Wild inspiration found on canoe trip

Kevin McNulty paddles his canoe down the Pine River in the Huron-Manistee National Forest in Michigan. Photo provided

Last May, three fellow teachers and I took a field trip, without students. We ventured up U.S. 131 past Kalamazoo, through Grand Rapids and on to the great woods of Huron-Manistee National Forest.

Just south of where Michigan 55 intersects Michigan 37, runs the Pine River, and we planned to canoe it from the Dobson Bridge to the Low Bridge -- a stretch snaking through a magnificent national forest.

Of our foursome, I was one of two who had canoed the Pine before, the last time ending up face down with much of my stuff floating down river ahead of me.

Twelve summers ago, I swamped our canoe in the chilly water that runs under the knuckles of cedar trees and along the shady riverbanks. If we were to take a dip this time with an air temperature just barely in the 50s, hypothermia would become an imminent threat.

We spent a rainy night in warm cabins, and when the sun returned, we ambled down to Schmidt's fly shop where with a computer we got the latest river and weather conditions online. By our own research, we already knew that the river's temperature had been averaging 48 degrees Fahrenheit and a pace of 540 cubic feet per second (CFS), double its normal 233 CFS. It would be a fast trip down a river that in places is no wider than the high school hallways the four of us walk each day.

After settling up, we drove east as the sun cooked the moisture on the road and made steamy apparitions dance before us. Dripping pines and dewy grass gave the morning a sense of rebirth and vitality. We all sensed that this setting would provide the perfect escape from the stress of our end-of-the-year classrooms.

After a warm meal at a restaurant that once catered to loggers, we moved down to the river where we were outfitted with canoes, life-jackets, paddles and a ride to the drop-off point. It wasn't long before we were on the river.

The first moments in the canoes were the best. As the water quietly slapped the sides, and the morning sun peeked through forest gaps, we steered down river. The woods teemed with noise and movement.

Pine martins and red-winged blackbirds provided the most common company, but we scanned the forest for other wildlife the area promises, such as black bear, bobcat, otter and bald eagles. Cedars, pines and birches lined our leafy corridor, and like characters out of stories through which rivers run, we became part of the scenery.

This day's jaunt was supposed to last five hours, but we knew that the hasty current would shorten that time. Even though the current was quick, we found our surroundings a nice reprieve from lifestyles whose pace seemed to move at many more cubic feet per second. Though we were moving rapidly by river standards, those first moments seemed gradual, almost sluggish.

We bobbed and angled our canoes around the hips of the river. We peered into the shady groves of cedar trees where it still looked like night. We said nothing to each other though our mouths stood agape. But as the river's course is challenging, the silence soon gave way to vital communication.

Though wide in some places, the Pine River mostly carves out a narrow gorge in the clay of its often steep banks. Some banks are 100 feet high, and you can see the work of 16,000 years of erosion. Originally called the South Branch of the Manistee, the Pine River was formed by waters that resulted from the advance and retreat of glaciers. Before us, it was traveled by early Native American inhabitants such as the Huron, Ottawa and Chippewa tribes of the Algonquin Nation, the French in the 1600s, and then the English paddled it in the 1700s.

Again and again we found ourselves gazing at the beauty of the river and its environs. Preserved wetlands and lowland forests keep this river in its pristine state, and though we could not see them through the "chocolaty" water on the day we traveled, the Pine's chilly waters are home to self-sustaining populations of brook trout, brown trout and even rainbow.

Our day did not end as nicely as it began. Another storm moved in, and it rained hard for the last hour and a half of our trip. Though it was cold and wet, this development did little to diminish our enthusiasm. We managed to navigate the white water, the hairpin turns, the clay shoals and the ripping current without so much as a single plunk of a foot hitting the water.

That is not to say that we did not come close a couple of times, but four hours after the current first took hold of us, we released our cramping fingers from the grips of the paddles and dragged ourselves from the mighty Pine, our thirst for adventure fully slaked.

And thus it ended. We returned to Indiana with a renewed sense of vigor -- borrowed, no doubt, from the river -- and we finished the school year with gusto. I even went so far as to plan a second trip just before the start of this school year. In August, I returned to the potent Pine River with my wife, Joanna, and I drank once again from the font of strength and inspiration.

Kevin McNulty of South Bend is an English teacher at Penn High School. He and his wife, Joanna, are the parents of three children.