A brand new organization has formed to inventory and celebrate the rivers as our original trails through Michigan.  We are called the Middle Grand River Heritage Water Trail Association.  As part of this endeavor, a canoe trip is planned down the Grand River on October 22^nd.  Some of the phenomena to be seen, heard and felt follow in this article:  how to join this organization, and, better, how to come canoe our inaugural voyage with us also follow as we paddle from Centerline Bridge to Portland.

CENTERLINE - CENTERLINE BRIDGE:  The century old classic truss bridge was recently replaced by a state of the highway art “S” shaped concrete bridge.  The location is on Charlotte Highway due south of Portland.  Each township has an east-west centerline and a north-south centerline.  These begin midway between adjacent corners and invisibly cross the township, dividing it into four equal squares.  Somehow, by calculation, or much more likely by pure chance, this bridge crosses the Grand River at almost the exact spot the two centerlines intersect in Danby Township.  We set out at the canoe launch here.

            CRUISING DOWN THE RIVER.  As with all rivers, the Grand is variable as to speed and depth.  At this time of year it ranges from six inches deep to three feet deep depending on what its bottom is doing.  Rocks dot the route, some deep down, and some splashing in the water.  Many of these are from the days of yore when glaciers bulldozed around our area, scraping up rocks and gravel here, and then dumping, or dribbling, or sifting out rocks and gravel there.  Rivers and streams ran every which way washing along and sorting meticulously, cutting through glacial moraines with gay splashing abandon.  Today’s result was sort of a big plate of chopped up spaghetti.  The tremendous amounts of meltwater from the last glacier were compelled by gravity to always flow to the low ground, so the Grand coming down from the marshes northwest of Ann Arbor was constantly trying to work its way north and west because the land there was lower.  When the glacier’s ice blocked the way north, the Grand twisted west, and then tried north again.  All this time the glaciers themselves, especially the last one, were doing their own ebbing and flowing, in equestrian terms, backing and filling.

            The result left today in Danby Township is a very sinuous and highly convoluted river route.  The early pioneers marveled, and named this area “Little Egypt” because they felt that the twisting of the Grand River was similar to the twisting of the Nile River.  You’ll be canoeing in all four directions at one time or another whether you are headed downstream or upstream.

            CHIEF OKEMOS’ GRAVE.   About a mile from our launching place is the first of a dozen or so islands.  Paddling around the right side, to your right is a precipitous bank.  Way up above, just over the top, is a gravestone placed there by the Daughters of the American Revolution.  It reads:  Grave of Okemos/Noted Chippewa Chief/1858/Placed by S.T. Mason Chapter/D.A.R. 1921.  The river is deep there, the bank is very steep, to put it mildly, and the best course is to salute the old chief, and paddle on.  Go see the grave some other time.  It’s at the school bus turn around at the south end of Okemos Road.  Follow the little trail about 200 yards straight east.  Twenty yards farther you can look almost straight down at the river and the island.

            In the neighborhood, there’s some question where Okemos was really buried.  The Indians provisioned their dead in the grave with items from this life that they might need in “the happy hunting ground”.  Certain white souvenir hunters have been tempted to dig up graves in the dead of night, and rob them.  Therefore, the real gravesite was often a closely held secret.  One local farmer claims to know where Chief Okemos is actually buried, but it appears that he’s going to take his secret to his grave with him because he’s not telling anyone yet.  Maybe there will be a map with his will, but even if so, will his heirs tell a family secret?

            BUCK JUMPS UP ISLAND.  If you’ve canoed a river over and over again, special experiences in particular places that you have only once become permanently fixed in your memory.  The second island is very small, and has a luxuriant stand of grass on its upsteam tip.  On one trip what must have been an eight point (or more?) buck popped up like a jack in the box about twenty feet ahead of the canoe, took one look, and bolted away.  A few seconds later, the sound of his splashing across the river came back like a little invisible tail.

            If you canoe down the river paddling noisily, chattering and popping cans, the denizens of nature hunker down, or fade away if they’re reasonably ambulatory.  However, if you “rig for silent running”:, as the submariners say, critters have little personal or genetic experience of danger from a river, so they tend to stay put.  If you will pass the second island on the left side, its very cool and quiet.  You can get out and wade here in the clear shallows.

            WOODCOCK FIELD.  This open space is on the north bank where a power line crosses over the river now, and an early ford went under the river.  The heavens come alive here in late March and April when the woodcock, migrating to upper Michigan and Canada perform their amazing “sky dance”.  The male birds fly almost straight up a hundred feet or so, then circle, twittering wildly before the bubbling song as they drop back down to earth.  Then, they fool around for awhile, and do it all again.

            ERDMAN ROAD AND CORN ISLAND.  This is the parking area for a short walk over to Sebewa Creek.  It is also a “pull out” area for your canoe, or you can arrange to “put in” here.  A neighboring farmer forded the river here with his corn raising machinery not too many years ago.  The big island that recently was a cornfield is now going back to its climax vegetation.

            SEBEWA CREEK.  If you paddle around the fishhook shape inside the mouth of this creek, you come out in a sunny, shallow, sandy spot where great splotchy sycamores tower up, and the ancient horsetail grass (scouring rush to some) covers the northern bank.  This is another fine wading area.   All sorts of flotsam and jetsam washes down from the various junk piles and trees upstream.  This spot is also sort of a raceway for whirl-a-gig beetles and water striders.  There is a faint path all along the southerly bank of Sebewa Creek that runs upstream and upcountry for a mile or so.  It abounds with wildflowers in the spring, and in the fall, leaves of all shapes and colors sprinkle trail and trees.  At the top you can look out over a sea of leaves, and straight down at bubbling Sebewa Creek far below, perhaps one hundred feet.  This place could be termed “Lover’s Leap”, and perhaps it once was...

            Just up the creek from the river, where the first rocks are, a few ancient daffodils still blossom each spring to mark the house site of two country schoolteachers who built there.  You can still see parts of the stone walls, and parts of the fractured concrete footings and rusty twisted cable from their suspension bridge over the water.  Far out in the field to the southeast is now a swimming pool sized patch of grape hyacinths that these people first planted.  The flowers took hold, and have naturalized.  At blossom time they’re a sheen of azure, and upon closer inspection a full contingent of early bees and ephemeratta, as well as the just out from under their bark slab, wintering over tortoise shell and mourning cloak butterflies.  A thriving, seething floral memorial.

            SARAGASSO FLATS.  The Grand now circles back to the east under a high bank, passes an audible, but invisible under the greenery waterfall, and the river heads off over a long pool, then widens out to a slow stretch characterized by long sinuous yellow green swags or boas of river weed.  These streamers are a sort of freshwater kelp.  These flats are home to all sizes, shapes and colors of dragonflies above the surface, and home to legions of sucking, smutching carp below.

            CARPLESS CRICK.  Just before the next turn north, this crick runs southerly up into a cul-de-sac north of the entrance to the Portland State Game Area from Towner Road.  This is theoretically and seemingly a perfect spawning ground for Michigan’s native carp, the red horse, and for the battlewagon Asiatic carp, but so far no soap.  No carp.  Ever.  However, not all is lost, not by a long shot.  Somehow, working their way down out of the higher ground are these irregularly shaped pieces of Paleozoic pizza topped with toppings of crinoids, brachiopods, and trilobites.  Keep a keen eye out for hexagonaria which is the professors’ fancy name for a coral fossil we call Petoskey stone.  Each little “eye” in the stone has what look like the rays of the rising sun spreading out from it.  Chief Petoskey’s given name was Pet-o-sega, which means in Odawa, “the rays of the rising sun”.  So, even though the Devonian geologic layer surfaces in and near the city of Petoskey, and is nibbled apart and smoothed there by the waves of Lake Michigan, which results in many Petoskey stones, the reason for the name is not the place, but rather the way the stone looks with its suns and their rays.

            MCKEE’S FORD AND TAVERN.  This is a shallow stretch of the Grand where the great wagons, with their oxen and teamsters forded the river on the Grand River Trail.  In those days, instead of the cows going to the dairy barn, and the males going to the hamburger stand as it is now, the females went to the barns and the boys became its, and worked the same as horses.  From the east they came in on that little stub of Danby Township road, and after crossing, struggled diagonally up the steep bank to the corresponding little stub of road running northwesterly.  There are a few days each spring when you can see the snow left on the crown of the road up from the river after the snow on the southern face of the high bank has melted away.

            McKee’s tavern was one of those way stations where the teamsters unhitched and fed their oxen.  They all sat around the fire and drank whiskey and listened to stories.  Afterwards they all staggered up to the loft, and slept in their clothes until daybreak.

            OKEMOS ROAD.  This is where the river runs up against the road while the road runs right along the river.  This is the second “put-in/take-out” your canoe place.  There were Indian villages and burial grounds on both sides of the road.  A perfect double bitted tomahawk was found embedded in the crown of Okemos Road here.  A small stream flows into the river here.  It is Shimnicon Run.

            THE PIGGERY.  Just before the river swings west again, was once a vast hog farm, famous all around.  Today, that bottomland grows the sweetest soys this side of Iowa.

            THE BRIDGES.  Coming into Portland is first the new Kent Street Bridge, then Southmeadow subdivision houses and the Expressway Bridge, and then the old Kent Street Bridge, moved downstream and converted to another river crossing of the Portland Rivertrail.  You then begin to paddle over an area that once was the impoundment for a flour mill on the west bank of the river.  The remains of the dam cross the river behind the Portland District Library, and are often bespeckled with cackling Canada geese.  When the dam was in its heyday, and holding water back, a little steamer whose name is now lost to us ran across the millpond to one of the islands, perhaps Butternut Island.  One would guess that there must have been a dance pavilion there, with moonlight cruises after the dancing had ended.

            After the century old restored Bridge Street Bridge, and just after the Grand River Avenue Bridge, on the right bank the Looking Glass River either joins the Grand, or splits from the Grand, depending on your perspective.  If you’ll paddle one hundred yards up the Looking Glass under the arched rivertrail bridge, there is a crushed stone take out spot and a parking lot, or just pull out on the north bank at Portland’s 9-11 Memorial. 

            MELON TREE BROOK.  These words are printed on an old recently discovered Portland postcard.  Who knows where Melon Tree Brook is or was?  Who knew what a melon tree would be in Michigan?  Melons on Michigan trees?  That particular mystery was solved by the book, Michigan Trees, published in 1931.  A melon tree is a paw paw tree, and the melons are called papayas.  The book says they’re common along the Maple and Grand Rivers.  The book says the fruit is black when ripe, and looks like a stubby five-inch black banana.  Anybody seen one lately?

            ODDS AND ENDS.  The Grand River has many rare decorations, and some trips you see them, and some trips you don’t.   Just to sensitize the voyagers, keep an eye peeled for one or more of the following possibilities. 

Small shoals of snail shells sometimes exist by themselves, and sometimes are at the tips of bigger islands.  Somehow the river has the gift of winnowing and windrowing snail shells.  There are proper names for them out there, but blueies and pointies will do for now.  There are also assorted clams: pearlies, silver ears, and big bombers.

            Migrating bald eagles flap over twice a year, and sometimes will stop on a snag and sit a spell.

            Each year a pair of ospreys nests here.  They have raccoon mask faces, white tummys and a piercing cry.

Sometimes you hear a great splash, and though you don’t often see it, that’s a bass jumping for some fly.  Look at where the ripples are because often a fish jumps twice. 

Pick up a medium sized rock out there in the river.  Any one will do.  Scooting away in a cloud of dust, with a watery Hi Ho Silver will be a crayfish.  They hang out  under rocks facing upstream waiting for the river current to bring breakfast, lunch and dinner to them.  Big rock harbors big crayfish.  Small rock - small crayfish.  The scary news about crayfish is that they have formidable pincers.  The good news is that the power of their pinch won’t break our skin.  You can let them grab on, and appear heroic to whatever audience is out front.

            Sometimes at this time of year, a migrating salmon, for no particular discernable reason, will simply leap completely clear of the water and dive smoothly back in.  Ichthyologists and their ilk speculate on what impels a salmon to do this.  Why jump?  Some think its a little like itching, and the fish can shake some annoying parasites.  Others think that the fish is practicing for the rapids (now fishladders) ahead.  A few feel that salmon leap for pure joy.  Out of exuberance.  They’re heading home.

            Dusty books about the history of the Grand River refer to places where the Indians went to find an orange pigment to paint their bodies with.  This liquid oozed out of the layers of the earth in seeps, and stained the riverbank.  It was iron oxide, iron dissolved in water, and now running free.  It’s what stains your bathtub that rust color.  It comes in shades of red, orange, yellow and brown.  Look for it.  Warpaint in the raw.  Try some?

            Each canoe trip on the river is different.  You see, hear and feel some of the old events.  You always see, hear and feel lots of new events.  As an old classic Dixieland song puts it, “Something’s always happening on the river!”  Join us.

            Canoe Rental Technical Details:  Call Dan or Deb Smith at 517/ 647-7402 or 517/ 242-0132.  Make all arrangements with them as to departure times, put in places, and take out places.  They will pick you up, and return you to your car even if you bring your own canoe or kayak.  If you’ll bring your cell phone you can make plans with them while you’re on the river.  The cost will be a special price to us, $15 a canoe, and you get a free tee shirt.  Canoes will be available on October 22^nd, and on the rain dates of October 23, 29 and 30.  They have paddles and floatation gear.  Detailed maps will be included too.  We figure the canoe time on the river will be 2 hours from Centerline to Erdman, 2 hours Erdman to Okemos and 2 hours Okemos to Looking Glass.  Call Smiths for other questions.

Tips:   Wear “river shoes” (old tennis shoes?) so you can disembark and not worry about getting wet, or, stepping on sharp stones.  When in doubt as to where to paddle, pick a river edge near the bank as the water tends to be deeper there, and there’s more to see.  When you thunk or scrape a rock, lean forward and down to keep center of gravity low; don’t grab branches, they act as levers.  Bring your own kayak or canoe if you choose.  Complete detailed map available.

            Supplies:  Bring food and drink - picnics are fun.  Sweatshirt in a plastic bag?

Celebration and tale telling party on the Point at Duke’s after the trip.