Park-to-Park portage just a bump in the trail

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

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A helping attitude and a small strip of carpeting made all the difference.

July 4th weekend — two weeks before the Park-to-Park Paddle, the state’s largest day paddle event that has drawn as many as 350 kayaks and canoes — we read that a gate on the Menasha Lock was broken, then fixed, then broken again.

The Park-to-Park takes those hundreds of paddlers through the Menasha Lock. In fact, the iconic image of the P2P is hundreds of colorful boats packed into the lock.

Do we shift the launch to below the lock, or do we portage around the lock? As one of the organizers of the event, I initially favored sacrificing the length of the paddle to avoid what I expected to be the pandemonium of 200-plus paddlers trying to scale the rocky shores on the Menasha Lock basin.

But a few factors changed my mind.

History revealed in what the saw sees

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com


The great thing about history is it doesn't just live in books. Sometimes, history is just hanging there on the wall.

Setting out from Newport Park.
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In the best of the essays in his must-have classic work "A Sand County Almanac," pioneer environmentalist Aldo Leopold tells the story of he and wife Estella sawing through a large, old oak tree. He uses that event to frame the natural history that was happening as the tree was putting on the growth rings they are transecting with the two-man crosscut saw.

As we paddled down the Wisconsin River on June 21 as part of the Fox-Wisconsin Heritage Paddle series, I was describing the essay to fellow paddler Daren Barrett in more detail than you would expect to be tolerated by someone who easily could accelerate away from me. Barrett was unfamiliar with Leopold and how his environmental legacy was tied so closely to Wisconsin history, but was genuinely inquisitive about it.