High water

I returned to a favorite stretch of the upper St. Croix last Sunday for a short paddle with our friends Kristin and Andy and their Boston Terrier, Bender. The trip was their idea, as they’re planning to take Bender to the Boundary Waters in a couple weeks and wanted to see how he would do in a canoe. He did fine. He and Lola played hard at the first island we stopped at, and then they both struggled to stay awake for the rest of the float.

The river was still up very high. Really weird for the first day of August. The water was much clearer than when Wade and I paddled near Wild River State Park on July 18, but just as high. It makes for challenging fishing, and it also hides most beaches and other good landing spots. But, we were paddling a stretch where I remember walking the canoes a few times on our last trip, this time we floated right over the riffles.

We got on the water about 10 a.m. Radar had shown a line of storms heading almost right for us, but I theorized that as the morning warmed, they would come to nothing. It sounded logical enough to get us on the water, anyway. That and we’d already driven an hour to be there.

The storms never did materialize. But the skies stayed moody and every mile or so as we proceeded downriver, we’d get hit with a few raindrops.

I fell in love with the river all over again as we drifted down it. I guess I do every time I visit. It was humid, buggy weather and there must have been some sort of bug hatching because we were frequently accompanied by swallows maneuvering the skies 20 feet above our heads, furiously gobbling up whatever was being served for breakfast. There were many islands to navigate amongst, but they were generally smaller than the long, skinny ones downstream and the water in all the channels moved rapidly past the banks.

There was not another person on the river. And we didn’t see a single structure until about a mile before the take-out. Then we passed what looked like a very old cabin on the Wisconsin bank. It looked old, but kept-up. It had green wood siding and seemed as much a part of the lush shoreline as the basswood trees and the white pines. I wish I would have taken some photos.

A short way downstream, we spotted a campsite and decided to have lunch. Strangely, we noticed a van driving up along the top of the bank. As we got ready to eat, he came back by and stopped for a moment to tell us the last people to visit the site had left garbage everywhere and he had spent 20 minutes cleaning it up. Fish guts and food scraps in the weeds right by the picnic table. We found a plastic shopping bag of garbage down by the water. He also told us that the cabin was his, that it had been his grandfather’s. He looked about 60 himself, and mighty proud of that place.