. Winnebago, approximately 30 by 10 miles (48 by 16 km) is the largest lake in the United States contained entirely within a state. The lake is the terminus of the Upper Fox. The Lower Fox drains Lake Winnebago. Only 39 miles (63 km) long, the Lower Fox is a much larger, faster, and more developed river. It passes through half a dozen large cities and 17 locks while falling 164 feet (50 m) on its way to Green Bay, an arm of Lake Michigan.³

But here, on the last stretch of the Upper Fox, the river slowed and broadened as I went. By the second mile, marsh edged both sides, and roads, cottages, and homes disappeared. At about mile four, the Fox began to open into Lake Butte des Morts. Here the river skirted the 8,857 acre Nickels Marsh to the west. I paused and called my father on my cell phone. I told him to meet me in Oshkosh’s Rainbow Park in about two hours.

Dredging had formed a long breakwater along the east side of the Fox as it entered the lake. The channel and its wall continued for three quarters of a mile northeast into the lake. With each paddle stroke, the storm front built ever higher and darker behind me, sucking in a strong wind from the south east, the very point I needed to head into. So, I kept the break-wall close on the right. It provided some shelter from the wind.

Gulls covered the breakwater. As I passed each group, they broke into clamorous braying, announcing my progress as the channel slowly arched east. Roundeding the end of the wall, I found myself in the middle of the lake, the wind now blowing unimpeded across four miles of lake, which it was whipping into a short chop. The swells were running nearly two feet high, and the interval between waves was less than the length of my baidarka. The boat was most stable taking the wind and waves head on, but this meant constant, hard paddling for four miles right down the middle of the lake. The shores to the north and south were each a mile or more away. I felt awfully small and alone on a very big water.

The lashed framework of the hull rode and flexed over the waves like a living being. I made my profile low, leaned forward into each stroke, and kept in the rhythm of paddling. The blade work was constant as the wind was unrelenting. Spray from foaming wave tops soaked the deck and me. It took an hour and 40 minutes to cross the four miles of lake. I was spent by the time I passed under the Highway 41 Bridge and back into the river, heading just a mile further for Rainbow Park on the near-west side of Oshkosh. I arrived at 9:15.

I nosed the kayak onto the cement boat ramp. Hoisting myself out of the cockpit, I left the river for the last time this trip. One hundred miles traveled; eight warm June days behind me. The baidarka had proved that it belonged in the Fox, not hanging, beached high and dry, in my garage.

In his book from which my kayak was born, Wolfgang Brinck wrote: “Aleut kayaks of early construction had spirit … lines carved on the inside face of the gunwales. The spirit line is like the digestive tract, the circulatory system, and the nervous system of an animal all rolled into one. Since a kayak is a living thing, it needs a spirit line.”⁴ I too had carved a spirit line on my baidarka. And I had given it a journey. I hoped the journey had nourished it, allowed its spirit to taste life, to surge, arching joyfully, over every wave. The journey had nourished me too. When I was deep in the cockpit, the kayak riding low in the surface of the Fox, its gunwales barely breaking above the river’s skin, I felt the pulse of the river, felt the history, the time immemorial that it had flowed through the hearts and lives of the people along its banks.

In A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean wrote: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”⁵ The Fox River, this river, had its own stories to tell. A few, those common and new, were shouted by the river. Most were whispered. I had to submerge myself in the waters to hear the murmurs. Sometimes the words were so soft that the tale was felt more than heard, like water sliding over the hull of my baidarka. Sometimes I had to look under the rocks for the words. But they were there - the words of the Fox, the stories of timeless, quiet beauty - and they haunted me.

I pulled my baidarka from the Fox. I draped my gear over the pavilion‘s tables, and waited for my father. He arrived at 10:30 a.m., cheerful and obviously full of questions about the trip. Always a welcome sight, he had come just in time, as the first drops of rain began to fall.


1. Kort, Ellen. The Fox Heritage: A History of Wisconsin’s Fox Cities, at page 25. Windsor Publishing, October 1984.

2. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 16. Trails Books, 1998.

3. Wikipedia. Fox River (Wisconsin). Revised October 5, 2011. Accessed October 29, 2011. http://www.omro-wi.com/a-brief-history-of-omro.html.

4. Brinck, Wolfgang. The Aleutian Kayak: Origins, Construction, and Use of the Traditional Seagoing Baidarka, at page 61. Ragged Mountain Press, April 1, 1995.

5. Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. University of Chicago Press, May 1976.

Seventeenth Installment: Omro rises from the pages

It was a sunny, sweltering 90 degrees. I had landed in the west end of Omro, at a wooden boat ramp. From there it was a half-mile hike through downtown and then uphill to the Ramble Inn Motel*. I trudged along, but an air-conditioned Subway restaurant in mid-downtown, wafting the smell of fresh-baked bread, drew me off course. I parked the baidarka and stepped into the cool air to order lunch.

Still, it was a beautiful day in a new town, and I had been in plenty of Subway restaurants before. So, I got my sandwich to go, and lots and lots of ice for my large lemonade, and headed for Scott Park, a shady refuge from the heat of downtown Omro.

Reached by a bridge from Main Street, Scott Park occupied a canoe-shaped island in the Fox. I took in the city as I ate. The downtown looked like it had had a facelift, and some businesses were new. The park was updated. Some vitality was on display. I decided to come back downtown after checking into the motel to learn more about this small city with an even smaller name.

The Ramble Inn, according to the sign out front on Highway 21, was under new management. The cluttered office was claustrophobically the size of a porch, which it had been in a former life, and the air conditioner was not holding its own. The décor was 70s - dark brown carpeting and trim, white counters and walls, and plastic plants. It was soon apparent that the new management had not yet ironed out all the wrinkles of running a first class establishment.

The owner ran my credit card repeatedly without success. As the minutes passed and the heat in the too-close office got unbearable, I asked if perhaps someone else was tying up the phone line. The hotelier’s eyes lit up. Muttering “John”, he dashed out to the row of small motel rooms facing the highway to get “John” off the phone. The single phone line cleared, the owner returned and finished checking me in. He said the only other guests were two men making a cross-country motorcycle trip, and a couple older men renting by the week. The long-term guests were sitting outside one of their rooms drinking beer, looking as worn out as the motel.

The room was recently posted as non-smoking, but prior years of smokers had permeated the walls, carpet and furniture with the stale odor of old cigarette smoke. The traffic areas of the carpet seemed clean, but the edges were frosted with dirt and dust. The bathroom and the TV were both small relics of another decade. But the air conditioner and shower worked, the bed was not too soft, and the sheets were clean. That was all I really cared about.

After unpacking and showering, I crossed Highway 21 to the Fat Cats Drive-in for a chocolate milk shake. (What could be better after a morning of paddling.) It was a 50s-style drive-in, with a walk-up window to order from. You could then eat in your car, or, like me, sit at a picnic bench. A large water park lay to the north down the slope, between the drive-in and the river. Having slurped up the last drop of the shake, I strolled downtown.

Omro was located on lands that, at the time of the first French explorers, belonged to the Ho-Chunk Indians. By the mid-1830’s, the Ho-Chunk had ceded their land to the United States government and were relocated west of the Mississippi.¹ They did not lose the land for lack of love, stewardship or need. They gave way reluctantly and for too small a price in the face of overwhelming technology, a much more numerous race, and that people’s greed for wealth. Louise Phelps Kellogg reports in her Early Narratives of the Northwest 1634-1699 an Indian saying: “For us this river was a path. For our white brethren, to whom we sold it, it is a power.”²

Down near the river, by Scott Park, was a small public library where I discovered a fat three-ring binder with over 300 type-written pages of local history compiled by Miriam J. Smith, a 96 year-old woman, between 1970 and 1976. Reading it was like sitting around a kitchen table with friends, swapping stories heard long ago from parents and grandparents. I read of two brothers from Ohio who traveled from Green Bay to nearby Oshkosh in 1836. They made their way on Indian paths along the Fox, following sketchy directions from the scattered traders, settlers and Indians they met along the way. I learned that Charles Omreau, a French fur trader and black smith, settled in what is now Omro, bequeathing his name, albeit Anglicized, to the city.

Omro was founded in 1842, became a village in 1849, and finally a city in 1944. By 1853 it had a population of 600. Located on the south bank of the Fox, it had 100 dwellings, five stores, two hotels and three mills. Being on the Fox, and at the junction of two important plank roads, it was a commercial center. The village had grown to 2,000 people, adding a glass factory and several carriage factories.³ Miriam wrote of steamboats that ran through Omro, and that by 1880 there was a rail stop. The county fair was held in Omro.

In 1896, the village built a hall and firehouse with a four-story tower. Made of a pale-pink brick in the Late Victorian style, it was the village’s crown. However, the nearby city of Oshkosh, with its thriving lumber business, began to dominate commercially, and eventually the mills and factories of Omro relocated or closed.⁴ The notes in the binder said that the steamboat passenger service ended in 1902. I had read in another source that in Cady’s Bayou, between Eureka and Omro, some fifty steamboats “met a humiliating end”, being broken up for firewood.⁵

But the city began a new growth spurt in the 1970s, expanding from its static population of around 2,000 to about 3,400 residents today.⁶ The city web site said that Omro started a revitalization program in 1986, and claimed: “Through projects such as the historic walking tour, the Scott Park pavilion project, and the designation of a historic downtown district, [the city] is paying homage to its past even as it builds for the future.”⁷ So, Omro was trying to be something other than bayous I passed in the morning - a backwater. Still, it seemed the glory days were gone, leaving only ghosts - an elegant village hall, an old woman’s memories, Indian stories.

Finished with reading and musing, I returned to Fat Cats for dinner, eating my meal at a picnic table shaded by the building from the still blazing sun. As I ate, I turned my thoughts to tomorrow, the last paddle on the journey. It would be eleven miles to Oshkosh, at least five of which would be through Lake Butte des Morts, the largest and most dangerous lake of the trip.

* The name of the motel has been changed.


1. Hoocak Waaziija Haci Language Division (a division of the Ho-Chunk Nation). The Ho-Chunk Nation - A Brief History. Accessed July 9, 2011. http://www.hocak.info/mysite/HTM%20All/Ho-Chunk%20history.html.

2. Kellogg, Louise Phelps. Early narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699. C. Scribners's sons, 1917.

3. Wikipedia. Omro, Wisconsin. Revised September 29, 2011. Accessed November 3, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omro,_Wisconsin.

4. Id.

5. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 15. Trails Books, 1998.

6. The City of Omro. A Brief History of Omro …. Accessed July 10, 2011. http://www.omro-wi.com/a-brief-history-of-omro.html.

7. Id.


_____________________________________________

Sixteenth Installment: Meander from Berlin to Omro

I slept a sound seven hours in the motel, waking at 5:30 a.m. A continental breakfast was set out in the hotel lobby, which I ate while watching the weather, which would be hot again. Best to start early. So I retrieved the baidarka from the utility shed, repacked it, and wheeled it half a mile back to Badger Mineral. I was on the Fox by 7:11. Seven days' practice had made me efficient.

The river was now broad and sluggish. Leaving Berlin, I passed Riverside Park, peaceful and graceful, with grassy slopes and weeping willows hanging over the water. The river mirrored the trees and sky. The willows and stately cottonwoods lining the bank were reflected perfectly, their reflections spangled with thousands of cottonwood seed tufts floating on the surface. I love cottonwoods despite their blizzard of snow-like seeds. Tall, with thick straight trunks, they were intimately connected with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Ocean, supplying tree trunks that the explorers fashioned into dugout canoes.¹

Cottages now dotted the river's shore, and for the first time on the trip there were year-round homes. The homes were placed further inland than the cottages, as if owners could not quite choose between the infrastructure of roads and utilities connecting them to the workaday world, and the isolation of the banks of the Fox. The homes all had neat, mown lawns running down to the shore. Dairy farms also appeared here and there, with their red, gambrel-roofed barns and tall concrete silos.

It was day seven, with a fifteen-mile trip to Omro, Wisconsin, and I was tired. My right elbow and shoulder had mild tendonitis. This I had to grin and bear. I had been taking Ibuprofen (Vitamin I, as Paul from the climbing gym calls it), but quit after it caused acid reflux. My lower back was sore from the constant paddling and irritated from rubbing the cockpit coaming. And each day my backside cramped up from the confined position in the lightly padded seat. (Too much padding in a kayak raises the center of gravity, making the boat easier to tip. A sore behind is better than a soaking.) A saving grace was the carbon-fiber Greenland-style paddle that I was using. Manufactured by Superior Kayaks, it was a beauty to behold, fit my hands well, was efficient, and was as light as a feather.

The route was west northwest toward Omro. Near the halfway point there was a portage around the Eureka Lock and Dam. The take-out point was obvious. The put-in spot downstream was not. Improvising, I rolled the kayak past the abandoned lockkeeper’s house and down a long drive following the river. After going an eigth of a mile, I found a gravel embankment low enough that I could lower the boat into the water and reenter while using a paddle-brace against the bank. While this portage took longer than planned, being out of the boat, stretching muscles and getting the blood flowing again was a great relief.

Several miles farther downstream were the small village of Eureka and the lift bridge for County Highway K. The bridge, steel girders painted a dull gray-blue, looked as if it had been pieced together out of some giant's child’s erector set, and had an odd, art nouveau, sculptural look. The pivot point was to my right, and the girders swept up there in a great arch to encompass the enormous counter weights. I stopped just beyond the bridge on a concrete pier to eat a power bar and trail mix.

Somewhere along this stretch of the Fox once stood a great palisaded city of several thousand Mascouten Indians, the city that Nathan Strong had heard about. An Algonquin-speaking tribe, in about 1600 it had been forced west into Wisconsin by other tribes. They were a small band, and for self-protection associated with the Fox and Kickapoo tribes along the Fox River.² The city was visited by French explorers, including Allouez and Joliet.³ The intertribal peace did not last long. By 1665, the Iroquois drove the Mascoutens out of the Fox River valley. They either resettled in Illinois and Michigan, or were absorbed into other tribes.⁴ Now, along the Fox only their story remains, their city’s site gone from maps and memory.

With the stronger current and no wind, I averaged three knots even though I paddled only in spurts, interspersed with pleasant periods of drifting and enjoying the sights and sounds of the river. Much of the landscape was the familiar sandy spoil banks overgrown with silver maple, cottonwood, willow and ash. The topography along this section of the Fox was flat, and the stream meandered. Every mile or so was a bayou formed from a former bend of the river, some nearly a mile in length.

A female mallard at the entry of one slough herded twenty tiny ducklings through the water. Three drakes floated nearby, not lifting a feather to help. In contrast, I later saw a pair of Canadian geese working together to lead their brood of goslings off the river and up the bank as I approached. I also came across a red-tailed hawk on the marshy edge of an embayment, splashing in the water rather than soaring overhead or perched on a tree. An agitated merganser hen was paddling back and forth nearby. The hawk may have just pounced on one of her brood. My last bird sighting was just outside of Omro where I spotted an osprey or eagle nest atop a telephone pole. The head of a fledgling could be seen, calling with all its might for its next meal.

I entered Omro at half past noon and landed at a wooden boat ramp upstream from downtown. From there it would be a half-mile walk in the 90 degree heat through downtown Omro to the Ramble Inn Motel.


1. Lloyd, Kathy. Black Cottonwood. Montana Native Plant Society. Lewis and Clark Plant Information - Species Specific Series. Accessed November 5, 2011. http://www.mtnativeplants.org/Lewis_%26_Clark_Plant_Information.

2. Sultzman, Lee. Mascouten History. Accessed July 9, 2011. http://www.dickshovel.com/mas.html.

3. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 15. Trails Books, 1998.

4. Sultzman, Lee. Id.


_____________________________________________

Fifteenth Install: Looking for jollification in Berlin, Wisconsin

I wheeled my kayak, as if it were Detroit’s finest sedan, into the entryway of Berlin’s Best Western Motel. At the front desk, Melissa was helpful and sympathetic, listening patiently to my tired babbling, and saying nothing about how I smelled after a hot day of paddling. When asked about the safe-keeping of my baidarka, Melissa helped me store the boat in the motel’s utility shed. She was amazed at how much stuff was jammed into the boat. Solicitously, she remarked that there was a hot tub for the guests. As I had no swimsuit, she produced a pair of “disposable” trunks from under the reception desk. They were six dollars, and one size fit all, which really meant that they were many sizes too big for me. Melissa was fascinated by the paper-like material, but I was skeptical about their opaqueness and politely declined the trunks and the hot tub.

After a long shower and washing out my paddling clothes, I crashed on the bed for an hour. Rousing myself at four, I walked downtown. Most shops were closing, but I was able to get an ice cream at La-Vern & Shirley’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. Overhead were large globe lights and an old-style ceiling fan. Glass cases displayed the ice cream. Small, round-topped tables were supported by tubular, chrome legs. The floor was a checkerboard of large black and white tiles. With the addition of modern air-conditioning, it was an interesting respite from the very hot day.

Berlin has a shrinking population of about 5,000. The city began unofficially in June 1846. The previous winter Nathan Strong and three other men had explored this area of the Fox River, looking for a crossing point for the Fond du Lac to Stevens Point road being planned by territorial authorities. They knew there had been a large settlement of Mascouten Indians near this area of the river and suspected a possible crossing place in the otherwise marshy land. They found such a spot, and in June of 1846, Strong returned to start a ferry in what is now Berlin. He was soon joined by other settlers and the city was officially formed in 1847.¹ Originally known as Strong’s Landing, the first postmaster changed the name to Berlin, pronounced (since World War I) with the accent on the first syllable.² I could not confirm my guess that there was a connection between the name and the fact that 46% of the residents claim German ancestry.³

The mid- to late-1800’s were the heyday of steamboat traffic in Berlin. Following one memorable passenger excursion, the local newspaper reported: “One-half the passengers were drunk, three-quarters feeling good, nine-tenths brimming over with fun and frolic, and the whole so jam full of jollification and lager beer that they didn’t know which way they were looking ….”⁴ The city’s growth peaked in the late 1890s, with a population close to what it is today. Many of the city’s fine Victorian homes were built then. The city is still known for those homes, lovingly called “painted ladies“, and also for its fur and leather trade.⁵ But I found no “jollification”; only a sleepy city under a hot afternoon sun.

Wandering back toward the motel, I found a place to eat – Shepard’s Drive-In. My fellow diners were all people of significant girth. One, a young man in a dirty tee shirt that barely covered his beer belly, ordered his “usual” – a double burger and large fries. Two women placed a huge order, and every non-drink item they requested was fat-fried. The next person in line ordered a vanilla cone dipped in cherry topping. I ordered a hamburger - the Shepard’s-special, a small fries, and lemonade. I ate outside in the shade of a tree, and then played the miniature golf course behind the drive-in. I finished way over par.

Returning to the hotel, I boosted up the air conditioning, sprawled across the bed, and watched TV until bed time. Tomorrow, Tuesday, the seventh day of the trip, would be another long paddle, this time to the city of Omro.


1. Wisconsin Historical Society. Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles: Berlin Journal - Early History of Our Town, May 12, 1921. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/searchresults.asp?adv=yes&np=Berlin+Journal.

2. Wikipedia. Berlin, Wisconsin. Revised October 22, 2011. Accessed November 5, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin,_Wisconsin.

3. Citydata.com. Berlin, Wisconsin. Revised 2011. Accessed June 2011. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/searchresults.asp?adv=yes&np=Berlin+Journal.

4. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 15. Trails Books, 1998.

5. The City of Berlin, Wisconsin. About Berlin. Accessed June 15, 2011. http://www.cityofberlin.net/modules/web/index.php/id/1/Berlin%20Wisconsin.


_____________________________________________

Fourteenth Installment: Seventeen miles to Berlin

I reached Princeton’s Hiestand Park by 8:20, headed for Berlin, Wisconsin. I had already paddled 55 miles, but now, at seventeen miles, this leg would be the longest paddle of the trip. A stronger current helped, but the wind was both friend and foe. Coming out of the northwest, it built all day until by noon it was whipping up small chop on the more exposed sections of the river. Occasionally, I had it to my back and it pushed me along, but five times the Fox meandered to the northwest and I had to paddle into the teeth of the wind. Most of the time the wind quartered the kayak, catching the bow, forcing it to starboard and necessitating correction strokes on that side to stay on course. It was hot, too – in the 80s. As the morning wore on, storm clouds built with the heat. I kept to a steady pace of 3 knots.

I landed the kayak three times during the seventeen miles to stretch and rest: first at the park-like White River Lock and Dam, constructed in the 1850s; next, at noon for lunch on a sandy river bank beyond the Puchyan River junction; and finally at the Berlin Lock and Dam, just a mile above Berlin itself.

There were no people at my first two stops, nor were there many on the river, so I had the Fox pretty much to myself. Along the way, I saw a great blue heron perched on an old snag. An eagle soared overhead just before my noon stop. And shortly after my lunch break, I came upon a doe. She looked up from drinking in the river as I drifted down on her. Staying as still as possible, I got within 35 feet before she gave a nimble, twisting leap over the bank and was gone. Later, I surprised two sand hill cranes along the shore.

I heard the cranes long before I saw them, their prehistoric cacophony epitomizing for me the power and mystery of nature. Aldo Leopold wrote that cranes are “wildness incarnate”.¹ Another native Wisconsin naturalist, Ron Sauey, co-founded the International Crane Foundation in 1973. Located on his parents’ horse farm just north of Baraboo, the Foundation hosts all 15 of the world’s cranes species, and has been instrumental in protecting and reviving natural populations throughout the globe.²

The river’s isolated banks, almost pure sand in this stretch, were inviting to wildlife such as the cranes and deer. The silver maples along the banks had shallow, spreading root systems, easily eroded by undercutting of the shore. Where exposed, they formed intricately woven root-baskets fifteen feet or more across. The land bordering the river was marshy, and to the west, along the Fox’s confluence with the White River, lay the extensive White River Wildlife Area. Later, at about mile eight, the Puchyan River entered from the east. It drained Green Lake, the deepest lake in Wisconsin, plunging to an astounding depth of 239 feet.³ A vast marsh surrounding the Puchyan stretched out to the east of the Fox. No roads could approach the Fox for the next three miles, and there were no more boat landings until near Berlin.

I had paddled this section of the Fox before in my baidarka accompanied by Linda, her husband, a friend and their dog, all crowded into one canoe. We had also started at Hiestand Park, but planned to take out at the point where Huckleberry Road came closest to the river – just before the long, empty stretch below the Puchyan River. According to both maps we were using, there was a takeout there. We had no back-up plan, as it was seven more miles to the next boat landing, and Linda and her husband were exhausted from paddling the overloaded canoe.

However, upon arrival we had found barbed wire stretched across the landing, festooned with "No trespassing" signs every five feet. We could see a man in the yard across the road from the landing. I politely called to him for permission to land our two little boats, but he barked back that we had better not set one foot on his land. There was no arguing with him. So we drifted down to his neighbor’s property, the last home for the next three miles. We could see the man, but not be seen ourselves, or so we thought. When he went indoors, we got out on the spongy bank at the property line, carefully walked our boats out along the line, met our ride on the road, and drove back to Princeton for lunch. Linda’s husband announced over coffee that he was pretty sure the landowner had followed us back to town in his pickup truck. We had a long discussion about how strange the whole incident had been.

The next night a deputy sheriff called me. Using our ride’s license plate to identify us, the landowner had reported us as trespassers. From the deputy, I learned that several years earlier the man had discovered that he owned the thin slice of land between the river and the highway. He had been to court four times to establish his right to shut down the long-running boat landing there, zealously enforcing his rights. I confessed to the deputy, explaining that we had no good alternative to the “trespassing”. The sympathetic deputy had been fielding complaints from the property owner for years and said he would drop the whole matter if we would pledge to never get out there again. I assured him that getting out there again was the farthest thing from our minds.

As I passed this second time, the "No trespassing" signs were still hanging from the barbed wire, flapping back and forth in the wind, waving me past and on toward Berlin.

At the Berlin Lock and Dam, a motorcycle policeman rode in. (Law enforcement officers seem to be closely associated with my travels of this stretch of the Fox.) I asked if he would mind taking a picture of me paddling the baidarka. The officer was happy to do so, and as I showed him the camera, a man joined us from a minivan that had been parked alongside the boat launch. He turned out to be a friend of the officer as well as the president of the 1st National Bank of Berlin. I explained my trip to both of them, and then took the boat out into the river for the picture.

After sculling up to the landing to retrieve my camera, I asked where I should get out in Berlin so as to be closest to the Best Western Motel that I would stay at that night. The officer and the bank president had a long discussion and concluded that I should not paddle all the way into Berlin. My motel was on the south end of the city, and it would be over a mile from the park that I had planned to get out at. Instead, they suggested the Badger Mineral property just south of the city limits. It had a boat launch and would be less than half a mile from there to the motel. Soon I found the landing, off a little slough. It was 2 p.m.


1. Van Horn, Kent. “Wilderness Incarnate: Sandhill Cranes are a Conservation Success“. Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine, October 2011.

2. The International Crane Foundation. The International Crane Foundation: The History. Accessed October 31, 2011. .

3. Wikipedia. Green Lake (Wisconsin). Revised March 3, 2011. Accessed October 21, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Lake_(Wisconsin).


_____________________________________________

Thirteenth Installment: Match Making in Princeton

I walked the kayak down the broad, mown ditch of Highway 23 to Marsh’s Landing, about ¼ mile from the lodge. The landing nestled in a break in the bluff along the Fox River. As I coasted along the day before, I had noticed the quiet, grassy inlet. That afternoon, Leanne Harvey mentioned the inlet as one of the places they launched canoes, and she obtained permission for me to start my Sunday paddle from there. I was not the only Sunday user, as I had to compete with a two foot-long water snake for the launch site.

The river was a little narrower now, and the current a bit stronger. At a leisurely pace, the first two and a half miles passed in an hour, taking me to what was marked on my map as a large, marshy, hairpin loop of the river. Only after paddling to a dead end did I realize that since the making of the map, the river had cut through the loop at its base and filled in the far outlet with the eroded soil. I had to retrace my route, but it was graced with waterlilies floating like white candles on the limpid gray-green water.

Half a mile farther downstream was the long portage at the Princeton Lock and Dam, the half-way point for my six-mile Sunday paddle. I examined the kayak while making the portage. It was holding up well. Before the trip, I found a split rib and had splinted it with a spare oak dowel, lashing them together and then wrapping them with duct tape. The repair had held. Many other ribs in the mid-section had shifted - up to an inch - in their lashings, responding to the pressure points of where I sat or moved. The baidarka was designed to adjust just that way. The canvas skin was scraped and nicked, but there were no leaks, an equally apt descrition of my own state on the fifth day of paddling.

Besides being narrower, the Fox was now often dominated on one side by a high, sandy bluff, the opposite shore being the low spoil bank from years of dredging, beyond which stretched marshes. Silver maples predominated, joined by locust, ash or cottonwood. One cottonwood had snapped during the storm, collapsing at an angle into the river, necessitating a wide swing around it. Here and there willows grew. An especially large willow at one of the infrequent cottages wept a curtain of branches into the river.

As I neared Princeton, Sunday morning church bells rang out. In the further distance rifle shots resounded from a shooting range. Religion and guns - how American.

I arrived in Princeton at 11:30, sweeping through the backside of the downtown and getting out at Hiestand Park, just below the Highway 23 Bridge. I had read that on May 20th, fifteen fifth graders from Neshkoro Elementary School had sampled the life of a voyageur. Recreating a 1762 trip by the Northwest Fur Company, they boarded a 28 foot-long wooden voyageur canoe at Hiestand Park for a three-mile maiden voyage down the Fox River.¹ Had fur-trading voyageurs stopped at the park site 250 years ago?

Princeton was settled in the mid-1800s by pioneers drawn to the Pleasant Valley township, and grew during the free-wheeling days of the steamboat. My favorite tale from then was of Captain Robert Booth, determined to reach the city in his Lone Star steamer despite darkness and high water. Sensing that the boat had left the channel, Booth cut the engine only to hear a farmer shouting angrily: “What do you think you’re doing in my pasture?” to which Booth yelled back: “Why in hell didn’t you keep your gate shut?” Then, changing his tone, he persuaded the farmer to guide the Lone Star back to the Fox, and the steamboat reached Princeton safely.²

The city was still vibrant with 1,500 residents and specialty shops, fine restaurants, antiques stores, and riverside terraces. I wheeled the kayak through downtown toward Emmy's Lord Byron Bed and Breakfast on Maple Street*, my home for the night. It was near noon and I had not had any breakfast. One of the first places I came to on Water Street, the main street through downtown, was the Once in a Blue Moon Café. I parked the baidarka on the sidewalk below the restaurant’s windows and flower boxes, and went in for a lunch of Thai chicken wrap, with fresh strawberry pie for dessert. The kayak attracted curious passersby. Two old men gave it a real going over until their wives dragged them off for shopping.

I continued on to the bed and breakfast, a lovely, little Victorian house with two cement lions guarding the front walk, and turned-wood spindles framing the porch. Just as at the lodge, I was the only guest. There were four bedrooms upstairs, each with a private bath. I chose the light-green room - the least frilly of the four. Emmy was the enthusiastic and inquisitive proprietress. Before I knew it, we were talking about my legal work, including divorce law. Emmy eventually pried out of me that I, myself, was recently divorced.

After showering, I headed back downtown. I went first to Strong’s Landing, an antique shop. Items were organized by theme, era and style into rooms and settings, mostly expensive Victorian pieces. However, I found a Japanese print of irises and ducks, matted in silk with a gold frame. The whole affect was simple but elegant. A reproduction rather than an antique, it was only $45, so I bought it. The shop owner promised to deliver it to my office, as it certainly would have looked odd strapped to the back of my baidarka. Among the other shops I stopped at was the N Gallery. I spoke to Nick, the owner, whose path to opening the N Gallery was long and circular. He had left Princeton as a young man to study at the New York American Culinary Institute. That training took him to a job in Seattle, where, through a friend, he became interested in glass art, which lead to the making of fine jewelry. Family and available funding brought him back to Princeton to open his shop. I bought a simple but unique necklace.

Dinner was at JJ’s Supper Club around the corner from the bed and breakfast. The diners were families and senior citizens, including Harry. In his 70’s, Harry sailed through the dining room with a rolling gait. He tacked from table to table, zigzagging across the room, loudly hailing everyone he knew, which was almost the whole crowd. After working the dining room, he jibed off into the bar where he sang a lusty, off-key Happy Birthday to a red-faced woman.

After a good night’s sleep, I went down for a hearty breakfast. As Emmy served me she took a telephone call, slipping into the kitchen with the phone. When she returned, she seemed a little flustered, but tried to make conversation. She remarked that I had been out all Sunday afternoon, and wanted to hear what I had been up to. So, I ran through Sunday’s exploration of Princeton, including the shopping. Emmy asked if the necklace was for a daughter. I answered: “No. It is for a woman that I have begun to see.“ There was a long silence. Then Emmy sat down in a chair and became confessional. “I don’t know why I am telling your this. You will think that I am wacky.” And then she proceeded to tell me.

After talking to me on Sunday, Emmy was so sure that I was a perfect match for her ex-sister-in-law Marcia that she called her. She talked Marcia into letting her give me her e-mail address. The next door neighbor, Elsie, had been recruited into the match-making scheme too. The telephone call was Elsie asking if Emmy had told me about Marcia yet. The attempt to fix me up with Marcia was sweet, and I was sure that Marcia was nice, but I had to disappoint Emmy and politely decline.

Having escaped potential matrimony, and with a very nice English-style breakfast in my stomach, I wheeled my baidarka back through downtown Princeton to Hiestand Park. My next destination was Berlin, Wisconsin, about 17 miles further down the Fox.

* Certain names of people and places have been changed to respect the privacy of individuals.


1. See Fox of the River Voyager Canoe LLC, .

2. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 13. Trails Books, 1998.


_____________________________________________

Twelth Installment: The Mecan Lodge

The Mecan River Lodge van plucked me from the rain-muddied bank of the Mecan River and whisked me off to the lodge and restaurant. The complex was built in 1994 by Paul and Leanne Harvey and their family. The lodge was laid up from nearly 300 logs of hand-peeled red and white pine that the Harveys cut from their own land. A 35 foot-tall fieldstone fireplace dominated the great room, a restaurant opened off one side, and a bar and store off the other. Five suites for lodgers filled the upstairs. The Harveys also offered canoe and kayak rental out of an out building.

The first order of business was cleanup. I washed all the river muck off the kayak and stored it for the night on a boat rack behind the lodge. I sorted out my gear and dragged most of it up to my room. I washed out what I could, including my damp, foul paddling clothes. The gear was soon hung from every available hook and peg in the room. By the time I finished, the log-walled room looked like an old trapper’s cabin.

I was the only guest that night. It was early in the season. I did not lack for attention, and the Harveys made me feel at home. Paul and Leanne ran the lodge with help from two daughters and their son Mike. Mike was about 24 and his oldest sister, Michelle, was 32. I did not get the name or age of the other daughter, who was off taking care of her newborn. Paul and Leanne’s kids had already given them six grandchildren, including the most recent three – all born within two months of each other that spring.

Sitting out on the veranda, I also met Gray Cat. (The Harveys were straightforward in naming their animals.) She checked me out, and I was soon her newest rubbing post. She couldn’t get enough rubbing, petting, and scratching behind the ears and batted with her right paw whenever I ignored her too long. Her brother, Black Cat, was not as social. He stayed away, slinking through the yard after birds.

Later Leanne and Michelle joined me on the veranda. They told me the tale of the near demise of the springs feeding the Mecan River. It was a tale of a close encounter with an international water-bottling corporation that I will call Pure Flow.

The Mecan, thanks in part to the springs, was a first-rate trout stream, and a joy to canoe or kayak. The State of Wisconsin owned the land upon which its springs arose, and during Governor Thompson’s administration, the state entered into negotiations to sell the land to Pure Flow, which planned to drill into the springs’ aquifer and aggressively pump out 270,000 gallons a day. They would ship the water out by the tanker-full.

None of this was public knowledge until a state worker leaked news of the deal to a former Department of Natural Resources employee who recognized the enormity of the environmental consequences. He went public, and soon a grass roots organization of farmers, environmentalists, fishermen, outdoor enthusiasts, and other citizens, including the Harveys, rose up in opposition.

This organization, Waterkeepers of Wisconsin, weighed in against the sale, held successful referenda against the well in affected communities, and raised enough money to hire a hydrologist. It also brought in a rabid Pure Flow opponent from Florida who funished aerial pictures from every Pure Flow site in the country showing graphically the negative environmental impacts of pumping. The Harvey’s said that she was such a thorn in Pure Flow’s side that they tried to have her thrown out of every public hearing. Between the hydrologist’s research and the Florida woman’s files, the group soon had credible proof of the potential harm and enough questions on Pure Flow to get local and national news coverage. Soon the sale was politically untenable, and Pure Flow slunk off to suck someone else’s water.

The implication that Governor Thompson would destroy an environmental system for the sake of a private economic interest contrasted sharply with one of his predecessors – Governor Gaylord Nelson. Another Wisconsin-born environmentalist, Gaylord Nelson was a principal founder of Earth Day in 1970.¹ He rejected the suggestion that economic development should take precedence over environmental protection: “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.”² The whole story put in mind what Mahatma Gandhi once said: “[The earth offers] enough for everybody’s need, but not enough for anybody's greed.”³

With the tale done, the draining of my bottle of beer, and the setting of the sun, I retired to my room and was soon asleep, but not for long. Early Sunday morning, about 1:30 a.m., a thunderstorm rolled in, waking me with a brilliant lightning flash and nearly simultaneous thunderclap. Rain beat on the windows and the wind roared through the pines. It did not last long, as it raced across central Wisconsin, and by the time I woke again, at 6 a.m., the sky was clear.

I found that I was the only one in the still dark, locked lodge. My room key opened the main door and I let myself out. It was an hour and a half until the complimentary breakfast, so I spent my time packing the kayak and watching birds in the garden. A male ruby-throated hummingbird perched on the top-most leader of a little pine. As it turned, its breast caught the early morning sun, and its red throat patch flashed like a brake light. To reside in the environs of the lodge he must have been very wily, for Black Cat was a reputedly relentless and unrepentant bird-stalker.

At 7:55, just as I was sitting down to breakfast, the storm played one last trick. The lights flickered, and we lost all power. It must have been a storm-stressed limb finally crashing through a power line, or a delayed chain reaction in the power grid after a night of power surges and blown transformers. Slowly all the Harveys and the kitchen help gathered in the window-lit bar. Luanne called a lineman friend to confirm that the power company was repairing the outage. But that work would be too late for me. No power meant no breakfast. Michelle gave me a Coke, and Paul adjusted down my bill before I left.

I could reach the Fox River via a short walk down Highway 23, and then the little city of Princeton via the Fox, so I set off rolling my kayak along.



1. Nelson, Gaylord. Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise. Wisconsin Press, November 2002.

2. Id.

3. Nilsson, Hans. Leonardo Energy website: “There is enough for everybody’s need, but not enough for anybody’s greed”. April 4, 2008. Accessed November 5, 2011. .


_____________________________________________

Eleventh Installment: Fog to Tree Falls

I was awoken at 5 a.m. by what sounded like a rifle shot. It silenced the early birds, and for a while everything was perfectly still. I lay in the bed, puzzled. Twelve minutes later there was another crack, just as loud. It was soon followed by a third, but this time more organic sounding.

I threw back the covers and looked out the window. In the yard was an old, spreading locust tree. A limb some twenty feet long, stretching out perpendicular to the trunk, had shattered near its base. It was still connected to the tree by shreds of wood and bark, but barely. Every ten or fifteen minutes its weight snapped the remaining connection a little more, until its branches draped the lawn. There was no apparent reason for the sudden failure other than that the limb had just now reached its fullness of leaves. Maybe that weight, combined with damage from winter’s freezing and thawing, triggered the catastrophe.

So, I was up, even before the chickadees. I ate my not-so-hearty plastic-packaged Sarah Lee, washed up, and dressed. Soon I was off to the bottom of the hill and the most easterly of the four boat launches. A fog hung over the lake, obscuring the far shore; but by 6:45, it had lifted enough to reveal a vague indication of the north shore, so I squeezed into the baidarka and pushed off from the boat ramp, setting my course to the northeast. If I could maintain that heading, it would take me to the Fox River’s outlet from the lake. It was nearly two miles across the lake; there were no landmarks to guide me; and the fog had not entirely melted away. Reed beds, dredge banks, and islands were scattered between me and the river, further obscuring the outlet.

After thirty minutes, I reached what should have been the Fox. Peering through the mist, trying to pick out the river’s gap in the shoreline, I tried unsuccessfully one spot and then another further southeast. Both were just marshy inlets. Next, I sat motionless in the baidarka, feeling for a current, to no avail. I rested the paddle across the boat and studied the map. It gave few clues – just a suggestion of higher ground here and there, and potential tree lines. I tried further north, and eventually, stroke after stroke, the broad outlet emerged out of the fog. It had taken an extra twenty minutes to find the way out.

Here the Fox was wide and sluggish. Cottages lined the right bank, disappearing with marshy land, and reappeared wherever the shore was high enough to support a road. Their predictable appearance with the roads now made following the map easy. The wind was occasionally at my back, and the current helped, so I made about two and half knots with steady but relaxed paddling. The mist burned off, and the morning sun slanted across the marshes.

Birds were my company. My bird-list grew daily. I had previously seen red-tailed hawks, blue-winged teals, wood ducks, mallard and geese. Cat birds mewed from the rushes and the wings of mourning doves whistled as they flew over in pairs. Finches chattered from the brush, and Baltimore orioles sang melodies from the trees. Jays and crows called loudly up and down the Fox.

As the Fox reached a bluff, it narrowed, and the Mecan River entered from a marsh on the left. I needed to take the Mecan upstream until the County Highway C Bridge, where someone from the Mecan Lodge would meet me, for that was where I was staying the night. But, it being only ten in the morning, I paddled another mile or so downstream on the Fox. That took me to a section of the river running just below a steep, thirty-foot bluff that blocked any view, and the wind was picking up. Time to head back to the Mecan, I edged the boat around and leaned into my paddle strokes, pushing my way back upstream against wind and current.

Rain clouds had gathered by the time I turned into the Mecan. This little river ran fresh, the surface riffling in the breeze, and meandered through the marsh from copse to copse of silver maple. It felt isolated and wild. I saw another pair of sand hill cranes with a chick. In a marshy embayment, a great blue heron and an egret stalked the shallows. Turtles plunged off logs into the stream at the splash of my paddle. I spooked a big doe and crossed paths with a two foot-long snake swimming up the Mecan, like me, trying to reach shelter before the rain.

As I neared the Highway C Bridge, woods closed in on the little river, fallen trees slanting into the stream here and there. Soon there were deadfalls crisscrossing the river; it was possible to thread the kayak through some of the tree-falls, but only for another fifty yards. I would have to walk.

The stream banks were just high enough that balancing the tippy baidarka against the bank while sliding out of the cockpit was not very successful. I did not roll the boat, but came close enough to ship several quarts of water into the cockpit. The terrain was too rough to use the cart. I was going to have to portage everything to the bridge on my shoulders.

That was not easy. I was stiff after paddling nearly twelve miles. The bridge was 200 yards away through tall grass and undergrowth along an uneven deer-path. Roots reached up to trip me. Gaining the road the first time, I called the lodge for my pick-up. By the time I reached the road with my second load, my ride, a van with a kayak trailer, was pulling onto the shoulder. I trudged back for the kayak. When I emerged the third time, kayak on my shoulder, it was raining.


_____________________________________________

Tenth Installment: Four-way stop in the Village of Marquette

Marquette had one 4-way stop and two taverns, including “Bud’s Never Inn.” There were four public boat landings, a supper club, and a trailer-park/resort, a post office, and a two-room antique store. The village ran up the hill from the lake for four or five streets, and was about two blocks wide. The population was only 162. Although the establishments were modest, there was more commercial life than in Endeavor, most of it centered on fishing, hunting, and recreational use of the lake, along with the food and alcohol to fuel those activities.

I had reservations at Hotel Puckaway* for the night. The “hotel” was the second floor of the Van Epern home. It was a large, rambling farm house, covered in white clapboard. The sign out front said that the hotel was established in 1890, and it looked its age. A hallway ran the length of the second story, off of which there were eight tiny rooms plus a men’s and a women’s baths. I was paying only $20 for the night, and was not expecting any luxuries. But the small TV in my room did not work. The top drawer of the dresser was missing, the gaping space filled with National Geographic and NRA magazines. There were no lamps in the room, only a 70-watt overhead light. The room lacked an air conditioner, and I felt cheated when I noticed operational instructions for one posted next to the window.

However, it was just $20, and the view out the window was pleasant. It looked out on a tall blue-spruce and a broad yard beyond. Three chickadees were playing in the spruce branches and chattering loudly. In the morning they would do duty as my alarm clock, since that was another item missing from the room.

Tom Van Epern helped me park the baidarka in the garage, and we talked as I unloaded the gear needed for the night. Tom’s father owned a bakery in Kaukauna, just up the road from Appleton. One of eight children, Tom grew up watching how hard his dad worked – six days a week, ten to eleven hours a day, with Saturday-night bowling as his only free-time activity. As soon as Tom could, he escaped the bakery by enlisting in the Navy. Now retired, Tom said that Kaukauna had changed so much since his childhood that he would not even go back to visit. And the bakery was gone too, having been sold several times, and then, in its final incarnation as the Hilltop Bakery, having gone bankrupt.

I showered and relaxed for a while, listening to the chickadees and skimming through one of the NRA magazine, and then went out. I strolled the village, looking for the old Caw Caw Club. While the duck-hunting clubs of the 1900s were long gone, I had read that one group’s former clubhouse remained; the Caw Caw Club had occupied a fine, three-story home overlooking the lake. Built by a retired sea captain, it had a spiral ship’s staircase and rooms laid out like a ship’s staterooms.¹ The outside was covered with cobbles laid up like bricks, and pillars, rising from ground level to the eaves three stories above, fronted first and second floor porches.

I soon found it, but no one was around to show me the ship-like interior. As it was already 6:30 in the evening, I walked down to the four-way stop. As I neared the intersection, I discovered the antique shop was still open. I stopped in, surprised it was operating so late on a Friday. The owner, a nice white-haired woman in her 60s, said that she kept Friday evening hours to hook people on their way to the fish fry in the supper club.

With big picture windows in the front, the shop was well lit and airy. It was clean, tidy, and the most organized antique store I had ever been in. Everything had its place. The tools were all in one area, organized by type and size. Cast iron banks were in their own display case. Toy cars sat on their designated shelf. Among the sporting goods, I found and bought a pair of used binoculars for $15. At that price I could use them on the kayak without losing too much if they fell overboard.

There was no breakfast café in Marqutte, so from the antique shop, I headed past the stop signs to the trailer-park/resort. It had a little store, where I bought the best breakfast food they had to offer - a Sara Lee plastic-packaged Danish pastry and a bottle of orange juice. The clerk showed me a map of the lake and we discussed the route that I should take through the marshy islands and spoil banks from Marquette to the lake’s outlet to the Fox River.

Retracing my steps to the four-way stop, I went to the supper club for dinner. My waitress, named Charity, lived in the nearby town of Coleman. Charity bragged up the supper club’s desserts. She also bragged up her new boy friend, who, she claimed, cooked, did laundry, and was good to her child. At the next table, a heavy-smoking, cocktail-drinking, old woman cackled that he was a keeper.

Back in the hotel, I read old National Geographics until it was time to sleep. But I was awakened at 1 a.m. by a male voice in the next room. He was just coming in. So, the hotel had other inmates. What surprised me more was that apparently there was already a woman in that room. I had not heard any sounds from her before. There was soon noise a plenty coming through the paper-thin walls. Fortunately the guy was a quick finisher, and I was soon asleep again.

*Again, I have changed some names of people and places to respect the privacy of individuals.


1. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 12. Trails Books, 1998.


_____________________________________________

Ninth Installment: Paddling Lake Puckaway

I spent Thursday night in Montello, at the Kozy Rest Motel. I did not sleep well. I woke for an hour and a half in the middle of the night and wasted my time with the TV, jumping from one channel to another but watching nothing. By six I was up again, so I dressed - an early start would avoid the stronger afternoon wind and heat. Next on the agenda was breakfast downtown at Mary’s Coffee Cup.

It was a small cafe. Mary waited tables, cooked, and made small talk. She knew each customer and their families. I ordered a fried egg, ham, and cheese on an English muffin, with coffee. Either Mary used salt liberally, or the ham and cheese were especially salty. Nonetheless, Mary was so sweet that I smiled and nodded that all was good. I would just drink extra liquid during the paddle to slack my thirst. Leaving a nice tip, I returned to the motel to pack the kayak.

From the Kozy Rest, it was a long hike to the put-in below the Montello dam. For fifteen minutes I wheeled the ungainly 17-foot kayak through streets alongside drivers headed off to work or play. Some of those intent on playing had gathered just below the dam to fish. The baidarka and my strange-looking gear prompted lots of questions as I prepared the boat for launching. My explanations received the normal pleasant, positive, but slightly mystified reactions. At the far end of the pool, by the highway bridge through which the Fox gathered itself and headed downstream, were two young Amish men fishing. They were too far away to ask me questions, but what did they think? Did they approve of my non-motorized travel? Did they feel the float down the Fox was wasted without a fishing pole?

I eased into the baidarka and pushed off from the shore. After the long, awkward, sweaty walk to the dam, the first paddle strokes downstream were exhilarating. Feeling the kayak surge ahead with each stroke, carving a broad curve through the pool as I came about, catching the cool breeze off the water for the first time, I felt the freedom of being on the Fox. It would be eleven miles of paddling to the Village of Marquette, my next destination.

The river beyond the bridge opened up to a broad, shallow stream. The Fox was not deep except in the fastest-flowing channel. The water was clear, and the river bed of the channel was scoured down to its sandy bottom. For the first seven miles of the day, the stream led me through mostly open fields and marsh. Sandhill cranes trumpeted their prehistoric calls in the nearby fields. Over 1,000 cranes live in Marquette County, and another 35,000 pass through during their yearly migration.¹ Great blue herons stalked the shallows of the shore. Red-winged blackbirds clacked out their warnings as I passed; males trilled their territorial calls to neighboring males. There were a few robins and plenty of the dark-backed Eastern kingbirds. Here and there I spotted mourning doves, ducks, and cormorants. From a field, cows inspected my kayak, and I shared the Fox with a number of muskrats.

The land along the Fox was low and mostly marsh, with only a few trees growing along the spoil banks. Other than near Montello, or where an occasional road reached the shore, I saw no cottages. I took my first break at the Grand River Lock and Dam, about four miles downstream from Montello and near where the Grand River, much smaller than its name advertised, swung into the Fox from the marshes. I had the lock and dam to myself, but I did occasionally see fishing boats. I counted six before I reached Lake Puckaway at mile seven. All of the fishermen and women were friendly, enjoying the beautiful morning despite the lack of bites on their fishing lines.

The sky clouded up shortly before noon as I entered Lake Puckaway. Much wider than Buffalo Lake, Lake Puckaway covered 5,433 acres, but only to a maximum depth of five feet.² The Wisconsin Historic Society uncovered four possible origins of the name “Puckaway”: the name was derived from a Native American word for "wild rice field."; "from Bokawe - an Indian supposed to have formerly lived on its shores“; it meant "Cattail flag"; or it came from "bokuhnzawa", meaning "unclean disease".³ The first possibility was the most evocative, calling up images of a shallow lake teeming with ducks, wild rice, and Indians harvesting the grain into their canoes and dugouts. I rejected the fourth explanation as simply too creepy.

In the late 1900s the lake still teemed with water fowl, but market hunting had began to flourish. Unlike the sustainable harvesting of the Indians, the new masters of the land used punt guns to bring down 100 birds a shot.⁴ Lake Puckaway is still an excellent habitat for ducks and geese, but the populations of a century ago are gone, maybe forever.

Aldo Leopold, like John Muir an adopted son of Wisconsin, decried such exploitation of nature’s bounty. The father of wildlife ecology and author of A Sand County Almanac, Leopold moved to Wisconsin in 1924, and bought a used-up farm in the sand counties just south of the Wisconsin River and less than ten miles west of Portage, where I began my trip. The farm was his living experiment in restoring the ecology of the land.⁵ He wrote of the need for a land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it is otherwise.”⁶

But the wind gods soon put an end to my musing. They were contrary again, sending winds from the east, even stronger then on Buffalo Lake. Rain clouds blew in with the winds. I had four miles to go on Lake Puckaway before I reached my goal of the Village of Marquette, two thirds of the way along the southern shore. I pressed ahead, giving up thoughts about Aldo Leopold and my plan to land somewhere for a rest and lunch. Instead, I took an on-water pause in the lee of Hickory Point, ate a power bar and slaked my thirst. There would be no more stopping until the village. My aching back and behind would have to wait. I focused on my technique and pressed ahead with power strokes. So it was with great joy and satisfaction that, after rounding a point an hour later, I could see the Marquette boat landing. In another 15 minutes I was ashore.


1. Wistravel.com. Wisconsin Cities: Montello Wisconsin. Accessed November 5, 2011. http://www.wistravel.com/cities_in_wisconsin/montello_wisconsin/.

2. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 12. Trails Books, 1998.

3. Wisconsin Historical Society. Dictionary of Wisconsin History: Places - Puckaway Lake, Marquette Co. [origin of place name]. Accessed May 10, 2011. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=3792&term_type_id=2&term_type_text=Places&letter=P.

4. Svob, Mike. Id.

5. Wikipedia. Aldo Leopold. Revised October 26, 2011. Accessed November 3, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Leopold.

6. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac (Outdoor Essays & Reflections), “The Land Ethic, pages 224-225. USA: Oxford University Press, November 15, 2001.


_____________________________________________

Eigth Installment: The red granite of Montello

The second leg of the trip was finished. The night’s bivouac was the Kozy Rest Motel. It was in the northwest corner of Montello, about a quarter of a mile up the road from the Buffalo Lake boat landing. The motel was just past the state’s largest tree - a cottonwood - with an immense circumference of 23.2 feet, and towering height of 132 feet.¹ It stood alone next to the courthouse. I could imagine many years ago, on another hot, sunny June day, young John Muir standing in its shade, left hand on its rough, ancient bark, waiting for his father to emerge from business in the courthouse.

Mary Jean, the proprietor of the Kozy Rest, was off with a sister helping their elderly parents. Knowing that I was coming, she taped the key to my room, unit #1, to the office door. The room was at the near end of the long, low-slung building, where the row of rental rooms intersected with Mary Jean’s home and office. I parked the baidarka in the angle, crosswise from beyond my door to the side wall of the office.

The room was tiny, with barely space to walk around the bed. A closet-sized bath held toilet, sink and shower. But it was clean, and the bed was firm enough. I went through what would become my the late-afternoon ritual of carrying in gear, showering, and washing out the clothing. Then, in fresh clothes and map in hand, I headed for downtown Montello.

Montello, a small city of about 1,400 people, is the seat of Marquette County. It sits atop a deep deposit of mahogany-red granite.² A polished slab of this Montello granite marks the boyhood home of John Muir.³ Also used for both General U.S. Grant’s and General Robert E Lee‘s tombs, Montello’s granite is the hardest in the world. Designated the Wisconsin state rock in 1971, it had been quarried from the center of downtown Montello since 1879, employing up to 200 men at times. The deepest pit reached the depth of 150 feet. But the quarry closed in 1960.⁴ The pits are now filled with water, which pumps circulate to the top of the 45-foot-tall rock spire still standing sentinel in the middle of the pits. The water tumbles down again in four separate waterfalls.

I asked a native where I could get good ice cream, where I could find a good book, and where the townspeople ate dinner. He sent me down to the B&B Candy Store for the ice cream. He said that around the corner from the candy store was Buffalo Books. (Susan of Endeavor had also recommended Buffalo Books.) As to dinner, he suggested his own place: The Granite Falls Supper Club.

The ice cream shop replicated an old-fashioned candy store. Jar after jar of colorful candy covered wooden tables. Glass-fronted counters lined the walls, full of additional sweets. I ordered one scoop of caramel-chocolate ice cream and another of New York cherry. The young owner broke off a conversation to serve me. A woman, perhaps a local realtor, was asking her questions about the building. But every time she asked a question, a new customer walked up. It took 15 minutes for the realtor to get her few questions answered. Oddly, as soon as the realtor left, the stream of customers dried up. Strange how that works.

I then went around the corner to check out the book store. It was small and homey, with little, cloth-covered reading table with lamp and chairs. Next to many books on the shelves were hand-written recommendations by the proprietor. I enjoyed reading the reviews, and bought a small book of poetry. As I left, I was sorry to see a "For Sale" sign next to the front door.

With a bit more time to kill before dinner, I walked back to the abandoned quarry. The spray of the waterfalls cooled the warm air, and the tumbling water splashed and murmured soothingly. I sat on a block of red granite. A swan living in the quarry waddled over to the fence separating us and preened while I sat in the sun taking in the town.

A little after five, I strolled over to the Granite Falls Supper Club. Five is early for dinner on a week night in Montello, and I had the dining room to myself until the dessert course, when a few patrons wandered in.

While getting a drink, I asked the owner why it was called a “supper club”, for there seems to be a supper club in almost every small Wisconsin city. He answered that designation arose during Prohibition. Ostensibly operating as a private club with food and entertainment, it could serve liquor without much hassle from the police, and thus became the local speak-easy. And since the customers drank primarily in the evening, the club only opened at supper time. Today the Granite Falls Supper Club made no pretense of being a private club and offered no entertainment beyond piped-in music, yet the “club“ moniker, the hours, the drinking, and the food continued.

With that enlightenment and a good meal, I headed back to the Kozy Rest to watch a little TV and get to sleep early.


1. Montello Now. The History of Montello. Accessed October 15, 2011. .

2. Wistravel.com. Wisconsin Cities: Montello Wisconsin. Accessed November 5, 2011. http://www.wistravel.com/cities_in_wisconsin/montello_wisconsin/.

3. The Historical Marker Database. Montello Granite. November 15, 2007. Accessed September 5, 2011. http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=3556.


_____________________________________________

Seventh Installment: On Buffalo Lake

Thursday’s paddle was the length of the very long and narrow Buffalo Lake. The first leg was due north for a little more than two miles. The lake then dog-legged to the east for nearly eight miles.

Buffalo Lake was shallow and weed choked except for a buoy-marked boating channel, that meandered through the middle of the lake, keeping me far from shore - out of the lee of any land. The wind normally blew from the west. Instead, this Thursday, funneled by the low, wooded bluffs along the lake, it blew from nearly due east and stiffened as the day wore on. With the nearly negligible current hardly helping, I paddled constantly to make headway, and I did not feel safe in my water-hugging kayak, nearly invisible to any approaching motor-boat, so I kept up a steady pace and a constant look out.

After traveling six miles, I swung out of the channel to stop at a boat landing along the northern shore of the lake. Marquette County work crews were at the landing, and others were out on the lake chopping and removing the lake weeds. Three huge, floating choppers, painted orange, grazed their way through the weed beds.

The choppers were built on barges. Reaching from the bow into the water, cutters sliced back and forth through the weeds, and a conveyor swept the cut vegetation back into the barge. The barges had a paddle wheel on the middle of each side. Each wheel turned forward or in reverse independently, allowing for tight maneuvering in the weed-choked shallows. The huge orange craft loomed like sea monsters over my little baidarka and floundered about like the twisted spawn of the steam boats that used to ply the lake. Those old steam boats themselves were not pretty progenitors, having been described as a “cross between a mud scow and a pile driver”.¹

As a chopper filled its extended bed with cut weeds, a similar boat lacking only the weed cutters docked mid-lake at the stern of the chopper, and the chopper's second conveyor belt moved the cargo of cut vegetation onto the transfer boat. The cut weeds were then ferried to the landing and disgorged via yet another conveyor into waiting dump trucks.

“Wally” was painted on the hood of the dump truck waiting for the next load. The driver - Wally, of course - looked like he rode a Harley Fat Boy on his free days, crowning his image with a long, frizzy, ZZ Top beard. He said that Marquette County cut weeds on Buffalo Lake four days a week during the boating season; if they did not, it would fill with weeds. He asked a lot of questions about the baidarka and my trip, often shaking his head in bemusement.

Before I left Wally and the landing, I rested under a maple. Flitting through the branches above me was a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks. The male’s breast glowed and flashed as he moved in and out of patches of sunshine. He sang like a robin, only more flute-like and lustier. Soon after I launched again, a damsel fly came aboard to hitch a ride on my left forearm. After a mile of rising and falling with each paddle stroke, she decided that I had taken her far enough, and with a shiver, loosed her wings, rose off my arm, and caught the breeze to her ultimate destination. Perhaps she was headed to John Muir’s boyhood home, just five miles south.

In 1849, John Muir, at age 11, arrived in Marguette County with his family from Scotland. Known as the father of the United States’ national parks, John Muir grew up on a lake less than half a mile from the Fox.² He wrote of his boyhood: “Oh that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Every thing new and pure in the very prime when Nature’s pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and streams and sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!”³ I, too, rejoiced with what wildness was still to be seen and experienced.

With the ever-freshening wind, I began to think more about my paddle stroke than nature or John Muir, setting each upcoming buoy as my next goal. As I closed in on a buoy, the next one would come into sight, and I would redirect my effort. Each buoy drew me on toward the east end of the lake and the city of Montello. I set off for each new buoy a little more exhausted and cramped, but knowing that I had a couple hundred fewer paddle strokes to go.

And so I reached the Montello boat landing at mid-afternoon. A lean man with close-cropped, graying hair was launching his fishing boat. His name was Don, and he said that it was the first time this year that he had put the boat in the water. He intended to do a tune-up run before going fishing. Even though Don was retired, he had been too busy to get out earlier with the boat.

In fact, he had just returned from a cattle round-up in Montana on a relative’s 30,000-acre ranch. A crew of Wisconsin family members drove out in two pickup trucks to Montana to help. The group included Don’s fourteen year-old nephew and sixteen year-old niece. On the ranch, they rounded up and branded 400 calves. That seemed a lot, but Don’s relative said there should have been nearly 500. The rancher thought the missing hundred had been rustled by a neighbor! Don rode an ATV, but said that he would get on a horse next year. Despite not being mounted, Don loved the work, the cowboys, the West and the idea. He still wore his straw cowboy hat and a big, cowboy-style silver belt buckle.

After I said goodbye to Don and finished strapping the wheels on the front of the baidarka, I turned north down a gravel road, headed for Montello and the Kozy Rest Motel.


1. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 11. Trails Books, 1998.

2. The Sierra Club. John Muir: A Brief Biography. 2011. Accessed November 5, 2011. http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/muir_biography.aspx.

3. Muir, Johm. Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of California. Library of America, April 22, 1997.


_____________________________________________

Sixth Installment: In the environs of Endeavor

Now, a mile west of Packwaukee Islandthe, I followed the Fox as it looped into Buffalo Lake, which is ten miles long and very narrow. It looks uncannily like the large intestine. But those ten miles would be tomorrow’s paddle. The Village of Endeavor was my goal today.

Endeavor lies at the upper end of the lake. If I can continue with the anatomy lesson, the upper end of the lake looked like a stomach, with the Fox entering as the esophagus in the upper right corner of the stomach. Endeavor sat a quarter mile away, at the base of the stomach. The river channel has shifted away from Endeavor over the years, and now the village is guarded by shallow water and thick lines of lake weeds and water lilies. I swung far to the west to flank these defenses and reach the muddy boat landing. It was 3 p.m. I had covered 15 miles from Portage in about six hours, with two stops.

Known originally as Merritt’s Landing, the village was renamed Endeavor on August 7, 1890, in honor of the Methodist youth group of that name. Methodists had conducted an enthusiastic tent revival in the village that year, so successful that they immediately founded a Christian academy on the hill overlooking the village and Buffalo Lake. The Academy flourished for a number of decades, and then diminished until it closed in 1925. In 1931, the building passed to the community and became the local high school. Now, shorn of its gabled third floor, it houses the village hall and library. Even without its gables it could be seen from the lake for miles.

Susan*, a lovely woman from the village, had agreed to put me up overnight. When I had checked out Endeavor in the spring, I found a sleepy community of about 150 households, but no lodging for visitors. I located Susan by calling the only realtor in the village, who put me in touch with the Village President, Ken, who recruited Susan, an artist of an independent and Bohemian bent, who had once run a bed and breakfast. Susan called me in May with an invitation to stay overnight in her partially finished basement.

Address in hand, and rolling my baidarka along on its strapped-on front wheels, I found my way to her cream-colored house. A note on the back deck said that I should let myself in and feel free to use the shower. I unloaded the kayak and hung out my gear to dry in Susan’s garage. I parked the baidarka in her backyard, which was full of flower beds and paths mulched with pine needles. Susan’s neighbor, Dolores, told me that Susan was working up at the library, so after a shower and fresh clothes, I strolled there and found Susan behind the desk. Deciding I was safe enough, she agreed to dinner. In the meantime, I looked through the corner of the library dedicated to Endeavor’s history.

At five, we walked back to Susan’s. It is one of the few new homes in the village and is a work in progress. It was on the site of what had been one of the oldest log cabins in Endeavor. The cabin had started its life as a Civil War veteran’s hunting shack. And it was the cabin that Susan bought in 2001, as a home base when she was not on the road painting mural commissions around North America. Then one morning, as she stepped out of the shower, the cabin’s lights flickered and went out. A burnt electric smell hung on the air. Assuming a fuse had blown, Susan slipped into her pink bathrobe and went to investigate. She was brought up short in the living room by a glowing-red ceiling. A fire had been smoldering for hours in the attic, slowly burning its way through layer upon layer of old ceiling, until what was left throbbed red like a poker too long in the hearth.

Susan dashed out into the snow, saving only herself and her bathrobe. The volunteer firemen were quickly on the scene, but could not save the cabin. They were inside only long enough to toss some of Susan’s personal possessions out the windows and into the deep snow of the yard, things which slowly reappeared as the snow melted, including her art portfolio, which she and Delores dried and cleaned. We spent an hour looking through it and talking about her mural commissions around the country.

Susan had always been an artist, but opted instead for jobs with regular paychecks. However, after painting murals and using handmade stencils throughout a friend’s beach house, paying commissions started coming in. Soon, Susan was painting murals and stencils full-time. The murals varied in style, but the larger, commercial ones were of outdoor scenes painted across all the walls of rooms in trompe-l’oeil style, including huge murals of Tuscan countryside surrounding an Olympic-size pool in Vancouver. For more than five years that is all that Susan did – travel from place to place painting.

Susan was attracted to Endeavor by its quietness, quaintness, and to the cabin by its uniqueness. Now she was endowing her new house with her own artistic character. (The kitchen included skylights and concrete counter tops that she poured herself.) The village, however, was in decline. It had been dying since Highway 51 bypassed Endeavor in the 1960s. Only one tavern, the post office, a real-estate office and a little church remained open among the small homes. On the main street, building after building sat empty, their windows filled with fading "For Sale" signs. The library up on the hill seemed to be the village’s center of gravity during the day. At night, the single focal point was Gramp’s Swamp Inn, where Susan and I had eaten dinner.

When we finished discussing Susan's murals, I asked her to wake me early, and headed down into the unfinished basement. My space was defined by stud walls covered in places with cardboard. The joists above me creaked with Susan‘s passage. But the bed, with an antique headboard, was firm and the flannel sheets warm. The day’s hard exercise made for a good night’s sleep, and I did not stir until 5 a.m., when Susan’s footsteps on the kitchen floor woke me.

Breakfast included rhubarb pie baked by Susan’s friend George. Susan said she did not usually eat pie for breakfast, but she always made an exception for George’s pie. It was a delicious exception to the rule. While we ate, we spoke about village politics. From Susan’s perspective, past administrations had played fast and loose with Endeavor’s borrowing, and now the Village had to pay back $317,000 to the state for improperly-used development funds. Susan earned the nickname “Loan Ranger” after spending countless hours tracking Village loans. She and several other recent residents of Endeavor then led a revolt that unseated the prior administration. The losers still appeared at village board meetings to rail at the usurping “foreigners”.

After clearing the breakfast dishes, I thanked Susan and wheeled the baidarka down the main street. I turned left to the boat launch. A northeast wind had filled the water by the ramp with duck weed. I spent ten minutes sweeping it clear with a long, fallen tree limb, slid the boat in, and got underway. It was 8:10 a.m. I headed northeast down Lake Buffalo.

*From hereon, I have changed some names and details to preserve the privacy of those I met along the way.


_____________________________________________

Fifth Installment: On to Endeavor

It was Wednesday morning, June 1st. The sun was shining, the air still, and the temperature nearing 70. I had just entered the slow current of the river to begin my 8-day paddle of the Upper Fox, anticipating a great day.

There were many downed cottonwoods and other deadfalls along the shore. None completely blocked the river, which ran clear and some 60 feet across a sandy bottom. The banks were mounded to the height of four or more feet with dredge spoils, blocking most views inland. Cottonwoods and silver maples predominated along the higher ground. Cattails filled the marshy land.

It was fish that I first saw. In the clear water, two carp swam along the edge of the sandy, deeper channel until the passing of my baidarka spooked them. They shilly-shallied into the weed beds. A long-snouted pike swam under the boat. Later, in the silty, reedy shallows, carp twisted and snapped sending up splashes that I could hear far up river. They writhed together until I was almost upon them. Then, in an explosion of water, they would scatter in every direction. Later, in the afternoon, a walleye leaped twice.

Birds were plentiful. There were three foot-tall great blue herons. With the approach of the kayak, each solitary heron flew downstream, but not far. In four or five minutes I would catch up, disturb its solitude, and we would repeat the process. Lots of kingbirds, looking very black, darted out over the river after insects. There were others - a red-tailed hawk and several kingfishers. Kingfishers have comically enormous heads and sit on bare branches above the river’s edge. I love the kingfisher’s rattle-like call as it swoops from one perch to another.

Sandhill cranes were trumpeting in adjoining fields, and at mid-morning I surprised a pair with their chick. They were drinking from the river along the sandy edge of a spoil-bank. The adults fled up the bank, but the chick, neither fledged nor wise to the world, stayed. It was a ball of brown fuzz on stilt-like legs, with a head snorkeling up on a long, thin neck. The adults stalked the bank-top calling excitedly, but the chick remained disobediently below as I passed.

Robins and red-winged blackbirds were everywhere along the Fox. At Packwaukee Island, black terns hovered before diving headlong into the river. Tree swallows were common, and bank swallows swooped near every highway bridge I paddled under. Heard, but not seen, black-capped chickadees called their alarm warning of my approach.

The only reptile I saw was a painted turtle basking on a deadfall. There were mammals. Muskrats swam in the Fox, and I could paddle very close before they altered course. A deer came down to the river to drink. But, so far I had met no other humans on that warm, still Wednesday morning.

At mile four, I portaged around the low dam and lock of Government Bend. Before carting the kayak from the take-out to the put-in, I rested on the island between the dam and lock. Sitting at a picnic table, which was half sunk in the soil, I snacked on an orange and a power bar. A man with an impressive beer-belly was fishing from the island’s shore. His little girl kept looking at my strange kayak. I caught her eye, and she gave me a shy, little wave.

By half past noon I had reached the County Trunk Highway O Bridge, about nine miles downstream from the Indian Agency House. I stopped, stretched and ate a lunch of trail mix and another power bar, washing it down with pink lemonade from the Nalgene. The trail mix was my own concoction, featuring my favorite nut, the almond, with a fair mix of M&Ms, cashews and peanuts in a base of sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and dried soy beans. I already regretted not including more M&Ms and fewer soy beans. The mix was dry and joyless, and I had seven more of these lunches to look forward to.

Under the afternoon sun, the day continued to warm. By 2 p.m., my arms were a little fatigued and my bottom cramped from sitting. Except for going aground once, all had gone well. As I approached Packwaukee Island and the diving terns, I ignored my guidebook’s suggestion to take the north channel around the island. It looked more sluggish than the south channel. So I swung south, but the channel broadened more and more, while getting shallower and shallower. Halfway around the island the boat ran aground. I didn’t have to get out to rescue the situation, but it took six minutes of poling with my paddle before I was able to extradite the kayak from the shallows.

Passing the island, I now had only a few miles to go before my destination – Endeavor, Wisconsin.


_____________________________________________