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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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