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.