On a cool, almost rainy morning the Sunday before Memorial Day weekend, a motley flotilla of 730 canoes and kayaks gets launched ten at a time into the Des Plaines River at Oak Spring Road in Libertyville. Paddled by one-, two-, and three-member crews, the boats head south between muddy forested banks, past golf courses and country houses. Their goal is Dam Number Two in Prospect Heights, the finish line of the 19.5-mile Des Plaines River Canoe Marathon every year since Ralph Frese started the race in 1958 as a Boy Scout excursion.
Frese is a fourth-generation blacksmith raised on the northwest side. When he grew up, he gradually turned his father’s blacksmith shop, located at 4019 N. Narragansett, into the Chicagoland Canoe Base, which sells and rents canoes and kayaks, and himself into a leading advocate of river and stream restoration. The canoe marathon he founded has turned into an annual confab for paddling athletes, environmentalists, and recreation-minded families.
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In his father’s shop, Frese made a little trailer to tow the kayak behind his bike and took to pedaling three miles west on Irving Park to Schiller Woods, where he could launch on the Des Plaines. “I’d disappear down the river and spend my afternoons on the water,” he says. “I learned it all by trial and error, because my parents had never been in such a boat. But I learned. I’ve only capsized about three times in my entire life.” Later in his teen years, Frese and a buddy bought a canoe-building kit from Mead Gliders, a company downtown that he says ruled the canoe industry then.
“So what do I know about scouting?” Frese says. “I just wanted to take the kids adventuring with me on the rivers, so I’d borrow boats and take them all out.” Eventually he and a friend figured out how to make a mold for a fiberglass canoe and began teaching scouts and other groups how to make them. “We made 500 or 600 canoes from that mold,” he says. He also started teaching other scout leaders how and where to canoe with their troops. “Then one day I had this crazy idea,” he says. “There’s a stretch of the Des Plaines that I knew was beautiful. So let’s have some fun competition and see how nice it is out there.”
Frese is now involved in trying to hatch seedlings from a pair of red pine trees that stand on bluffs over the Fox River near Sheridan, Illinois. Chicago Botanic Garden curator of woody plants Peter Bristol says that the southern reach of the red pine’s natural range is around the Wisconsin Dells. If he manages to grow trees from the seed Frese collected, some will be raised at the botanic garden and some at or near the parents, which have survived despite environmental challenges. Bristol says, “There are more pressures on them now, with climate change and acid rain. Plants that are on the edge of their growing zone, like these, definitely are under more pressure. So it’s of some concern that we help nature along by growing a seed crop, reintroducing the plants back to that habitat, and protect them.”
Sit with Frese for an hour in the paper-crammed office at the back of his store and he’ll deliver a passionate monologue covering everything from the particulars of Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette’s 17th-century route through the region’s rivers and lakes to Chicago’s heyday pre-World War II as a canoe-manufacturing center to the ins and outs of getting various river cleanups funded to the exact number of boats in each of the first few Des Plaines River marathons (25 the first year, 106 the second, 156 the third).
The first Des Plaines River Canoe Marathon also set off from Oak Spring Road in Libertyville, one of the few access points that wasn’t on a busy highway, and ended at Dam Number Two. Frese, who’d paddled much of the river, estimated that the distance was about 25 miles, so he called the race a marathon. It turned out to be less by 5.5 miles, but Dam Number Two has remained the finish line because it features a long view up the river where spectators can watch the last leg of the race.
