Second Installment: The Fox River

The Fox River runs through the heart of my city, Appleton, Wisconsin. As part of the historic Fox-Wisconsin waterway, the Fox once linked the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River via the Wisconsin River.¹ At what is now the city of Portage, in the center of southern Wisconsin, the Wauon Trail connected the Fox and Wisconsin watersheds, a relatively easy portage of 2,700 paces.²

For thousands of years, Native Americans plying the Fox and Wisconsin portaged at the Wauon Trail. In 1673, the first Frenchman, Father Jacques Marquette, ascended the Fox, hoisted his canoe onto his shoulders, and walked the 2,700 paces to the Wisconsin.³ He was soon followed by voyageurs and settlers as the Fox-Wisconsin waterway opened up the midsection of North America to European exploitation and settlement.

I, too, had paddled my baidarka on the Fox, exploring short, beautiful sections of both the upper and lower river in day-trips. But I had yet to give the baidarka what it deserved and what the Fox merited – a long, sustained voyage.

The Upper Fox, flowing from Portage to the city of Oshkosh and Lake Winnebago, is a gentler, more intimate, more isolated stretch of water than the Lower Fox, which descends through a series of rapids from Neenah, Menasha, and Appleton to Green Bay. The Upper Fox, slow and shallow, winds through marshes and past sloughs, through long, weedy lakes and beside pastures and cottages. Little towns are strung along its length, remnants of early river-crossings and steamboat stops. The steamboat trade flourished briefly on the Fox in the mid-nineteenth century before being eclipsed by the railroad, but it left stranded knots of humanity regularly spaced along the waterway, making convenient stopping points for a kayaker.

Over 100 miles in length, the Upper Fox can be paddled at a relaxed pace. A seven-day trip could be accommodated by stopping overnight at the towns and villages along the way. As I planned my voyage for spring of 2005, I opted instead for an eight-day trip beginning at Portage. By splitting one segment in two, I could allow for bad weather and give my body some recovery time. Besides, this would allow an extra day to stay at the charming Mecan River Lodge, five miles from Princeton, on a tributary of the Fox.

Water levels and insects were also on my mind. I needed to leave early enough in the season to benefit from higher water and stronger current, but not so early as to face cold, cloudy weather, and we had been having a very cool, damp April. I also wanted to beat the early-summer hatches of biting insects. A long-time canoeist, Linda Stoll, told me cautionary tales of miserable mid-summer experiences amid insect swarms on the Fox. So I settled on a start date of June 1st.


1. Kort, Ellen. The Fox Heritage: A History of Wisconsin’s Fox Cities, page 9. Windsor Publishing, October 1984.

2. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, page 10. Trails Books, 1998. (The maps herein were adapted from the maps in this book.)

3. Kort, Ellen. Id. at 23.


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First Installment: The Baidarka

I built a baidarka. I built it as an escapist whim. I built it as a physical challenge. I built it as an intellectual exercise.

Once built, I loved it for its beauty and grace, for the feel of the Sitka-spruce stays and gunwales, for the curve of the oak ribs, for the architecture of the frame. If I had had a bigger living room, I would have hung the naked frame over the mantle. My sketch does not do it justice. As speed sculptured in wood, it cried out to be used. So I skinned it with canvas, painted the deck a mocha brown and the hull a creamy yellow, and took it to the big waters.

The Aleutian kayak, known by its Russian name “baidarka", had its beginning thousands of years before I built mine. George B. Dyson, an expert on native kayaks, writes: “When the Russians first reached the Aleutian Islands and the coast of Alaska in the 1700s, the waters were thick with small, swift, split-prowed boats …. Made of driftwood, lashed with baleen fiber and covered with translucent sea-mammal skin, these craft were entirely creatures of the sea. The Aleuts paddled the lightweight, flexile kayaks at great speeds in the treacherous waters of the area ….”¹

For me, the building started with a book, or, more precisely, with a book cover. The cover photograph of a baidarka, the kayak’s translucent skin revealing a slender, sensuous frame within, drew me to Wolfgang Brinck’s book, The Aleutian Kayak, in which Wolfgang laid out, with the passion of a convert, the steps to build a baidarka.² The tools and materials were simple and accessible, and the skills were within my range. By the second reading, I knew that I too would build a baidarka. That was the summer of 1998.

I started that October, spending weekends and many evenings in my father’s woodworking shop. My plan to keep track of time spent was soon dropped. So many hours piled up in the shop that a precise count seemed meaningless. But they were wonderful hours. I loved planning each construction phase, measuring, problem solving, shaping the wood, the grain and feel of each sanded piece, the smell of linseed oil. It was my first boat, and I built slowly and made many mistakes. As a novice steaming and bending ribs, I snapped every third one just as it reached its maximum arc.

Mark Rogers, owner of Superior Kayak, lived in Whitelaw, about 40 minutes away. Whenever I traveled that direction, I stopped in his shop. Since Mark was in the business of building kayaks for inepts like me, he wouldn’t freely divulge his secrets. Or, so he said. I discovered that when I described what I was working on that week and the process I was using, if there was a better way, after twenty minutes Mark’s resistance to free advice would give way to his perfectionism, and he would blurt out the correct approach. Later, in appreciation for all of this inveigled help, I hired Mark to help me put the canvas skin on my baidarka.

By early summer 1999, I was painting the hull and looking forward to my first outing, but I was busy with work and family. I faced a steep learning curve to perfect my paddling and to just stay upright in the boat. (The hull, as shaped by my inexperienced hands, proved to be fast but very tippy.) So for years I made only short day trips. The baidarka deserved better. It was a design meant to make long passages on big rivers, lakes and seas. I had barely tapped its potential.


1. Dyson, George B. “The Aleutian Kayak.” Scientific American Magazine, April 2000.

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


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