Eighteenth Installment: The journey's end

I woke at 5 a.m., at the first sign of dawn, and switched on the small TV. The weather forecasts reported a major storm front lined up on the Minnesota/Wisconsin border, moving east rapidly. No forecast pinned down the exact time that the severe weather would arrive, but it sounded like it could reach Lake Butte des Morts by early afternoon. This final paddle of the trip would be about eleven miles, five of those miles on the very open water of that lake.

Lake Butte des Morts, named “Hill of the Dead” by the French for an nearby Indian burial mound¹, was large, about five miles long by three miles wide, or almost 14 square miles (36 square kilometers). Being shallow, the wind could quickly whip up large waves of short interval. One guide book was specific: “In windy or uncertain weather, Lake Butte des Morts is not safe for canoeing.”² It was imperative to start early so as to beat the worst weather. I did not have a “bomb proof” roll in case I got tipped – far from it, and I did not relish trying to right and reenter a loaded kayak on a storm tossed lake.

I had half packed the night before, and now, in the wan light of early dawn, I wolfed down the last of my power bars and quickly dressed. In a few minutes more the kayak was packed and I was wheeling it down to the boat launch. As the boat slid into the current, my watch said 6:10.

The last leg of my journey would end in Oshkosh, where the river entered Lake Winnebago. Winnebago, approximately 30 by 10 miles (48 by 16 km) is the largest lake in the United States contained entirely within a state. The lake is the terminus of the Upper Fox. The Lower Fox drains Lake Winnebago. Only 39 miles (63 km) long, the Lower Fox is a much larger, faster, and more developed river. It passes through half a dozen large cities and 17 locks while falling 164 feet (50 m) on its way to Green Bay, an arm of Lake Michigan.³

But here, on the last stretch of the Upper Fox, the river slowed and broadened as I went. By the second mile, marsh edged both sides, and roads, cottages, and homes disappeared. At about mile four, the Fox began to open into Lake Butte des Morts. Here the river skirted the 8,857 acre Nickels Marsh to the west. I paused and called my father on my cell phone. I told him to meet me in Oshkosh’s Rainbow Park in about two hours.

Dredging had formed a long breakwater along the east side of the Fox as it entered the lake. The channel and its wall continued for three quarters of a mile northeast into the lake. With each paddle stroke, the storm front built ever higher and darker behind me, sucking in a strong wind from the south east, the very point I needed to head into. So, I kept the break-wall close on the right. It provided some shelter from the wind.

Gulls covered the breakwater. As I passed each group, they broke into clamorous braying, announcing my progress as the channel slowly arched east. Roundeding the end of the wall, I found myself in the middle of the lake, the wind now blowing unimpeded across four miles of lake, which it was whipping into a short chop. The swells were running nearly two feet high, and the interval between waves was less than the length of my baidarka. The boat was most stable taking the wind and waves head on, but this meant constant, hard paddling for four miles right down the middle of the lake. The shores to the north and south were each a mile or more away. I felt awfully small and alone on a very big water.

The lashed framework of the hull rode and flexed over the waves like a living being. I made my profile low, leaned forward into each stroke, and kept in the rhythm of paddling. The blade work was constant as the wind was unrelenting. Spray from foaming wave tops soaked the deck and me. It took an hour and 40 minutes to cross the four miles of lake. I was spent by the time I passed under the Highway 41 Bridge and back into the river, heading just a mile further for Rainbow Park on the near-west side of Oshkosh. I arrived at 9:15.

I nosed the kayak onto the cement boat ramp. Hoisting myself out of the cockpit, I left the river for the last time this trip. One hundred miles traveled; eight warm June days behind me. The baidarka had proved that it belonged in the Fox, not hanging, beached high and dry, in my garage.

In his book from which my kayak was born, Wolfgang Brinck wrote: “Aleut kayaks of early construction had spirit … lines carved on the inside face of the gunwales. The spirit line is like the digestive tract, the circulatory system, and the nervous system of an animal all rolled into one. Since a kayak is a living thing, it needs a spirit line.”⁴ I too had carved a spirit line on my baidarka. And I had given it a journey. I hoped the journey had nourished it, allowed its spirit to taste life, to surge, arching joyfully, over every wave. The journey had nourished me too. When I was deep in the cockpit, the kayak riding low in the surface of the Fox, its gunwales barely breaking above the river’s skin, I felt the pulse of the river, felt the history, the time immemorial that it had flowed through the hearts and lives of the people along its banks.

In A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean wrote: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”⁵ The Fox River, this river, had its own stories to tell. A few, those common and new, were shouted by the river. Most were whispered. I had to submerge myself in the waters to hear the murmurs. Sometimes the words were so soft that the tale was felt more than heard, like water sliding over the hull of my baidarka. Sometimes I had to look under the rocks for the words. But they were there - the words of the Fox, the stories of timeless, quiet beauty - and they haunted me.

I pulled my baidarka from the Fox. I draped my gear over the pavilion‘s tables, and waited for my father. He arrived at 10:30 a.m., cheerful and obviously full of questions about the trip. Always a welcome sight, he had come just in time, as the first drops of rain began to fall.


1. Kort, Ellen. The Fox Heritage: A History of Wisconsin’s Fox Cities, at page 25. Windsor Publishing, October 1984.

2. Svob, Mike, and Elizabeth McBride. Paddling Northern Wisconsin: 82 Great Trips by Canoe and Kayak, at page 16. Trails Books, 1998.

3. Wikipedia. Fox River (Wisconsin). Revised October 5, 2011. Accessed October 29, 2011. http://www.omro-wi.com/a-brief-history-of-omro.html.

4. Brinck, Wolfgang. The Aleutian Kayak: Origins, Construction, and Use of the Traditional Seagoing Baidarka, at page 61. Ragged Mountain Press, April 1, 1995.

5. Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. University of Chicago Press, May 1976.

Seventeenth Installment: Omro rises from the pages

It was a sunny, sweltering 90 degrees. I had landed in the west end of Omro, at a wooden boat ramp. From there it was a half-mile hike through downtown and then uphill to the Ramble Inn Motel*. I trudged along, but an air-conditioned Subway restaurant in mid-downtown, wafting the smell of fresh-baked bread, drew me off course. I parked the baidarka and stepped into the cool air to order lunch.

Still, it was a beautiful day in a new town, and I had been in plenty of Subway restaurants before. So, I got my sandwich to go, and lots and lots of ice for my large lemonade, and headed for Scott Park, a shady refuge from the heat of downtown Omro.

Reached by a bridge from Main Street, Scott Park occupied a canoe-shaped island in the Fox. I took in the city as I ate. The downtown looked like it had had a facelift, and some businesses were new. The park was updated. Some vitality was on display. I decided to come back downtown after checking into the motel to learn more about this small city with an even smaller name.

The Ramble Inn, according to the sign out front on Highway 21, was under new management. The cluttered office was claustrophobically the size of a porch, which it had been in a former life, and the air conditioner was not holding its own. The décor was 70s - dark brown carpeting and trim, white counters and walls, and plastic plants. It was soon apparent that the new management had not yet ironed out all the wrinkles of running a first class establishment.

The owner ran my credit card repeatedly without success. As the minutes passed and the heat in the too-close office got unbearable, I asked if perhaps someone else was tying up the phone line. The hotelier’s eyes lit up. Muttering “John”, he dashed out to the row of small motel rooms facing the highway to get “John” off the phone. The single phone line cleared, the owner returned and finished checking me in. He said the only other guests were two men making a cross-country motorcycle trip, and a couple older men renting by the week. The long-term guests were sitting outside one of their rooms drinking beer, looking as worn out as the motel.

The room was recently posted as non-smoking, but prior years of smokers had permeated the walls, carpet and furniture with the stale odor of old cigarette smoke. The traffic areas of the carpet seemed clean, but the edges were frosted with dirt and dust. The bathroom and the TV were both small relics of another decade. But the air conditioner and shower worked, the bed was not too soft, and the sheets were clean. That was all I really cared about.

After unpacking and showering, I crossed Highway 21 to the Fat Cats Drive-in for a chocolate milk shake. (What could be better after a morning of paddling.) It was a 50s-style drive-in, with a walk-up window to order from. You could then eat in your car, or, like me, sit at a picnic bench. A large water park lay to the north down the slope, between the drive-in and the river. Having slurped up the last drop of the shake, I strolled downtown.

Omro was located on lands that, at the time of the first French explorers, belonged to the Ho-Chunk Indians. By the mid-1830’s, the Ho-Chunk had ceded their land to the United States government and were relocated west of the Mississippi.¹ They did not lose the land for lack of love, stewardship or need. They gave way reluctantly and for too small a price in the face of overwhelming technology, a much more numerous race, and that people’s greed for wealth. Louise Phelps Kellogg reports in her Early Narratives of the Northwest 1634-1699 an Indian saying: “For us this river was a path. For our white brethren, to whom we sold it, it is a power.”²

Down near the river, by Scott Park, was a small public library where I discovered a fat three-ring binder with over 300 type-written pages of local history compiled by Miriam J. Smith, a 96 year-old woman, between 1970 and 1976. Reading it was like sitting around a kitchen table with friends, swapping stories heard long ago from parents and grandparents. I read of two brothers from Ohio who traveled from Green Bay to nearby Oshkosh in 1836. They made their way on Indian paths along the Fox, following sketchy directions from the scattered traders, settlers and Indians they met along the way. I learned that Charles Omreau, a French fur trader and black smith, settled in what is now Omro, bequeathing his name, albeit Anglicized, to the city.

Omro was founded in 1842, became a village in 1849, and finally a city in 1944. By 1853 it had a population of 600. Located on the south bank of the Fox, it had 100 dwellings, five stores, two hotels and three mills. Being on the Fox, and at the junction of two important plank roads, it was a commercial center. The village had grown to 2,000 people, adding a glass factory and several carriage factories.³ Miriam wrote of steamboats that ran through Omro, and that by 1880 there was a rail stop. The county fair was held in Omro.

In 1896, the village built a hall and firehouse with a four-story tower. Made of a pale-pink brick in the Late Victorian style, it was the village’s crown. However, the nearby city of Oshkosh, with its thriving lumber business, began to dominate commercially, and eventually the mills and factories of Omro relocated or closed.⁴ The notes in the binder said that the steamboat passenger service ended in 1902. I had read in another source that in Cady’s Bayou, between Eureka and Omro, some fifty steamboats “met a humiliating end”, being broken up for firewood.⁵

But the city began a new growth spurt in the 1970s, expanding from its static population of around 2,000 to about 3,400 residents today.⁶ The city web site said that Omro started a revitalization program in 1986, and claimed: “Through projects such as the historic walking tour, the Scott Park pavilion project, and the designation of a historic downtown district, [the city] is paying homage to its past even as it builds for the future.”⁷ So, Omro was trying to be something other than bayous I passed in the morning - a backwater. Still, it seemed the glory days were gone, leaving only ghosts - an elegant village hall, an old woman’s memories, Indian stories.

Finished with reading and musing, I returned to Fat Cats for dinner, eating my meal at a picnic table shaded by the building from the still blazing sun. As I ate, I turned my thoughts to tomorrow, the last paddle on the journey. It would be eleven miles to Oshkosh, at least five of which would be through Lake Butte des Morts, the largest and most dangerous lake of the trip.

* The name of the motel has been changed.


1. Hoocak Waaziija Haci Language Division (a division of the Ho-Chunk Nation). The Ho-Chunk Nation - A Brief History. Accessed July 9, 2011. http://www.hocak.info/mysite/HTM%20All/Ho-Chunk%20history.html.

2. Kellogg, Louise Phelps. Early narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699. C. Scribners's sons, 1917.

3. Wikipedia. Omro, Wisconsin. Revised September 29, 2011. Accessed November 3, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omro,_Wisconsin.

4. Id.

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

6. The City of Omro. A Brief History of Omro …. Accessed July 10, 2011. http://www.omro-wi.com/a-brief-history-of-omro.html.

7. Id.


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Sixteenth Installment: Meander from Berlin to Omro

I slept a sound seven hours in the motel, waking at 5:30 a.m. A continental breakfast was set out in the hotel lobby, which I ate while watching the weather, which would be hot again. Best to start early. So I retrieved the baidarka from the utility shed, repacked it, and wheeled it half a mile back to Badger Mineral. I was on the Fox by 7:11. Seven days' practice had made me efficient.

The river was now broad and sluggish. Leaving Berlin, I passed Riverside Park, peaceful and graceful, with grassy slopes and weeping willows hanging over the water. The river mirrored the trees and sky. The willows and stately cottonwoods lining the bank were reflected perfectly, their reflections spangled with thousands of cottonwood seed tufts floating on the surface. I love cottonwoods despite their blizzard of snow-like seeds. Tall, with thick straight trunks, they were intimately connected with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Ocean, supplying tree trunks that the explorers fashioned into dugout canoes.¹

Cottages now dotted the river's shore, and for the first time on the trip there were year-round homes. The homes were placed further inland than the cottages, as if owners could not quite choose between the infrastructure of roads and utilities connecting them to the workaday world, and the isolation of the banks of the Fox. The homes all had neat, mown lawns running down to the shore. Dairy farms also appeared here and there, with their red, gambrel-roofed barns and tall concrete silos.

It was day seven, with a fifteen-mile trip to Omro, Wisconsin, and I was tired. My right elbow and shoulder had mild tendonitis. This I had to grin and bear. I had been taking Ibuprofen (Vitamin I, as Paul from the climbing gym calls it), but quit after it caused acid reflux. My lower back was sore from the constant paddling and irritated from rubbing the cockpit coaming. And each day my backside cramped up from the confined position in the lightly padded seat. (Too much padding in a kayak raises the center of gravity, making the boat easier to tip. A sore behind is better than a soaking.) A saving grace was the carbon-fiber Greenland-style paddle that I was using. Manufactured by Superior Kayaks, it was a beauty to behold, fit my hands well, was efficient, and was as light as a feather.

The route was west northwest toward Omro. Near the halfway point there was a portage around the Eureka Lock and Dam. The take-out point was obvious. The put-in spot downstream was not. Improvising, I rolled the kayak past the abandoned lockkeeper’s house and down a long drive following the river. After going an eigth of a mile, I found a gravel embankment low enough that I could lower the boat into the water and reenter while using a paddle-brace against the bank. While this portage took longer than planned, being out of the boat, stretching muscles and getting the blood flowing again was a great relief.

Several miles farther downstream were the small village of Eureka and the lift bridge for County Highway K. The bridge, steel girders painted a dull gray-blue, looked as if it had been pieced together out of some giant's child’s erector set, and had an odd, art nouveau, sculptural look. The pivot point was to my right, and the girders swept up there in a great arch to encompass the enormous counter weights. I stopped just beyond the bridge on a concrete pier to eat a power bar and trail mix.

Somewhere along this stretch of the Fox once stood a great palisaded city of several thousand Mascouten Indians, the city that Nathan Strong had heard about. An Algonquin-speaking tribe, in about 1600 it had been forced west into Wisconsin by other tribes. They were a small band, and for self-protection associated with the Fox and Kickapoo tribes along the Fox River.² The city was visited by French explorers, including Allouez and Joliet.³ The intertribal peace did not last long. By 1665, the Iroquois drove the Mascoutens out of the Fox River valley. They either resettled in Illinois and Michigan, or were absorbed into other tribes.⁴ Now, along the Fox only their story remains, their city’s site gone from maps and memory.

With the stronger current and no wind, I averaged three knots even though I paddled only in spurts, interspersed with pleasant periods of drifting and enjoying the sights and sounds of the river. Much of the landscape was the familiar sandy spoil banks overgrown with silver maple, cottonwood, willow and ash. The topography along this section of the Fox was flat, and the stream meandered. Every mile or so was a bayou formed from a former bend of the river, some nearly a mile in length.

A female mallard at the entry of one slough herded twenty tiny ducklings through the water. Three drakes floated nearby, not lifting a feather to help. In contrast, I later saw a pair of Canadian geese working together to lead their brood of goslings off the river and up the bank as I approached. I also came across a red-tailed hawk on the marshy edge of an embayment, splashing in the water rather than soaring overhead or perched on a tree. An agitated merganser hen was paddling back and forth nearby. The hawk may have just pounced on one of her brood. My last bird sighting was just outside of Omro where I spotted an osprey or eagle nest atop a telephone pole. The head of a fledgling could be seen, calling with all its might for its next meal.

I entered Omro at half past noon and landed at a wooden boat ramp upstream from downtown. From there it would be a half-mile walk in the 90 degree heat through downtown Omro to the Ramble Inn Motel.


1. Lloyd, Kathy. Black Cottonwood. Montana Native Plant Society. Lewis and Clark Plant Information - Species Specific Series. Accessed November 5, 2011. http://www.mtnativeplants.org/Lewis_%26_Clark_Plant_Information.

2. Sultzman, Lee. Mascouten History. Accessed July 9, 2011. http://www.dickshovel.com/mas.html.

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

4. Sultzman, Lee. Id.


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