Paddling the Au Sable

The Au Sable that lands on postcards is upstream, and you’re not going to paddle it. The trout water — the Holy Waters up around Grayling, the flies, the guides standing in drift boats — sits a hundred-odd river miles the other way. What runs past Oscoda is the working end of the river, the part that does the labor. Six dams have had their way with it. Slower, wider, older. It doesn’t care whether you can cast.

Once a year the fast people come through anyway. Since 1947 the AuSable River Canoe Marathon has started at nine at night, on the last full weekend of July, with a LeMans sprint — two-person teams running their boats through Grayling on foot before they hit the water. Then they paddle 120 miles without stopping. The narrow upper river gets paddled in the dark. Six dam portages, where the crews haul the boats up and around the concrete and put back in below. Fourteen to nineteen hours of it. The winners reach the mouth here in Oscoda the next afternoon, past noon, having slept none.

The dams are where you watch it. Mio, Alcona, Loud, Five Channels, Cooke, Foote — the crowd follows the boats downriver by car through the night and stands on the bridges at two and three in the morning while headlamps come out of the black upstream. The organizers bill it the world’s toughest spectator race. Spectator is the honest word. Most of the distance happens where nobody’s standing, at hours no reasonable person keeps.

The last of the six is Foote Dam. Consumers Power finished it in 1918 and named it for the man who built the company, and it still turns. Above it the river spreads into Foote Pond — flat, wide, motorboat water, with a paddlewheel boat called the River Queen running circles on it all summer. Below the dam is the part you want. No more concrete after that. From Foote it runs open to Lake Huron, no dam left in the way.

Don’t expect whitewater. The lower river is slow and deep in the bends, and it carries you at a walking pace whether you dig in or not. There are sweepers — cedars leaned out over the banks — and sandbars that move every spring, and that’s about the whole hazard list. The trout everyone hears in the name are a hundred miles upstream. Down here the water’s warmer and heavier, the cold spring flow long since let out and worked over by six impoundments before it reaches you. The flow belongs to the dam. Consumers Energy works the gates on its own clock, so the river you put in on at ten can sit lower by noon, and there’s nothing to do but read it. It smells like cedar and cold mud, and near the ramps, two-stroke exhaust. Redwing blackbirds the whole way down. The dam’s white noise for the first half mile, then quiet.

Getting on it is the easy part, which is also the problem — everybody knows. If you own a boat, there are launches below Foote Dam and public parking down by the beach and the River Queen. If you don’t, Oscoda Canoe Rental has been running the lower river out of 678 West River Road, half a mile off US-23, and puts people in at two spots: the Whirlpool launch for a six-mile float, two hours or four, and the Rea Road launch below the dam for the full twelve river miles, about four hours to the mouth. They’re open mid-April into October. Everything has to be off the water by six. Call ahead on a weekend or don’t count on a boat — the good hours go.

Go on a weekday if the calendar lets you. July weekends the pond fills with pontoons and the ramp smells like a marina. September’s better regardless — the color coming down River Road, the water empty, the drive out to Lumberman’s Monument if you’ve got the afternoon. We keep houses in Oscoda a few minutes from the water one of our Michigan cabin rentals, Barefoot Beach Cabin #1, and the rest of the town is here when you want it: Oscoda.

Get on the water early. The fog sits on Foote Pond until the sun takes it, and the river finds your ankles before your eyes catch up. Cold, then gone.