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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