John speaks loudly with few words

By David Horst   sandhill7@gmail.com

How do I describe my friend John?

He is unlike anyone else I know — a mountain man born to the wrong time and place, but comfortable at any time and in any place.

John Behnke is, above all, nonjudgmental. That’s a quality I value in a friend.

We met through a mutual friend and a mutual interest in kayaking. We’ve done more than a dozen multi-day trips together, including at least 10 wilderness paddle-camping trips to the Apostle Islands. If you can come through that kind of potential for getting on each other’s nerves, you’ve got yourself a friend.

Navarino offers big trees for a pair of sawbucks

By David Horst sandhill7@gmail.com

NAVARINO -- For us, getting a Christmas tree is always an adventure.

Our tree is live. It’s cut by us. It is large.

We've had big fat trees, tall conical trees and bigger, fatter trees.

We’ll travel 20 miles for a tree. We have hiked every inch of an 80-acre tree farm and then walked away empty-handed when none of the trees met our -- well, really her -- standards.This year we went to the wild side. Unshorn trees in a former tree farm in the Navarino Wildlife Area were going for $20. Any size. Any species. Sales benefit the Navarino Nature Center.

Smaller turnout in the locks was OK

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

This was a far cry from 150 boats.

That's how many kayaks, canoes and stand-up boards we expected to show up at Lutz Park for the Appleton Locks Paddle.

That was before the one-week delay, due to hazardously high water flow on the Fox River, and the forecast for rain all day on our substitute date, Oct. 1.

The 38 boats that showed up didn't pack the locks full, as photos of past years' trips testify. No clanking of gunwales. No pushing of boats into the path of the lock gates.

Ellen's 'Migration'

By David Horst
sandhill7@gmail.com

The love of my life and I visited the Green Bay Botanical Garden this summer. As we always do, we went to the domed Stumpf Belevedere gazebo to read the line of Ellen Kort's poetry inscribed there.

Ellen Kort

It was the first time we had been there since Ellen's passing more than a year ago. There was such a powerful feeling of loss that we had to leave the shelter.