Why was I uneasy? Although had not really thought it through, intuitively the problem is readily apparent. What sort of river runs out from, and then back into , the same lake? One afternoon I finally decided to get to the bottom of the matter. Here was my reasoning:
Cholera epidemics in the last century forced the City to hire some French engineer to raise the street levels in Chicago, and reverse the Chicago River to flow south, through Lockport (where, obviously, locks were installed), and into the Mississipi River. The sanitary canal ran past the north side sewage plant on the border of Evanston and Chicago. Treated sewage water ran out of the plant, joining the canal flow, and ran down to be dumped in the Mississippi, thus ensuring that the intake water from the crib in Lake Michigan near Chicago Avenue (and The Water Tower) would be free from city sewage.
The canal was referred to variously by people as "The Canal," "The North Branch of the Chicago River," and "The Sanitary Canal."
Presumably the canal was just a widened river that flowed from the lake at its head near the Baha'i Temple in Wilmette.
So far so good.
But wait! First of all the canal is just too straight to be a river. In a city as old as Chicago, some evidence of a meandering original river would be present, but none was. Second of all, the Canal both entered from, and emptied into, the lake. No river runs like this!
Twenty years of being (subconsciously) annoyed at something that took three minutes to realize did not, and could not, add up. What sort of professor is this? Yikes.
Simple deduction led to the conclusion that the North Branch of the Chicago River ran part way up from Chicago, and then the Canal was dug FROM the lake, to join it on its new route down to the Mississippi. But where did this merging of the waters take place, and where was the original river?
Using the terraserver from Microsoft, which serves online satellite pictures of the whole U.S., I started tracing up along the canal. After several passes, I noticed a small speck of white near North Park College. Upon closer inspection I decided that this had to be a small waterfall, and sure enough leading off northwest from this point I found traces of a dark line -- the true North Branch of the Chicago River, running through a series of Forest Preserves and golf courses. I seemed to be able to trace it all the way up to the Skokie Lagoon but I was not sure.
I had solved one mystery, but turned up another. Was it possible to get from the Skokie Lagoon, to Chicago by boat?
In fact it took me three (but thirty minutes of it was spent looking for the glue!). Using a 4x8 of quarter-inch oak plywood, two one-by-twelve cedar planks, and two two-by-twelve pine transoms which I had on hand (I had been building a house in Evanston), I built a nice little square-sided seven-foot skiff. Disdaining paint which a craftsman knows can be used to hide poor workmanship, this was a VARNISHED little piece of woodworking. I carved the name JULIE into the transom.
Later that day I bought an electric fishing motor I had seen in a store window (but had never before used, or seen used) and the biggest battery I could find.
After a few trial runs in the canal near my house, I discovered that the little boat would run at full speed on the battery for a little under six hours. I made some delightful spins up to the Baha'i Temple, underneath all those north side bridges I had traveled over all these years, and also well down into Chicago, including over the turbulent waters coming from the sewage plant (which I later learned are only partically treated, in scanldalous Chicago municipal style).
The kids and I tooled all over the Skokie Lagoons in our three-hour boat .
All told it took me about twelve hours to make the trip. Along the way I sailed over waterfalls, under collapsing railroad bridges, through rapids, and through a Forest preserve full of Skinheads shooting guns at trees for target practice. I cracked the bottom of the boat (but not fatally!) striking it on a sharp rock in one section of rapids. I carried the boat over several beaver (?) dams. I ran through some deep fast sections, and some wide slow shallow sections with only a few inches of water over which my flat-bottom skiff gracefully floated.
The most hazardous sections were always near bridges where the workman invariably threw in large (sharp!) chunks of concrete debris from the bridge-building efforts, and all manner of submerged objects could be encountered -- such as shopping carts and bicycles.
In one sad moment I saw an injured deer huddled under one of the bridges. In one more comical moment I saw a naked man sleeping under another who woke up and waved cheerfully to me (no pictures!).
The most hazardous part of the journey was, believe it or not, traveling through the golf courses, where mischievous golfers could not seem to resist having a go at landing a tee-shot on my head. A number of balls plunked into the water around me.
I was an object of distinct curiousity to a number of people. One golf-course caretaker, who took my picture , said he had been working the course for twenty years, and mine was the first boat he ever saw come down the river in all that time.
To give just a flavor of the kinds of obstacles encountered, consider the following -- just one of many such adventures:
Passing through one golf course early in the trip I had to negotiate the boat over a one-foot spillway. This seems like not much of an obstacle, but remember that I was carrying a sixty-pound lead battery with only a quarter of an inch of plywood between it and the bottom of the river. And, a LOT of water was flowing quite rapidly over the top of the concerete barrier.
There was a walkway over the spillway, for golfers to get from the course on one side of the river to the course on the other side. Coming to the very brink of the spillway I reached up and grabbed the support struts with both hands, holding the painter (lead rope) for the boat in my teeth. Using my feet hooked under the seat I lifted the little boat over the spillway and shoved it as hard as I could away from the spillway waters. I held the boat from floating downstream with my teeth, generating some swinging motion while hanging from the walkway, and jumped into the boat, continuing on my way.
This was a complicated endeavor for the following reasons: (1) If the boat is not carefully worked over the spillway, water will rush over the side of the boat which is closest to the spillway, filling the boat with water in a matter of seconds and sinking it. (2) If a boat successfully lifted over the spillway is not thrust away from the spillway, it will naturally get sucked back up, broadside, to the spillway, filling with water, and sinking, as above. (3) If the boat is thrust too hard away from the spillway, the force of the flowing water is too strong to hold the painter (lead rope) with one's teeth, and the boat is going to sail down the river without anyone in it, leaving the captain (me) hanging from the underside of a bridge in the middle of the river. (4) If the boat floats too far away from the spillway, and the bridge, even if it can be held with the teeth, it is too far away to jump into it, leaving the hangee (me) like an idiot, in the middle of a golf course, hanging from a bridge, holding a boat against the current with his teeth, with nowhere to go. (5) If the swinging jump to the boat is not handled with superb timing, landing on the seat, the jumpee (me) lands in the boat, crashes straight through the quarter-inch plywood bottom, and continues straight down to the bottom of the river, with the sixty pound lead-acid battery to follow. (6) After successfully landing in the boat, the propeller has to be lowered into the water and started up within seconds, to keep the boat from getting sucked back into the spillway, and sinking, as above.
From an exploring standpoint the trip was fascinating. One soon loses all sense of streets and locations. At several points along the way one sails under giant, high, wide, expressway bridges. Railroads tracks are sailed under. Bridge after bridge passes overhead. Tributary streams join the main flow. Factories back themselves up to the river, and some even have the remains of ancient small piers (for what?) and underwater concrete bulwarks. In the more wild sections there are nesting birds, turtles, fish, wierd bugs, deer, and rabits. It is like going back in time to an earlier Chicago, with the reflections of an endless and timeless sky floating down the river with you.
In wide, slow sections, one can lie down in the boat, stare at the clouds, and float down the river without a concern in the world.
In sections of racing water, with submerged rocks sticking up to within an inch of the surface, one has to be quick and nimble with the tiller, to keep the boat from getting destroyed. The sense of isolation, while yet still in the middle of the city, is amazing. Because there are tall bushes and trees lining the sides of the river, because it wanders all over the place, as rivers naturally do, and because the surface of the water is much lower than the surface of the streets, it is hard to keep track of even what city one is in, on the way down the river. The river's path goes far west before it veers back toward the lake down in Chicago. Except for the bridges every half mile or so, it is often easy to imagine being out in the middle of virgin, wild, territory. The sounds of the city do not travel well down into the shallow valley the river has cut throught he landscape.
Finally, after about twelve hours, with the battery almost exhausted (floating downstream allowed me to use it at less than half power most of the time), I pulled the Julie out of the rapidly moving water just north of the six-foot (!!) waterfall near North Park, and hid it in the bushes, retrieved my car, loaded the little boat up, and headed for home.
From niggling mystery, to simple deductions, to the internet, to online satellite photography, to building a three-hour boat, to proving a point sailing back through the history of Chicago.
Yep. It IS possible to get from the Skokie Lagoon to the Sanitary Canal down in Chicago. I know because I did it.
