Canoeing With Your Family

My father was a family man, who loved finding great adventures for his 5 children and wife to participate in on weekends and vacations. When I was 7 years old, he brought home his first of the many canoes that he would collect over the ensuing years. He created a love that would last for decades.

We lived in Iowa, as he still does to this day, when he embarked on canoeing. We began our canoeing careers on lazy rivers across Iowa, flowing through fields and meandering past pastures. Some of the rivers had proud and noble Indian names, such as the Maqouketa and the Wapsipinicon, while others were less noble sounding, like the Yellow, Skunk and Turkey rivers. Our favorite river had a clever and catching name, the Upper Iowa River.

Regardless of the rivers we found in Iowa to canoe, suffice it to say that we were the earliest of canoers on these rivers. Years later, landings on the rivers would be cleared, and small areas would be set up for parking your vehicles near the river, but at the time we began our great adventure, we had no ramps and no place to park, other than the edge of a cornfield or pasture, through which we then had to carry the canoes and our paraphernalia. Poison ivy was common. So were curious cows and dragon flies, and rattlesnakes.

My parents, and my 4 siblings and I, loved canoeing on the weekends. We canoed in all weather, April though late October, rain or shine. It often rained. Actually, it often stormed. One storm, in particular, that I remember vividly now 35 years later, occurred on the Maquoketa River, which flows through eastern Iowa. During the early afternoon, the storm clouds gathered until, at last, still hours away from our take out point on the river, the storm began in earnest. It rained torrentially, and hailed. Dusk was upon us by the time we reached the area on the river where my father thought that we had left our extra vehicle. The river was rising quickly in the heavy rain, and entire banks were being washed away. Several times we pulled the 3 canoes up alongside steep muddy banks, and my father would climb out of his canoe, into the deep mud, and up the muddy bank, looking for the location of our takeout.

After several such attempts to find our takeout point, my father at last located the spot where we were to pull the canoes out and load them on the parked vehicle nearby. The bank of the river had long since been washed away, to be replaced with a steep muddy ledge, up and over which we would have to pull ourselves and our canoes. He was in mud up to his knees. We labored for over an hour to extract ourselves out of the river.

Through the years, my father grew restless with lazy rivers, and he longer for whitewater. In pursuit of faster rivers, he purchased several books which whitewater canoeing, including books which showed you step by step how to paddle in various situations in order to turn or move the canoe swiftly, thereby preventing you and your canoe from being smacked up against some boulder or other large immobile object. I was required to study these books, as were my older bother and sister, and we were tested on the paddle strokes on tame rivers until he was certain we had memorized what we were to do.

We began to search out the faster moving rivers. My father extended our canoe trips into longer adventures on the rivers of Northern Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, where the glaciers had left huge boulders behind as they receded back across the land. The rivers were exciting, requiring us all to utilize our book learned skills. I learned to read the descriptions of each of the sections of the river that we were to canoe, in books my father purchased prior to our trips.

In all of our years of canoeing on these faster flowing rivers, we made but one mistake. In planning for one particular canoe trip, we failed to notice the marking for a dam. The dam was a somewhat broken down stone dam from the early 1900s, but it was a dam nonetheless. Imagine our surprise when we came upon the fast moving water over and through the dam, and struggled to keep the canoes upright. The canoe containing my older brother and sister became pinned against the bridge abutment downstream from the dam. It looked as though they would be capsized and in a precarious position for rescue, so my mother and I, with my toddler siblings in the center of the canoe, struggled over to help them stabilize and move past the abutment and boulders. What could have been a serious accident that day on the river was averted, perhaps due to my father's years of insistence that we pay attention to our paddling and steering techniques.

After years of adventures on the Mid-Western rivers, my father yearned for a new adventure. We headed out to Moab, Utah, where we had often hiked and camped in prior years. We planned to canoe the Colorado River north of Moab. What adventures we had in those steep canyons, and what awesome beauty we beheld. Many times we canoed the section of the Colorado River, from Dewey Bridge or Hittle Bottom and down to Moab. We had great fun running the Cloudburst rapids, which were newly created back in 1976 by a flash flood during a thunderstorm when my family, incidentally, had been camped on the river upstream. White's Rapids always provided us with the greatest adventure of the trip, and we have never tired of trying new routes through the rocks and whirlpool of White's Rapids, in all seasons, and over many years.

My father gave all of his children a special lifelong gift when he introduced his children to canoeing at a very early age, with my younger siblings starting when they were less than a year old. They continue canoeing today with each other and with their own families, 35 years later. He created a legacy for his family, and for that we are forever grateful for.