I was awoken at 5 a.m. by what sounded like a rifle shot. It silenced the early birds, and for a while everything was perfectly still. I lay in the bed, puzzled. Twelve minutes later there was another crack, just as loud. It was soon followed by a third, but this time more organic sounding.
I threw back the covers and looked out the window. In the yard was an old, spreading locust tree. A limb some twenty feet long, stretching out perpendicular to the trunk, had shattered near its base. It was still connected to the tree by shreds of wood and bark, but barely. Every ten or fifteen minutes its weight snapped the remaining connection a little more, until its branches draped the lawn. There was no apparent reason for the sudden failure other than that the limb had just now reached its fullness of leaves. Maybe that weight, combined with damage from winter’s freezing and thawing, triggered the catastrophe.
So, I was up, even before the chickadees. I ate my not-so-hearty plastic-packaged Sarah Lee, washed up, and dressed. Soon I was off to the bottom of the hill and the most easterly of the four boat launches. A fog hung over the lake, obscuring the far shore; but by 6:45, it had lifted enough to reveal a vague indication of the north shore, so I squeezed into the baidarka and pushed off from the boat ramp, setting my course to the northeast. If I could maintain that heading, it would take me to the Fox River’s outlet from the lake. It was nearly two miles across the lake; there were no landmarks to guide me; and the fog had not entirely melted away. Reed beds, dredge banks, and islands were scattered between me and the river, further obscuring the outlet.
After thirty minutes, I reached what should have been the Fox. Peering through the mist, trying to pick out the river’s gap in the shoreline, I tried unsuccessfully one spot and then another further southeast. Both were just marshy inlets. Next, I sat motionless in the baidarka, feeling for a current, to no avail. I rested the paddle across the boat and studied the map. It gave few clues – just a suggestion of higher ground here and there, and potential tree lines. I tried further north, and eventually, stroke after stroke, the broad outlet emerged out of the fog. It had taken an extra twenty minutes to find the way out.
Here the Fox was wide and sluggish. Cottages lined the right bank, disappearing with marshy land, and reappeared wherever the shore was high enough to support a road. Their predictable appearance with the roads now made following the map easy. The wind was occasionally at my back, and the current helped, so I made about two and half knots with steady but relaxed paddling. The mist burned off, and the morning sun slanted across the marshes.
Birds were my company. My bird-list grew daily. I had previously seen red-tailed hawks, blue-winged teals, wood ducks, mallard and geese. Cat birds mewed from the rushes and the wings of mourning doves whistled as they flew over in pairs. Finches chattered from the brush, and Baltimore orioles sang melodies from the trees. Jays and crows called loudly up and down the Fox.
As the Fox reached a bluff, it narrowed, and the Mecan River entered from a marsh on the left. I needed to take the Mecan upstream until the County Highway C Bridge, where someone from the Mecan Lodge would meet me, for that was where I was staying the night. But, it being only ten in the morning, I paddled another mile or so downstream on the Fox. That took me to a section of the river running just below a steep, thirty-foot bluff that blocked any view, and the wind was picking up. Time to head back to the Mecan, I edged the boat around and leaned into my paddle strokes, pushing my way back upstream against wind and current.
Rain clouds had gathered by the time I turned into the Mecan. This little river ran fresh, the surface riffling in the breeze, and meandered through the marsh from copse to copse of silver maple. It felt isolated and wild. I saw another pair of sand hill cranes with a chick. In a marshy embayment, a great blue heron and an egret stalked the shallows. Turtles plunged off logs into the stream at the splash of my paddle. I spooked a big doe and crossed paths with a two foot-long snake swimming up the Mecan, like me, trying to reach shelter before the rain.
As I neared the Highway C Bridge, woods closed in on the little river, fallen trees slanting into the stream here and there. Soon there were deadfalls crisscrossing the river; it was possible to thread the kayak through some of the tree-falls, but only for another fifty yards. I would have to walk.
The stream banks were just high enough that balancing the tippy baidarka against the bank while sliding out of the cockpit was not very successful. I did not roll the boat, but came close enough to ship several quarts of water into the cockpit. The terrain was too rough to use the cart. I was going to have to portage everything to the bridge on my shoulders.
That was not easy. I was stiff after paddling nearly twelve miles. The bridge was 200 yards away through tall grass and undergrowth along an uneven deer-path. Roots reached up to trip me. Gaining the road the first time, I called the lodge for my pick-up. By the time I reached the road with my second load, my ride, a van with a kayak trailer, was pulling onto the shoulder. I trudged back for the kayak. When I emerged the third time, kayak on my shoulder, it was raining.
_____________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment