3/9 Lives

It’s a good thing that when we were kids hyperthermia hadn’t been invented yet, because we would have died of it many times over, having spent days at a time soaked to the skin in cotton clothes between 32 and 40 degrees. Our high-school club, Les Voyageurs, was retracing part of LaSalle and Tonti’s exploration of the Midwest. The day before, Thanksgiving 1960, we had paddled upstream on the St Joseph River in Michigan in rain all day and had been strung out and separated along the river. We finally got together as a group about 10 p.m. that night. Today we had portaged by car over to the headwaters of the Yellow River in Indiana to continue down the Kankakee and Illinois Rivers. At our put-in there was a bank on the downstream side of the bridge and a small waterfall on the upstream side. Being teenagers, we all put in above the waterfall to run it. Of five canoes, ours was the only one not to capsize, but the bow went under with a wave over me filling the canoe with a good bit of water. So, there we were fishing life jackets, packs, equipment, and guns out of the water and building a fire to dry off. Oh, have I not mentioned the guns? There were 17 guys on the trip, including guys switching out to portage by car, there were more guns than people, and half of us didn’t have any guns. The owner of the property chased us off and down the river we went, soaked to the skin. We portaged from the Kankakee to the Illinois and eventually went through locks near Starved Rock State Park. We ended up, a little scruffy for the adventure, in the snack bar at the park where we met a pretty local girl. To this day, every living member of that trip remembers her, Mary Jean Cosgrove, 610 Bucklin Avenue [Street], LaSalle, Illinois.