Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The Kettle River showed off for us two Sundays ago, mixing beauty and power like a rose in full bloom and a Juggernaut on a winning streak. Between County Roads 46 and 52 in northern Pine County, the river sprinkles a set of rapids every quarter mile or so. Not dangerous rapids, not Blueberry Slide or Dragon’s Tooth or those other killers at Banning State Park. Up north 20 miles, the rapids laugh WITH you, not AT you, gurgling and foaming, flexing their muscles a wee bit, letting you bump over hidden rocks just fast enough to make butterflies rise up in stomachs, just fast enough to make the kids duck their heads and close their eyes as the water bubbles by. Our Aussie Shep., Kenzie, was  David's canoe  partner  for several years. After this trip, it was quite  a while  before the kids got into a canoe  on the Kettle River  with their father. “I’ve got to admit you made a good choice,” Cindy said as we hit a quiet stretch ...

by David Heiller It rained all day Saturday, a light mist of a rain. Some people probably cussed at it. But from the garden it made me glad. That’s where I spent most of the day, shoveling, raking, tilling. My T-shirt stuck to my back like, well, like a wet T-shirt. My gloves got coated with mud. So did my boots, and the rake and fork and tiller. We were all one soggy mess. But the rain felt good, all six-tenths of an inch. Kids love the rain. We weren’t exactly in a drought. It had snowed eight inches just 17 days earlier. But the potatoes and lettuce and peas needed a drink. So did the corn and alfalfa. So did the roadsides along Highway 23, where train sparks have sent firemen a-scurrying and trees a-dying. So did the perennials that Elaine Pearson and Dorothy Nelson gave me last fall, forget-me-nots and delphiniums, primrose and daisies, and a bunch of others that I can’t even identify. Their leaves sprinted out of the ground with the rain. We heard it start i...

David Heiller The best part of the trip came at the end, when “Dave” and I paddled down the Kettle River last Saturday morning. (In case you don’t read Dear Abby, when a name is in quotations, it’s not their real name, although I’ve often wondered if people don’t put the person’s real name in the quotes, just to be funny.) “Dave” took care of the logistics, as usual. “We’ll put the two canoes in your truck, and then drive my van to the bridge at 46,” he told me when I pulled into his driveway at 9:30. The idea was to then drive my truck to a spot up-stream, park the truck, paddle downstream about eight miles to County Road 46, then get in his van with his canoe and go back for the truck. I would pick up my canoe on the way home. And that’s what happened, mostly. The Kettle River had never looked finer to me than that morning. Cold, deep, and in a hurry. A river in flood is like a magnet to me. We slipped the canoes over huge slabs of shore ice and into the water. It q...

David Heiller Our book club read Canoeing with the Cree , by Eric Sevareid, for our September discussion. But instead of meeting at someone’s house in the evening, like we usually do, we held this book club on the Kettle River. This is what bookclub usually looked like. This was at our house. We canoed from County Road 52 to Rutledge, about an eight mile stretch, on September 6. There were eight canoes and 18 people. Usu­ally we have about 10 people at book club, but a fun outing on a gorgeous day attracted extra spouses and kids. Cindy and I canoed the first half with a 16-year-old boy, Matt, in the middle. We hit a lot of shallow spots. The Kettle River is low, because of the dry summer. We had to get out of the ca­noe to pull it over rocks and sand many, many times. At some places trees lay over the river. Sometimes we were able to float underneath them. One tree was about three feet above the river. Cindy bent low enough to slip under it. But I’m a lot bi...

David Heiller The Kettle River water flowed along like a big muscle of water last Saturday morning, April 24, and it seemed to welcome our canoes almost as much as we welcomed it. My friend, Dave, noticed it first. “This doesn’t look like the Kettle River,” he said after we set our canoes down below the bridge on County Road 46. The current was strong, the water deep. Usually I don’t get on the river until later in the year, when the water is low and the rocks are high. David and Dave in a quiet canoe, during a different paddle. Not Saturday. The power of the current sent us downstream in a hurry. Dave and I each had our own canoe, which was a new twist, and a good one, because even in high water, the Kettle River will shave aluminum off a heavily loaded canoe, and any canoe with me in it is heavy enough. Saturday was a great day to be alive. Clear sky, temperatures in the sixties. No mosquitoes! The first really nice day of spring. And there couldn’t be a better plac...

David Heiller We pushed off the grassy bank and into the dark waters of the Reno Bottoms on Saturday morning, heading for parts unknown. A good canoe trip is like that, and there are definitely parts unknown in the bottoms. We had a couple fishing poles and a couple hours. Is there anything in life sweeter than that? My nephew, Alex, sat in the middle, behind his girlfriend, Laura. I was in the stern. View of the river on the way down to the spillway,  which begins the Reno Bottoms adventure. As we worked our way along the eastern shore of Running Slough, the feeling of freedom that comes from being in a canoe hit me. No worries about getting hung up. When that happens, and it did many times that day, you paddle over and retrieve your lure. It almost always comes free from the right angle. No worries about making the perfect cast either. It’s hard not to make the perfect cast when you can paddle to the perfect spot. Alex did just that, and had a nice tussle for ab...

 David Heiller We were having a hard time keeping a straight face as we trudged up the portage from Moose Lake to Splash Lake. Everyone except Paul, that is. Paul’s face was set, straight and hard. Hard as a rock, you might say. He was carrying a Duluth Pack front and back, full of camping gear for five days in the lake country east of Ely. What he didn’t know what that I had slipped a 10-pound rock into his pack while we loaded the canoes. There’s something perversely funny, watching a man carry a 10-pound rock in a pack. It’s like watching someone fall down on a patch of ice. You try not to laugh, but you just can’t help it. Especially someone like Paul, someone who has canoed every lake, who has pulled in 25-pound northerns, who has done if all. All except carry 10-pound rocks around on his back. After the portage, we faced a small rapids. Dave and Jim clawed up it in their canoe ahead of us, paddling furiously. Paul and I followed, and Paul put his back into it. Tha...