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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