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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