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.
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