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Lovely days on the Wisconsin River

In my Tuesday blog about not having a cell phone, I mentioned that I sometimes go to Muscoda and have borrowed my wife's cell phone for the trip.

That led fbcoach66 to ask what I do there--canoe, fish?

Well, a little of both, actually. We have a lot and a half about a mile downriver from Muscoda. Year-round homes are on both sides of our property. It's a nice, dead-end road where you can't see the highway, and the lot slopes to the water--perfect for a home with a walkout basement, if we ever decide we have enough money to build such a "retirement" home; that was the original intent, anyway.

Though I can get there in less than two hours when road construction doesn't hinder my route, I usually get over there only several times a year and sometimes camp a day or two. I had a small fishing boat but found I spent more time preparing it for the season and winterizing it than I did sitting in it, so I sold it this spring.

We've had a canoe over there since buying the lot more than a dozen years ago, and I bought nice, wide, bent-shaft paddles for it, but we first got it in the water just the last time Cheryl went with me. Stormy skies cut short our upstream paddle. It takes about two hours to run the mower across the lawn, and that's after spending about a half hour picking up sticks/branches. By that time, we're usually too tired to paddle upstream. That and the option of using the boat are why we didn't use the canoe.

I've done a lot of trimming and thinning trees. It seems like I've cut down dozens when we only had maybe 40 to start with, but I still have 3 that need to come down--one of the walnut trees that appears diseased, and two red pines that are dying, probably because they're too close to the walnuts.

When we do go over there, we usually grill out after mowing and visit friends in three homes on that road. I also fish with some of them (one still has a boat perfect for the river).

One couple, Scott and Maxine Patchin, own/operate David W. Heiney's restaurant in Black Earth. Anyone ever been there? It's at www.heineysdining.com. It's pricey, but Scott is a fine chef, and we think it's worth the trip on special occasions.

Last year, Scott and Maxine hosted a pig roast involving about 100 people on the Fourth of July. They invited us, and the outing included a paddle trip starting upriver near Gotham. I had been on the river many times with Scott and others, so I knew the beauty of that stretch of the Lower Wisconsin. It was a beautiful day for paddling, we had about 35 canoes and kayaks, and Cheryl discovered the beauty, as well.

One year we also took in Muscoda's annual mushroom festival. It's when the morels are out in May. We particularly enjoyed the free bus tours of Indian mound clusters in the area.

Some readers might recall the flood in August 2007. It wiped out the bridge over a little creek feeding into the river on Highway 60 just west of Highway 80. A man died there when his SUV plunged off the washed-out bridge the night of the flood. They found his vehicle and body days (weeks?) later. The river had been low before that, did get high, but the water never would have affected a house had we built one.

You might also recall that I was named the 2007 World Champion Liar by the Burlington Liars Club for a joke I sent them about how low the water was earlier that year. The "lie" was:

"The Wisconsin River was so low this year that the local government started taxing us for more property on our riverfront lot."

The water is again that low this year.

Greg Peck