BUILT BY JOS. LUCIUS

dinner with a beautiful young woman. We sat at a tiny table in the kitchen of a third-story apartment. The kitchen, like the house itself, was old and badly in need of paint. I had spent the better part of the afternoon simmering a Bolognese sauce and had splurged on a decent bottle of wine. Cold wind blew snow through a cone of streetlight. We raised our glasses to toast and the phone rang. I let the machine answer.

Isat down

“Alan,” boomed a voice from the distance, “I understand you have met a woman.”

It was John Rogers, a friend, mentor, and legend of the Brule River. It was the Brule River that had inspired my recent move to this Northern Wisconsin town. I needed to be near it.

“Well, I hope she is built like a Lucius canoe, elegant and sturdy from stern to bow.”

The beautiful young woman looked at me, “What is a Lucius canoe?”

It was a fair question. At its most basic level, a Lucius canoe is forty or so one-inch strips of carefully milled cedar, cinched to spruce ribs, and crowned with hardwood decks and gunwales. Most are painted dark green. In the bow, a “Captains chair” slides along parallel planks to adjust for trim. The sports, who these canoes often transport, cast for trout from an armchair.

Joe Lucius, of Solon Springs, Wisconsin, understood the needs of Brule River guides, and in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries he created an ideal platform from which to cast a fly. His boats were nimble, and they poled well because, before the age of car shuttles, guides spent as much time poling upstream as they did paddling down. Poling was an efficient technique on the sandy, rocky bottom of the Upper Brule, and it saved wear and tear on precious paddles.

In his wonderful little book, From the Log of a Trout Fisherman, Arthur Tenney Holbrook describes the service of a Lucius canoe he had built in 1904:

It has been to the mouth of the river a dozen times, has been paddled and poled around the head of Lake Superior from the Brule River to Duluth, and has had many trips in the baggage cars of the old Duluth South Shore Railroad. Novices have shot the Falls and rapids in it, smashed it on rocks, overturned and wrecked it on many occasions –and yet I fished from it last season and the grating was dry.

The Lucius boats that remain on the Brule today are not subjected to such punishment, and they tend to be treated with a sense of totemic reverence, although they are certainly still capable of the duty for which they were designed. Damian Wilmont, of Superior, Wisconsin, guides clients in his lovingly restored Lucius every summer, often casting the fly patterns that were popular when the boats were new.

What is a Lucius canoe? It is a direct connection with a not too distant yet tantalizingly simpler past, a handmade object that embodies the spirit of a river sacred to many.

And, about that phone call. John has long since gone to fish around the next bend, but I married the elegant young woman I was having dinner with that night. We fish the Brule together often, sometimes from a Lucius canoe.

Alan Craig is an artisan who lives with his wife in a refurbished log home near Mason, Wisconsin. A past employee of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, Alan completed seminal work with the Institute’s archives and is responsible for the creation of the Sigurd Olson archival display case in the entry way to the Institute. Currently, Alan works with Sharptail Construction restoring and creating beautiful homes in the woods of northern Wisconsin.

BY ALAN CRAIG | PHOTOS BY JONATHAN MARTIN