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THE PESHTIGO
 We came to Michigan Rapids, we thought 'twould do no harm.. but when we'd reached the bottom, we had bought the farm! This was the song we sang as we portaged our badly bent-up aluminum canoe up from the bottom of Michigan Rapids that fateful day in late May. Ironically it was a Michicraft canoe that bought it in Michigan Rapids. Ordinarily, my paddling pal Mike and I would have been paddling my father's old logo Grumman (this was in the early seventies), but Mike had decided to rent a canoe from the place he worked at the UW-Milwaukee because we knew the water would be high and we didn't want to damage my father's canoe. We reached Laona after a long drive and turned off on a gravel Forest Service road to head to a campsite. We almost made it, but we ran out of gas. Mike had forgotten to gas up back in civilization. Fortunately, we had a full gallon of Coleman fuel for the stove, so Mike poured it in the tank, started up his little Fiat 128, and was able to drive back to Laona for real gas. I stayed behind and set up camp.
 The next morning it was grey and overcast, but not raining as we loaded up the canoe with our camping gear. We took off down river and soon reached the first of many rapids on this rain-swollen river. We negotiated the first couple of sets with no problems except for shipping a little water. The rocks in the Peshtigo were hard to see, however, because of the tannic acid which colors the water and the dark color of the granite rocks in the stream bed. On one set of rips, we hit a rock dead-on that Mike, who was in the bow, just didn't see. Mike's butt shot up a foot into the air with the impact, and I heard a sharp crack back by me in the stern. At the bottom of the rapid, we put into the bank and inspected the canoe. We had put a dent the size and shape of a grapefruit in the reinforced bow of the boat, but that was not all the damage. We had hit the rock so hard that a rivet holding the rear thwart to the gunnel had popped due to the bowing of the boat!
 Undaunted, we switched paddling positions and continued down river. We had to stop several times to empty water from the waves we were taking out of the boat. At last we reached a bridge and knew that we were just above Michigan Rapids, which was rated one notch above the rapids we had previously negotiated. At the top of the rapids we saw a short, narrow chute with a vicious turn in it. At this high water level it looked tricky and we decided immediately to portage the top part of this drop. The rest of the rapids looked pretty much like the rest of the white water we had negotiated that day, but continued around a corner. We were pretty tired by this time and were not far from our intended campsite, so we put in below the narrow chute and paddled into the foaming rapids. As we progressed down the drop we began taking water form waves and gradually got lower and lower in the water. When we reached the corner we saw that the rapids continued for another hundred yards or so and ended in a big pool. By this time we were almost fully swamped. As we approached a ledge near the bottom of the drop, I figured that we'd get stuck, so I jumped out of the canoe to help us get the canoe over the ledge. I was holding on to the upstream side of the bow deck plate when I hit a rock with my thigh. I later had a huge bruise from the impact, but it didn't hurt much and I wasn't concerned. I had let go of the canoe on impact, but was still alongside it. I reached back up to grab it, but couldn't for some reason. By this time we were floating in the pool at the bottom of this drop, Mike still in the stern of the canoe.
 As I floated in the pool, paddle still in my right hand, I noticed a weird dark stain in the water. My eyes followed the stain up the paddle to my wrist, which was bleeding profusely from a deep one-inch gash in the side of my right wrist. I yelled to Mike and headed for shore. Once there, I wrapped my shirt around my wrist and stopped the bleeding. Mike paddled over and we saw what had happened. The impact of my hitting the rock had popped three rivets on the deck plate, exposing the razor-sharp under edge. I had cut myself when I reached back for the canoe. Ironically, on a well designed canoe like my faithful Grummy, there are twice as many rivets on the bow plate as on this Michicraft. Anyway, a trout fisherman gave us a ride to our car, and we headed to Laona. There was no hospital there, but a gas station attendant gave us the address of a retired doctor. He stitched me up (without anesthetic) and we spent the night at a Holiday Inn in Rhinelander. The next day, my wrist throbbing, we went back to the base of the falls and portaged the canoe back to the road, singing the lyrics to the song I made up. Once we got back to Appleton, we put machine screws where the rivets had popped and hammered out most of the dents with a rubber mallet. The keel had had about a six inch bend in it, but we got it pretty straight. Mike returned the canoe and later told me nobody mentioned the damage. I guess the moral of this story is threefold:
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