"Lauren Prom?" blares the graffiti on a Huron River bridge in Ann Arbor. Is this a plea for a dance with a mermaid? Or the waterside version of proposals ribboned from a Goodyear blimp? Don't know, but certainly the leisure of a canoe bench in the hot p.m. affords time for pondering intent as we glide by other, less lovey, calls to eat boogers and pray. Besides the spray-on missives, it doesn't feel much like Doug and I are tripping the urban stream fantastic. But how the current flows...
Enroute we're getting the water's eye view of Ann Arbor from
Argo Park to Gallup Park. The 3.7-mile, $22 trip in our rental canoe is shorter this summer, as we're first shuttled past the closed Argo Dam portage to a temporary launch downriver at Riverside Park. A bypass channel with a graduated series of drop pools to lower paddlers the 13 feet from Argo Pond to the Huron is under construction. It will replace the portage, a historic barrier for those unable to ferry their boats over the Argo Dam.
By next spring, I'm told, boats will leave direct from Argo, and can also hack the full 5.7-mile stretch between Barton Dam (upriver from Argo) to Gallup Park without a portage. "So we're going to have, for the first time in over 100 years, a free-flowing river from Barton Dam all the way to Gallup," says Cheryl Saam, facility supervisor for the Ann Arbor canoe liveries.
Next year the liveries will be adding tubes, six-person rafts, and whitewater kayaks to their fleet. A whitewater feature, Michigan's first, is also expected in 2012. Even without these new floaties, the fleet has quintupled from 70 canoes and no kayaks when Saam took over the liveries a decade ago, to 350 boats. Half of those are kayaks. About 40,000 people debark from the livery docks each season.
Swimmers bullet off the bridge near the Argo livery and there's a flock of summer campers at the picnic tables, but once we're underway on this August afternoon, only two canoes and one kayak pass by. Maybe so few because it's Tuesday? Or maybe because we're sweating up our life vests? A very fit and tan paddleboarder laps us three times in the heat.
We must've hit the river on a lazy slow day, as the Ann Arbor liveries are the largest and busiest in Michigan, Saam says. True enough, the next Saturday afternoon at Gallup Park is a different story. Canoes, kayaks, the odd paddleboat, and tubes joined at the hip stream by with the staccato of a faucet drip. For that matter, Saam, who sits on the national
Professional Paddlesport Association board, knows of no other city-owned riverside canoe livery operation in the country. While numerous park systems rent watercraft, they tend to be smaller outfits situated on ponds or lakes.
So is the city fully embracing this enviable position? Is it putting its best face to the riverfront?
"We certainly have done a lot in the last 10 years to bring more people down to the river and make it more accessible for all. But there is so much more we could do," Saam offers. She'd like to develop school and public education programs, naturalist and rafting tours, an interpretive trail.
Methinks an interpretive trail should be accessible by water too. The river banks could use some signage and places to pull over and stay a while. It'd be nice to get out and walk a bit, learn about the course of nature and the mark humans have left on the area's history. The river appears little-changed from the days as a trade route for the Huron Indians, in the sense that little of the manmade is visible from our low perch: the University of Michigan and VA hospital towers, the blocky Huron Towers complex, a few chi-chi homes, and that's it.
Small islands flock a waterway walled by deciduous trees and a mesh of upended tree trunks. Crickets trill in the thick foliage and a crane struts on shore. A swarm of white-breasted birds dive and arrow overhead.
In between photos, Doug, a longtime resident, points out Island Park, Fuller Park, the Arb. Without him in tow, I wouldn't have known what I was seeing. Bridgeside graffitti is the only visible signage; maybe that's why we glom onto to it.
There is parkland on at least one side of the river from Barton Pond on Ann Arbor's west side down to Geddes Dam on the east, says Colin Smith, Ann Arbor's
parks and recreation manager. Smith also likes the idea of more places to tie off. The city has pledged $1,000 towards an engineering study on the construction of a boat dock at Island Park, he says. This dock is one of the early proposed projects to come of
RiverUp!, a river community effort to improve the accessibility and rec-friendliness of the Huron's 104 navigable miles. "I could see [a dock] being in place next season," he adds.
And the idea of a riverfront restaurant has been floated. A couple years ago the city commissioned the Huron River Impoundment Management Plan. The plan recommended limited commercial development, such as a restaurant, near the banks. "If you think of a lot of other cities that have a river running through their town, it's a draw," Smith says, adding, "I would think somewhere around the Broadway Bridge would be the most logical. It's the closest to downtown.... with all the improvements going on at Argo it could also be an activity hub."
I've seen good riverfront dining set-ups in darling Boyne City, a tiny burg on northern Michigan's Boyne River; on the banks of Clear Creek in Golden, Colo.; and on the Yampa River shoreline in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Golden, the largest of the lot, has about 19,000 residents. For Ann Arbor, whose headcount is more than five times Golden's, water's edge meals should be easy to swallow. But the closest it comes is the Gallup canoe livery coffee shop with its outdoor tables next to the boat dock. It's closed in the chilly months. Saam says the cafe has been a huge success.
So until (or
if) a restaurant arises, the best we paddlers can do is eat from a drybag and quit tossing crumbs to the duck-duck-goose parade.
Speaking of crumbs, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that apart from one plastic bottle there's no surface debris in the tea-toned water or under the bridges. And the waterway is unsurprisingly devoid of power boats. The dams present an obvious barrier to
all forms of traffic. There are 97 dams along the Huron's span; four of those are in Ann Arbor.
What's been a cake paddle till now looks to get savage when we start fighting clods of a mystery weed near the Gallup livery. An underwater grove of pine trees, what Doug calls "seaweed shag carpeting", crops up all over Geddes Pond. Our canoe does a buttery slither through it. And we're bitching and laughing all the way. Turns out you can't take a spear to Eurasian watermilfoil, an invasive aquatic plant species. Try hacking and it grows back four-fold, a livery employee says.
Recent heavy rains mean the river runs high and fast, cutting our downriver travel time (1.5 hours, per livery guidance) in half. Since the trip has gone by in a splash and it's an idyllic day, we steer clear of monster greens and dink around the waters near Gallup Park. Our canoe barely plinks the glassine sheet of Geddes Pond. At seven in the evening we turn around and call it good.
I doubt by next year I'll be getting dinner service on the Huron, but hey, at least I'll build an appetite. I'll be tubing it. Shooting the water chutes. Beating up Eurasian trash plants. Maybe stopping to read interpretive signs – and some graffiti, for sure.
Tanya Muzumdar is the assistant editor of Concentrate and Metromode. She is also the development news editor for Concentrate and a freelance writer. Her previous article was "Crack That Whip! Stunt School is in Session".
All photos by Doug Coombe
Photos:
Cheryl Saam at the Gallup Park Canoe Livery
Tanya Muzumdar paddles past Nichols Arboretum
A paddleboarder near Nichols Arboretum
Arielle Clinthorne with the canoes at the Argo Canoe Livery
Tanya paddling past Nichols Arboretum
Santiago Castillo prepping a kayak at the Gallup Park Canoe Livery
Tanya paddles by Huron Parkway
Ben Paskus, Samantha Suarez and Justin Hein with the boat trailer at Gallup Park
One way to ask someone to prom