Fifteenth Install: Looking for jollification in Berlin, Wisconsin

I wheeled my kayak, as if it were Detroit’s finest sedan, into the entryway of Berlin’s Best Western Motel. At the front desk, Melissa was helpful and sympathetic, listening patiently to my tired babbling, and saying nothing about how I smelled after a hot day of paddling. When asked about the safe-keeping of my baidarka, Melissa helped me store the boat in the motel’s utility shed. She was amazed at how much stuff was jammed into the boat. Solicitously, she remarked that there was a hot tub for the guests. As I had no swimsuit, she produced a pair of “disposable” trunks from under the reception desk. They were six dollars, and one size fit all, which really meant that they were many sizes too big for me. Melissa was fascinated by the paper-like material, but I was skeptical about their opaqueness and politely declined the trunks and the hot tub.

After a long shower and washing out my paddling clothes, I crashed on the bed for an hour. Rousing myself at four, I walked downtown. Most shops were closing, but I was able to get an ice cream at La-Vern & Shirley’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. Overhead were large globe lights and an old-style ceiling fan. Glass cases displayed the ice cream. Small, round-topped tables were supported by tubular, chrome legs. The floor was a checkerboard of large black and white tiles. With the addition of modern air-conditioning, it was an interesting respite from the very hot day.

Berlin has a shrinking population of about 5,000. The city began unofficially in June 1846. The previous winter Nathan Strong and three other men had explored this area of the Fox River, looking for a crossing point for the Fond du Lac to Stevens Point road being planned by territorial authorities. They knew there had been a large settlement of Mascouten Indians near this area of the river and suspected a possible crossing place in the otherwise marshy land. They found such a spot, and in June of 1846, Strong returned to start a ferry in what is now Berlin. He was soon joined by other settlers and the city was officially formed in 1847.¹ Originally known as Strong’s Landing, the first postmaster changed the name to Berlin, pronounced (since World War I) with the accent on the first syllable.² I could not confirm my guess that there was a connection between the name and the fact that 46% of the residents claim German ancestry.³

The mid- to late-1800’s were the heyday of steamboat traffic in Berlin. Following one memorable passenger excursion, the local newspaper reported: “One-half the passengers were drunk, three-quarters feeling good, nine-tenths brimming over with fun and frolic, and the whole so jam full of jollification and lager beer that they didn’t know which way they were looking ….”⁴ The city’s growth peaked in the late 1890s, with a population close to what it is today. Many of the city’s fine Victorian homes were built then. The city is still known for those homes, lovingly called “painted ladies“, and also for its fur and leather trade.⁵ But I found no “jollification”; only a sleepy city under a hot afternoon sun.

Wandering back toward the motel, I found a place to eat – Shepard’s Drive-In. My fellow diners were all people of significant girth. One, a young man in a dirty tee shirt that barely covered his beer belly, ordered his “usual” – a double burger and large fries. Two women placed a huge order, and every non-drink item they requested was fat-fried. The next person in line ordered a vanilla cone dipped in cherry topping. I ordered a hamburger - the Shepard’s-special, a small fries, and lemonade. I ate outside in the shade of a tree, and then played the miniature golf course behind the drive-in. I finished way over par.

Returning to the hotel, I boosted up the air conditioning, sprawled across the bed, and watched TV until bed time. Tomorrow, Tuesday, the seventh day of the trip, would be another long paddle, this time to the city of Omro.


1. Wisconsin Historical Society. Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles: Berlin Journal - Early History of Our Town, May 12, 1921. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/searchresults.asp?adv=yes&np=Berlin+Journal.

2. Wikipedia. Berlin, Wisconsin. Revised October 22, 2011. Accessed November 5, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin,_Wisconsin.

3. Citydata.com. Berlin, Wisconsin. Revised 2011. Accessed June 2011. http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/searchresults.asp?adv=yes&np=Berlin+Journal.

4. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 15. Trails Books, 1998.

5. The City of Berlin, Wisconsin. About Berlin. Accessed June 15, 2011. http://www.cityofberlin.net/modules/web/index.php/id/1/Berlin%20Wisconsin.


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Fourteenth Installment: Seventeen miles to Berlin

I reached Princeton’s Hiestand Park by 8:20, headed for Berlin, Wisconsin. I had already paddled 55 miles, but now, at seventeen miles, this leg would be the longest paddle of the trip. A stronger current helped, but the wind was both friend and foe. Coming out of the northwest, it built all day until by noon it was whipping up small chop on the more exposed sections of the river. Occasionally, I had it to my back and it pushed me along, but five times the Fox meandered to the northwest and I had to paddle into the teeth of the wind. Most of the time the wind quartered the kayak, catching the bow, forcing it to starboard and necessitating correction strokes on that side to stay on course. It was hot, too – in the 80s. As the morning wore on, storm clouds built with the heat. I kept to a steady pace of 3 knots.

I landed the kayak three times during the seventeen miles to stretch and rest: first at the park-like White River Lock and Dam, constructed in the 1850s; next, at noon for lunch on a sandy river bank beyond the Puchyan River junction; and finally at the Berlin Lock and Dam, just a mile above Berlin itself.

There were no people at my first two stops, nor were there many on the river, so I had the Fox pretty much to myself. Along the way, I saw a great blue heron perched on an old snag. An eagle soared overhead just before my noon stop. And shortly after my lunch break, I came upon a doe. She looked up from drinking in the river as I drifted down on her. Staying as still as possible, I got within 35 feet before she gave a nimble, twisting leap over the bank and was gone. Later, I surprised two sand hill cranes along the shore.

I heard the cranes long before I saw them, their prehistoric cacophony epitomizing for me the power and mystery of nature. Aldo Leopold wrote that cranes are “wildness incarnate”.¹ Another native Wisconsin naturalist, Ron Sauey, co-founded the International Crane Foundation in 1973. Located on his parents’ horse farm just north of Baraboo, the Foundation hosts all 15 of the world’s cranes species, and has been instrumental in protecting and reviving natural populations throughout the globe.²

The river’s isolated banks, almost pure sand in this stretch, were inviting to wildlife such as the cranes and deer. The silver maples along the banks had shallow, spreading root systems, easily eroded by undercutting of the shore. Where exposed, they formed intricately woven root-baskets fifteen feet or more across. The land bordering the river was marshy, and to the west, along the Fox’s confluence with the White River, lay the extensive White River Wildlife Area. Later, at about mile eight, the Puchyan River entered from the east. It drained Green Lake, the deepest lake in Wisconsin, plunging to an astounding depth of 239 feet.³ A vast marsh surrounding the Puchyan stretched out to the east of the Fox. No roads could approach the Fox for the next three miles, and there were no more boat landings until near Berlin.

I had paddled this section of the Fox before in my baidarka accompanied by Linda, her husband, a friend and their dog, all crowded into one canoe. We had also started at Hiestand Park, but planned to take out at the point where Huckleberry Road came closest to the river – just before the long, empty stretch below the Puchyan River. According to both maps we were using, there was a takeout there. We had no back-up plan, as it was seven more miles to the next boat landing, and Linda and her husband were exhausted from paddling the overloaded canoe.

However, upon arrival we had found barbed wire stretched across the landing, festooned with "No trespassing" signs every five feet. We could see a man in the yard across the road from the landing. I politely called to him for permission to land our two little boats, but he barked back that we had better not set one foot on his land. There was no arguing with him. So we drifted down to his neighbor’s property, the last home for the next three miles. We could see the man, but not be seen ourselves, or so we thought. When he went indoors, we got out on the spongy bank at the property line, carefully walked our boats out along the line, met our ride on the road, and drove back to Princeton for lunch. Linda’s husband announced over coffee that he was pretty sure the landowner had followed us back to town in his pickup truck. We had a long discussion about how strange the whole incident had been.

The next night a deputy sheriff called me. Using our ride’s license plate to identify us, the landowner had reported us as trespassers. From the deputy, I learned that several years earlier the man had discovered that he owned the thin slice of land between the river and the highway. He had been to court four times to establish his right to shut down the long-running boat landing there, zealously enforcing his rights. I confessed to the deputy, explaining that we had no good alternative to the “trespassing”. The sympathetic deputy had been fielding complaints from the property owner for years and said he would drop the whole matter if we would pledge to never get out there again. I assured him that getting out there again was the farthest thing from our minds.

As I passed this second time, the "No trespassing" signs were still hanging from the barbed wire, flapping back and forth in the wind, waving me past and on toward Berlin.

At the Berlin Lock and Dam, a motorcycle policeman rode in. (Law enforcement officers seem to be closely associated with my travels of this stretch of the Fox.) I asked if he would mind taking a picture of me paddling the baidarka. The officer was happy to do so, and as I showed him the camera, a man joined us from a minivan that had been parked alongside the boat launch. He turned out to be a friend of the officer as well as the president of the 1st National Bank of Berlin. I explained my trip to both of them, and then took the boat out into the river for the picture.

After sculling up to the landing to retrieve my camera, I asked where I should get out in Berlin so as to be closest to the Best Western Motel that I would stay at that night. The officer and the bank president had a long discussion and concluded that I should not paddle all the way into Berlin. My motel was on the south end of the city, and it would be over a mile from the park that I had planned to get out at. Instead, they suggested the Badger Mineral property just south of the city limits. It had a boat launch and would be less than half a mile from there to the motel. Soon I found the landing, off a little slough. It was 2 p.m.


1. Van Horn, Kent. “Wilderness Incarnate: Sandhill Cranes are a Conservation Success“. Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine, October 2011.

2. The International Crane Foundation. The International Crane Foundation: The History. Accessed October 31, 2011. .

3. Wikipedia. Green Lake (Wisconsin). Revised March 3, 2011. Accessed October 21, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Lake_(Wisconsin).


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Thirteenth Installment: Match Making in Princeton

I walked the kayak down the broad, mown ditch of Highway 23 to Marsh’s Landing, about ¼ mile from the lodge. The landing nestled in a break in the bluff along the Fox River. As I coasted along the day before, I had noticed the quiet, grassy inlet. That afternoon, Leanne Harvey mentioned the inlet as one of the places they launched canoes, and she obtained permission for me to start my Sunday paddle from there. I was not the only Sunday user, as I had to compete with a two foot-long water snake for the launch site.

The river was a little narrower now, and the current a bit stronger. At a leisurely pace, the first two and a half miles passed in an hour, taking me to what was marked on my map as a large, marshy, hairpin loop of the river. Only after paddling to a dead end did I realize that since the making of the map, the river had cut through the loop at its base and filled in the far outlet with the eroded soil. I had to retrace my route, but it was graced with waterlilies floating like white candles on the limpid gray-green water.

Half a mile farther downstream was the long portage at the Princeton Lock and Dam, the half-way point for my six-mile Sunday paddle. I examined the kayak while making the portage. It was holding up well. Before the trip, I found a split rib and had splinted it with a spare oak dowel, lashing them together and then wrapping them with duct tape. The repair had held. Many other ribs in the mid-section had shifted - up to an inch - in their lashings, responding to the pressure points of where I sat or moved. The baidarka was designed to adjust just that way. The canvas skin was scraped and nicked, but there were no leaks, an equally apt descrition of my own state on the fifth day of paddling.

Besides being narrower, the Fox was now often dominated on one side by a high, sandy bluff, the opposite shore being the low spoil bank from years of dredging, beyond which stretched marshes. Silver maples predominated, joined by locust, ash or cottonwood. One cottonwood had snapped during the storm, collapsing at an angle into the river, necessitating a wide swing around it. Here and there willows grew. An especially large willow at one of the infrequent cottages wept a curtain of branches into the river.

As I neared Princeton, Sunday morning church bells rang out. In the further distance rifle shots resounded from a shooting range. Religion and guns - how American.

I arrived in Princeton at 11:30, sweeping through the backside of the downtown and getting out at Hiestand Park, just below the Highway 23 Bridge. I had read that on May 20th, fifteen fifth graders from Neshkoro Elementary School had sampled the life of a voyageur. Recreating a 1762 trip by the Northwest Fur Company, they boarded a 28 foot-long wooden voyageur canoe at Hiestand Park for a three-mile maiden voyage down the Fox River.¹ Had fur-trading voyageurs stopped at the park site 250 years ago?

Princeton was settled in the mid-1800s by pioneers drawn to the Pleasant Valley township, and grew during the free-wheeling days of the steamboat. My favorite tale from then was of Captain Robert Booth, determined to reach the city in his Lone Star steamer despite darkness and high water. Sensing that the boat had left the channel, Booth cut the engine only to hear a farmer shouting angrily: “What do you think you’re doing in my pasture?” to which Booth yelled back: “Why in hell didn’t you keep your gate shut?” Then, changing his tone, he persuaded the farmer to guide the Lone Star back to the Fox, and the steamboat reached Princeton safely.²

The city was still vibrant with 1,500 residents and specialty shops, fine restaurants, antiques stores, and riverside terraces. I wheeled the kayak through downtown toward Emmy's Lord Byron Bed and Breakfast on Maple Street*, my home for the night. It was near noon and I had not had any breakfast. One of the first places I came to on Water Street, the main street through downtown, was the Once in a Blue Moon Café. I parked the baidarka on the sidewalk below the restaurant’s windows and flower boxes, and went in for a lunch of Thai chicken wrap, with fresh strawberry pie for dessert. The kayak attracted curious passersby. Two old men gave it a real going over until their wives dragged them off for shopping.

I continued on to the bed and breakfast, a lovely, little Victorian house with two cement lions guarding the front walk, and turned-wood spindles framing the porch. Just as at the lodge, I was the only guest. There were four bedrooms upstairs, each with a private bath. I chose the light-green room - the least frilly of the four. Emmy was the enthusiastic and inquisitive proprietress. Before I knew it, we were talking about my legal work, including divorce law. Emmy eventually pried out of me that I, myself, was recently divorced.

After showering, I headed back downtown. I went first to Strong’s Landing, an antique shop. Items were organized by theme, era and style into rooms and settings, mostly expensive Victorian pieces. However, I found a Japanese print of irises and ducks, matted in silk with a gold frame. The whole affect was simple but elegant. A reproduction rather than an antique, it was only $45, so I bought it. The shop owner promised to deliver it to my office, as it certainly would have looked odd strapped to the back of my baidarka. Among the other shops I stopped at was the N Gallery. I spoke to Nick, the owner, whose path to opening the N Gallery was long and circular. He had left Princeton as a young man to study at the New York American Culinary Institute. That training took him to a job in Seattle, where, through a friend, he became interested in glass art, which lead to the making of fine jewelry. Family and available funding brought him back to Princeton to open his shop. I bought a simple but unique necklace.

Dinner was at JJ’s Supper Club around the corner from the bed and breakfast. The diners were families and senior citizens, including Harry. In his 70’s, Harry sailed through the dining room with a rolling gait. He tacked from table to table, zigzagging across the room, loudly hailing everyone he knew, which was almost the whole crowd. After working the dining room, he jibed off into the bar where he sang a lusty, off-key Happy Birthday to a red-faced woman.

After a good night’s sleep, I went down for a hearty breakfast. As Emmy served me she took a telephone call, slipping into the kitchen with the phone. When she returned, she seemed a little flustered, but tried to make conversation. She remarked that I had been out all Sunday afternoon, and wanted to hear what I had been up to. So, I ran through Sunday’s exploration of Princeton, including the shopping. Emmy asked if the necklace was for a daughter. I answered: “No. It is for a woman that I have begun to see.“ There was a long silence. Then Emmy sat down in a chair and became confessional. “I don’t know why I am telling your this. You will think that I am wacky.” And then she proceeded to tell me.

After talking to me on Sunday, Emmy was so sure that I was a perfect match for her ex-sister-in-law Marcia that she called her. She talked Marcia into letting her give me her e-mail address. The next door neighbor, Elsie, had been recruited into the match-making scheme too. The telephone call was Elsie asking if Emmy had told me about Marcia yet. The attempt to fix me up with Marcia was sweet, and I was sure that Marcia was nice, but I had to disappoint Emmy and politely decline.

Having escaped potential matrimony, and with a very nice English-style breakfast in my stomach, I wheeled my baidarka back through downtown Princeton to Hiestand Park. My next destination was Berlin, Wisconsin, about 17 miles further down the Fox.

* Certain names of people and places have been changed to respect the privacy of individuals.


1. See Fox of the River Voyager Canoe LLC, .

2. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 13. Trails Books, 1998.


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