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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