adventures of a canoelover

From my Sunday column to my customers.

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation.

He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be.

But he would not be in it.
He would never be in it.

-Wendell Berry, The Vacation

The cliché picture for all canoeists is this POV shot of the bow of a canoe. There’s a reason; it puts you in the moment for people who view it. A pretty sunset doesn’t hurt.  At least it’s supposed to put you in the moment.

There’s a million similar shots on the internet. Try a Google search. There’s a Facebook group called view FROM my canoe. There are even stock photos of POV bow shots from Shutterstock and Adobe. 

I like taking photographs. I still have film cameras, including Mamiya C330pro TLR, which I abbreviate as the Brick. It’s about as heavy as a small brick and about the same shape, but it’s fun to shoot if you’re willing to set up a tripod and compose a photograph, being willing to take it all down if the light is bad or it’s not quite right.

Sometimes when you’re focused on getting the shot, you run the risk of not seeing the place in real time. The availability of digital cameras, let alone phones, means it’s easy to lose focus and record your moment instead of being in it, moving swiftly toward the end of [your] vacation. 

Going back and looking these pictures, there are a few that bring me back to the place where I captured the image, but there are hundreds where I look at them and there’s no emotion; no sentiment. I’m not sure I was really even there. But I got a picture of it. Great. What a waste of pixels.

This weekend Stephanie and I are in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a long weekend (more on that to come). Mostly I’m trying hard to take fewer pictures and look at things more, to try to be here. 

I wish you a day of being present. It’s a practice, and I’m still working on it, and most likely, always will be.

Happy Sunday,

Darren

Written for The Isthmus, December 2024

It’s December, and a canoe sits on the front lawn. Around it are duffels and packs, a few paddles, and two Rubbermaid containers. One contains small chunks of hardwood, fuel for what’s in the other container: a small, titanium wood stove. In one of the duffels is a 10×10-foot canvas tent. Floorless canvas tents and small stoves are not common, but they should be. 

The canoe I’m taking is the perfect boat for a trip such as this: it’s a small, stable tandem canoe that I rigged up as a solo for me and my 100-pound pup. This time, no pup, who tends to exit the canoe with little warning upon the sight of a single goose. 

I adhere to the self-evident maxim If you want solitude, go where people aren’t. The submaxim, if that’s a thing, is that people avoid inhospitable places. Or places people think aren’t hospitable. It could be a difficult hiking trail with many rocks and roots, or a river with long distances between landings. Thing is, there are no bad conditions, just the wrong attitude. You can do this. You can camp in the winter out of a canoe. Two weeks before winter solstice. Temps below freezing combined with water and ice are the inhospitable part of the quest. 

The Arena landing on the lower Wisconsin River seemed like a good bet. There are sandbars aplenty for camping, and the river flow is low right now, and I can easily paddle against the scant current. This meant I didn’t need anyone to shuttle my truck downstream, adding a lot of inconvenient logistics. I could just go, so I just went.

I drag my loaded canoe across a large sandbar at the landing to get to the water. A small shelf of ice has formed along the edge of the sand, which makes it easy to climb into the canoe and slide down into the water, like a fat, lazy seal oozing off an ice floe. I’m drifting downstream, but with a few strokes I’m making way against the lazy current. I am dressed for inhospitable conditions, but I have no plans of testing them. I know where I’m going. It’s not even a mile upstream.

The tent goes up first. Years ago I made sand stakes out of aluminum T-bar, which vary in length from 12 to 18 inches. The 12s are good for staking the bottom of the tent to the sand, the 18s I use for guylines. With a dozen stakes, holding down my hospitable place, it won’t be moving. 

I set up the stove. Titanium is a lightweight metal with a melting point of over 3,000 degrees. The stovepipe sections nest inside themselves and fit inside the stove along with the legs. The wood I’m carrying weighs as much as my shelter. I could leave the wood and gather along the river, but 1) I don’t want to and 2) I don’t have to.

The stovepipe feeds through a stove jack, a hole in the canvas surrounded by a fireproof material that won’t let the pipe touch the canvas. With everything set up, I throw in some kindling and a few pieces of scrap 1x1s from the shop. Moments later, I have a baby fire. I stoke it up with a few chunks of oak.

The stove adheres to a maxim too: little and often. If you load it up with fuel and shut the damper down, it won’t matter; you’ll still roast for a few hours and then wake up cold. The proper method is a chunk or two, just once in a while. You wake up, you throw a chunk in, and you go back to sleep. 

It’s amazing how dark it is this close to the solstice. It’s only 4:30 p.m., hours before bedtime. I throw a few chunks of wood into the stove and go for a walk. It’s a short walk as I am on a small sandbar attached to a small island, but it’s wonderful to see how long you can make a short walk last. The river flows by, dark like molasses, and ice covers the vegetation along the shore. There are bird tracks, but precious few, and none appear to be very new.

Back inside the tent it’s already too warm. I overloaded the stove and didn’t close the damper enough, and now I have to unzip the door and open the small vents at the ridgeline. It cools off, but I’m going to have to pay more attention to little and often. 

My cot is set up to keep me above the cold air settling close to the sand. Canvas tents are floorless, which makes a lot more sense in the winter, so you can scootch the legs of the stove down into the sand a little.. The propane lantern is lit, so the headlamp goes back into the pack, and the cot gives me a place to unload gear until I get my folding table set up. 

Cooking on the stove is almost cheating, and I’m all for it. I try to avoid smelly foods in the wild places (because bears), but a pork chop goes well with my kale salad, which doesn’t get soggy in its Nalgene bottle. Glass bottles aren’t allowed on the river, so my beverage is canned. Keep your Michelin star; I’m content.

I spend a lovely night in silence and darkness, rousing periodically to stoke the stove. It pings as it warms and cools, which I find comforting. As the temperature drops, I don’t even know it. My thermometer reads 80 degrees at the ridgeline.

The current keeps the river from freezing, which would strand me on a sandbar for a while. As much as I like that idea, there are miles to go before I sleep. For now, I’m sure that I’m the only person sleeping on a sandbar on the 90 or so miles of the lower Wisconsin River. Solitude achieved. 

Wrote this for the Isthmus, June 2023 issue.

Wisconsin’s natural diversity was not lost on many of the early conservationists, such as Aldo Leopold, John Curtis, Albert Fuller and Norman Fassett, a UW-Madison professor of botany and taxonomy. They all were involved in the creation of the Wisconsin State Natural Areas Program, part of the Department of Natural Resources, but Fassett was the kingpin. It was his work that designated Parfrey’s Glen as State Natural Area Number One. It cemented in place the system that would create 687 State Natural Areas over the following six decades. 

These run from less than an acre to more than 7,500 acres, but size, in this case, doesn’t matter. It’s about the uniqueness of the flora, fauna, geology, and historical nature of the area. There used to be a sign giving credit to Dr. Fassett, but it’s gone, replaced with a bronze plaque fastened to a boulder. No mention of Norm. 

So let’s talk about Number One.

Parfrey’s Gorge, or glen, is one of the prettiest bits of scenery in the Baraboo Valley — a tiny gem. Imagine two green and brown curtains 100 feet high, parting the sandstone and higher formations of this section of the Baraboo Bluffs, swinging open the doors about 75 feet, and revealing a vista of a third of a mile into a valley of the highlands, through which comes leaping down a foaming stream, lively, beautiful — and powerful for turning the wheels of industry in pioneer times. 

-A Standard History of Sauk County, Wisconsin by Harry Ellsworth Cole, 1918

Over a century later, Cole’s observations are still accurate. The stone walls are covered with ferns and other moisture-loving plants, including some threatened and endangered species. There are rare species besides plants: the stream has an endangered diving beetle and caddisfly, all in this short stretch. The strata in the lower walls are complex and varied, laid down over 10 million years, at the rate of a meter every million years; incomprehensibly slow, a millimeter every 10,000 years. Most interesting to me are the conglomerates contained in some of the Cambrian strata, with embedded pebbles from as small as a lentil to as big as a bowling ball. 

I knew Parfrey’s Glen’s beauty from my many visits there, but I didn’t know how unique it was. Digging into some geology websites, I learned that half a billion years ago, Parfrey’s Glen was under water. No big surprise: The entire Midwest was under a shallow, warm sea, full of invertebrates, such as our state fossil, the trilobite. The deposits gradually compressed into sandstone with a matrix of conglomerate stones. Glaciers didn’t have as much of an impact due to the hard quartzite cap, and the glen was formed by water, not ice. Still, it took awhile.

I went up to the glen in late May, just to see some ferns, moss and lichens, to inhale the ineffable fragrance that emanates when plants grow on sandstone walls. Seepage from springs keep the walls damp and cool, and even in warmer temperatures, we usually pack a light fleece sweater as the temp dropped 10 degrees once we entered the glen. All that rock makes for an enormous heat sink, and the moisture makes the entire glen an evaporative cooler. Remember that in August.

Until a decade ago, there was a boardwalk built by the DNR to make access easier. Flash floods have roared through the gulch numerous times in modern history, the last one ripping out the entire boardwalk; quite a feat, given how sturdy it was. Now visitors are required to ford the creek bed, taking slippery side trails up to the waterfall that indicates the end of the trail. It may keep some folks from walking past the sign indicating the end of a maintained trail. I’m okay with that. I like walking in the cool water, even if my toes go numb.

Although access has been made more difficult by the lack of a boardwalk, there were still signs of prohibited activities. No pets, food or drink are allowed in the SNA, but I picked up granola bar wrappers, and ran into two well-behaved but still forbidden dogs. Some visitors had scratched their names into the soft sandstone. I found evidence that A. loves G. But A. doesn’t understand the N in SNA.

I tiptoed through the stream, trying my best to step on flat stones where I wouldn’t stir up any sediment. I was rewarded with a glimpse of a beautiful brook trout about five inches long, stationary in an eddy behind a rock, just downstream from a mini cascade that aerated the water with a music I haven’t heard since freeze-up last winter. My wife commented that I had been humming a lot. She said I do that when I’m happy. 

Even more important than recreational uses, the true value of a State Natural Area is its ecological value. Just a few miles south of Madison is the Badfish Creek Wet Prairie and Spring Seeps, State Natural Area 681, designated in 2016. I had never heard of a wet prairie, but since my favorite launching site for paddling the Badfish Creek is just a few hundred yards away, I investigated. Wet prairies have an extraordinarily high water table, just a foot or less below the surface. They are extremely rare, as many were drained and plowed, and there are fewer than a thousand acres remaining statewide. The Badfish Creek SNA contains 10% of our state’s total and is considered one of the top examples.

State Natural Areas can also surprise you. In 2021, Department of Natural Resources scientist Ryan O’Connor was surveying a small SNA in north central Wisconsin, and found an endangered species: a green violet. That was something in and of itself, but then he spotted a patch of them. Last seen in Grant County in 1958, this beautiful plant with subtle green flowers was presumed extinct in Wisconsin. O’Connor ran across this patch during one of his many surveys of SNAs, and it was, in his words, “a holy grail-type find.”

Hybanthus concolor is the only species in its genus of the violet family (Violaceae), and it bears little resemblance to the squat and colorful little wood violets you see all over the place. It can grow up to three feet tall, and the flowers sit close to the stem, similar to lilies of the valley, hanging like a small green bell. Once pollinated, the petals fall off, the ovary swells and opens up, exposing seeds covered with a fat and protein-rich coating called elaiosome. Irresistible to ants, they harvest the seeds, take them back to their colonies, eat the elaiosome and leave the seeds to germinate. 

The location of these rare violets is a well-kept secret. I got a hold of O’Connell, and while he couldn’t have been more kind, he was unable to disclose the SNA where he found them. The DNR doesn’t want it known to the general public, for obvious reasons. Well-meaning visitors might love the violets to death, and a bad player may poach plants for their garden.

There are almost 700 SNAs in Wisconsin, and most of them have some sort of rare, threatened flora or fauna, like the Karner blue butterfly, a species of concern, or even threatened snails, like the whimsically-named cherrystone drop or wing snaggletooth. There are 24 pages of extinct, endangered, threatened or of concern species in Wisconsin. State Natural Areas are part of what keeps hope alive. 

I wrote this for the Isthmus for the April 2022 issue.

Measuring from the Sauk City Dam, the Lower Wisconsin River flows almost 90 miles to its confluence with the Mississippi. I’ve paddled as far as 40 miles in a day in fast water in April, but that’s only because I woke up at 4:30 a.m. shivering due to an unexpected freeze the night before. Lone Rock is famous for its bone-chilling cold.

Paddling 40 miles in a day at full speed isn’t normal for me. Now I follow my own advice that the last one off the water wins. Last one off the water means go slower, not faster. I take backroads, not Interstates, on land, and my riparian travel habits are identical. I often stop to poke around a sandbar, looking at animal tracks and fragments of shells from newly hatched turtles. Sometimes I stop for no reason at all. It’s the opposite of my old childhood whining are we there yet? Nope. Not there yet.

Of course, stopping for no reason is a reason. It’s to slow everything down. To savor it. I admit I have a habit of unbridled rapidity in too many areas of my life, and this stopping thing: it’s good for me.

The longer I stay, the more I see. Not just the heron tracks the size of my palm, but the sandpiper tracks that look like engravings in the wet sand. Unlike the gouges left by the heron’s claws, the sandpiper’s are too light to displace much sand, but their delicacy is enhanced by their ephemeral nature.

If the otters have been busy, sometimes you find the discarded shell of a river mussel. Wisconsin has dozens of species, all with a luscious nacre comparable to any oyster. The people who named the mussels were surely enjoying themselves. Some, like the Elktoe, Monkeyface and Slippershell, are thriving. Others, such as the Purple Wartyback, Sheepnose and Spectacle Case, are endangered. The otters don’t differentiate.

There are other ways to slow down too. Sandbars are a favorite, but so are cemeteries.

Right around mile 65, as Marietta township ends and Wauzeka township begins, you’ll find the unincorporated community of Boydtown, so named by Robert Boyd, who laid out his plat in 1844, anticipating the railroad. Sadly for Mr. Boyd, the railroad chose the southern bank through Boscobel and Muscoda. Boydtown is located at the mouth of Boydtown Hollow, along which runs Boydtown Hollow Road. He didn’t get his railroad, but at least he made his mark.

On a hillock overlooking the river is the Boydtown Cemetery, as pleasant a place one could ever desire for their last permanent real estate. There are approximately 160 graves, and about half as many headstones, dating from 1853 to 1979. One might imagine a gravedigger in 1900 pausing to cool off in the breeze, admiring the view upstream.

I have counted over a dozen small cemeteries along the river. Walking among the headstones and remnants of headstones is one of my favorite pastimes, teasing as much history as I can from the names and dates. Numerous dates correspond to the influenza epidemic that swept through southwest Wisconsin in 1918. George Wayne, died 1852, the first child born in Boydtown. There’s Inez Davis, died 1906, aged 25 years, 7 months and 7 days. Buried with her is “infant,” died 1906, age one day. The heartbreak of a mother dying in childbirth along with her baby is intensified by the absence of Mr. Davis. I can imagine him wanting to get as far away as he could from Boydtown.

I came across a cluster of Bush names that were unexpected in this place. Normally Wisconsin cemeteries are full of Norwegian and German surnames, but even in the English/Welsh southwest, it’s startling to see your own name splashed across a century-old piece of granite. My ancestors came from England and Wales about the same time these Bushes were settling in Boydtown, and they are, as far as I can tell, no direct relation, but it does make me wonder if we’re somehow cousins. I patted the warm stone and pulled a few weeds from around the Bush stones just in case.

Wonderful names grace these monuments, anachronisms today, but still poetic and lovely to the ear. Althea Ioline Titus Ward. Ebenezer L. Keilley. Gilbert G. Buckmaster, and my favorite, Chester Zephaniah Faust. Every name belongs to a person, and on a contemplative summer afternoon, one begins to think about their lives. A skilled genealogist might find when they were born, christened, went to school, married, worked, bought a piece of land or two, and died, but other than that, it’s pretty slim pickings. It’s frustrating: There are stories in every structure, even stories in places where a grave marker belongs and is conspicuous in its absence. You get the feeling that personal histories lie just under the surface of every tree, building and rock. You might find a diary or short history at the state Historical Society, but the majority of the history of many of these people is lost forever.

Today, Boydtown is not so much a community as a group of houses, the older ones vine-covered and abandoned to the elements. One wonders about the fickle comings and goings of cities and towns, why their residents built there and then a few decades later pulled up stakes and moved on. I’m sure the railroad had an impact.

It makes me want to write down my history, so that my great-grandchildren will know their great-grampa, a normal sort of non-famous person, and how he spent his time. Will my progenitors, a hundred years from now, have any idea about my history? That’s pretty much up to me, I suppose. They might find some of my writing here and there on whatever the internet looks like in a century.

It gives a guy something to think about while he’s paddling a stretch of my river, downstream of Boydtown. 

Insane.

I open my blog and some French bookkeepers who run numbers on all sorts of sports put over 7,000 posts on this blog, ostensively to increase links back to their sites for SEO benefits to them and massive inconvenience to me. I had to buy a plug-in to delete them 500 at a time.

So if it looks like I put up 60 posts today, that’s going back aways.

More to come soon. I am writing more.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Brent, Wenonah Argosy

I really need this.

Three people said this to me when I asked if they wanted to go for a quick overnighter. I didn’t have to tell them that I needed it too.

I used to do a big trip in the fall with 10 to 14 paddlers, all in solo canoes.  It was quite the logistical feat; especially since half the paddlers usually needed a boat. To this day I am gobsmacked that I mostly was able to provide boats for all of them out of my own fleet.  I’ve even more gobsmacked that I was able to enjoy it after all the planning.

A few years ago my son moved away to school in Idaho and since we started the trip when he was about five years old, I just wasn’t feeling it, to do the whole big complex trip. There were other reasons too, but I took a few years off and waited for things to happen organically.

I really need this.

No one had to ask why we all needed this. That’s the best part about the medicine that comes from time on the river. It’s like an old patent medicine that claimed to cure all ills. Except this does. Cures all ills, including but not limited to fretting about things you can’t control, worrying about the future, ruminating on the past, and mentally rehashing supposed errors in judgement and downright stupidity.  It’s a panacea; it really is.

I’m off to the Outdoor Industry Association Rendezvous, an annual meeting of the hoi polloi of the outdoor industry, plus me. You can’t swing a wildcat by the tail without knocking over at least one CEO of one huge outdoor company.  I also have a board meeting with many of the same group, except more high-powered than the attendees. I probably own the smallest business of anyone at this event.

To top it all off, I’m an introvert.

I can speak to 500 people without a hitch. I can hang out with a half a dozen friends. But put me in a room of 50 people I don’t know and command me to mingle, I would just as well crawl under the couch and look for loose change until everyone leaves.  We’re Quiet. We don’t like mingling, but I force myself to meet 5 new people then I leave.

From the book, Quiet…

“If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens. We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types–even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate.”

I know a lot of people who talk a lot.  So did Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice.

Gratiano:  …silence is only commendable in a neat’s tongue and a maid not vendible.

Bassanio: Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing.

I’m with Bassanio.

More from Quiet:

“We also see talkers as leaders. The more a person talks, the more other group members direct their attention to him, which means that he becomes increasingly powerful as a meeting goes on. It also helps to speak fast; we rate quick talkers as more capable and appealing than slow talkers.”

No wonder we don’t stand a chance.

The hardest part is when we do speak up and louder, more persistent voices drown out the quiet dissent. What happens then are more snap decisions with limited information. Then we bomb a country half a world away because the loud voices say there are weapons there. Quiet voices most assuredly said there was no evidence, but our society rewards decisive, bold action. Even when it’s stupid.

“Study to be quiet, and do your own business,” said Paul to the Thessalonian busy-bodies. Too much noise is confusing and

This week I will:

1. Listen more
2. Talk less
3. But speak loudly when warranted.

A few times a year I attempt to take a short solo canoe trips, usually no more than two or three days.  The duration of the trip is influenced by a myriad of externalities; family and work responsibilities, water levels, and how much I feel like working at playing.

Solo tripping is awesome, but it is work.  You’re responsible for everything; loading, paddling, unloading, cooking, cleaning, unpacking, setting up, tearing down, packing, loading, paddling, unloading.  Like the shampoo bottle says: lather, rinse, repeat.  It’s a chiastic process repeated daily.

Something goes haywire?  You’re on your own.  Fishhook in the thumb?  Deal with it.  Forget matches?  I hope you like eating canned chili cold, which is very much like eating dog food, only I hear dog food is better.

The upside?  Absolute solitude.  No timeline but your own.  If you want to eat last night’s leftovers for breakfast, you do it.  If you want to stop and take a nap for an hour or two, no problem.  Get up when you want to.  Paddle when you want to.  Sleep when you want to.  You are as free as a bird.

Besides, the worst thing that can happen would happen anyway.

I’m writing a column about camp stove selection, which required some photos and examples. I dragged the Rubbermaid bin with the laminated tag that says STOVES. In it I found seven or eight stoves.  Two of which I forgot that I had.

There is nothing I love so much as teaching solo canoeing.