Growing up near the Great Lakes and the rivers that feed them made water an important part of my world, but it was also something I took for granted.

There’s a subtle difference between growing up in the “Midwest” and growing up in the Great Lakes region. Most folks lump them together — flyover country, friendly people, hard winters — and from outside, maybe the difference doesn’t matter much.

Big water demands your respect. Small water lets you forget it deserves any. And the danger isn’t always in the water.

August 1979.

Summer dragged into August. Hot, muggy work five or six days a week. Some of us would soon return to school — teachers and students alike. Others just needed a break from the steady drumbeat of responsibilities.

This was the closest thing to an adventure we could manage on short notice. Six guys, three canoes, two days on the quiet waters of Sugar Creek in central Indiana. We left early and dropped into the water by mid-morning.

I’ve rafted on wild rivers through the mountains of West Virginia and the Rockies. This was not that. But we were young, we weren’t working, and this was good enough.

The water was smooth, but late summer had thinned the flow until sand and gravel bars were the main thing to dodge. The current bounced from bank to bank, twisting the way water does across the flats.

We were in no hurry. We knew once the creek left the sandstone gulches and thick forests, it would widen out into corn fields and farms, so we stopped often, horsing around in the deep pools that formed occasionally beneath a bluff.

When the slow-moving waters crossed a gravel bar and formed tiny ripples, someone cried out “White water! White death!” That became the refrain for the rest of the journey.

The combination of the gentle current and no responsibilities unwound the week’s stress. Hours passed. We laughed and joked, paddled at times, drifted at others.

The lead canoe (not mine) passed under some overhanging branches. The rear paddler jumped to his feet and shouted, rocking the canoe and splashing water onto their gear. The lead grabbed the gunwales, turned to yell, then stood up, brandishing his paddle like a shield.

If you know anything at all about canoes, you know that standing is a very bad idea.

The rest of us laughed as they both tried to keep from tipping over while stabbing at something in the middle of the canoe with their paddles. Eventually, one of them lifted his paddle with four feet of writhing muscle coiled along the blade. As he shook it over the side, it slipped off and into the creek just as the canoe tipped the other way, sending the occupants and gear into the water.

The snake slithered across the creek and up the far bank.

We pulled up to help, but were laughing so hard we were no use. We dragged their canoe to a gravel bar and waited while they gathered their gear and joined us.

We all swore it was a water moccasin — perhaps it was. The range maps say maybe. The snake didn’t say either way.

Turns out, you can go through life afraid of the wrong thing.

I love the quiet of the woods and lakes. But I also love the right music at the right time. It is hard to balance letting God’s world speak for itself with letting the right songwriter speak for it. One writer that I return to sings of the lakes often, whether the haunting words and tones of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” or the breezy feel of “Christian Island,” Gordon Lightfoot takes me back to the waters of the inland seas I grew up near.

On one hand, his ingenuity was amazing — a compass photo relayed through Florida to rescue a man almost to Canada on Lake Superior. But on the other, what was he thinking?

It’s a solid reminder about the wild. In this case, Superior didn’t hate him. It didn’t want him dead. It didn’t even notice him. The fog wasn’t malicious. The water wasn’t cruel. The island wasn’t trying to swallow him. It’s just that his idea of what was possible didn’t count for much.

(Note to self: always carry a real compass.)

We spent that whole trip joking about white water that couldn’t swamp a bathtub, then got emptied into the creek by a tree branch. Most of the things that actually get us aren’t the ones we’re watching for. Everybody has an “afraid of the wrong thing” story — that one still makes me laugh almost five decades later.

This story went out to my Trail Notes readers first. Every couple of weeks I send one more from the trail, the page, and the porch — and they get it long before it ever lands here. Join the list →

 Photos: Daniel Schwen https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dschwen
canoers https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sugar_Creek_Turkey_Run_SP,_IN_1.jpg,
bluff https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sugar_Creek_Turkey_Run_SP,_IN_2.jpg,

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, via Wikimedia Commons. Images downscaled.