“I do remember spending a night at Rollways State Park. I was just too cold to sleep,” said Ann Meisel (1962-66). “Now I would just ask if there were any more blankets, which I’m sure were available, but I was too young and shy to know how to deal with grown-ups, so I just suffered.”

Ann later took a three-day canoe trip, where the girls were driven to Grayling. “It was truly a rough and hard adventure. We did not have good camping gear back then and it rained and my sleeping bag got soaking wet. We learned how to maneuver the canoes to sleep under them. There was also an accident with a canoe and three girls had to be rescued, which made people in charge quite frantic. I think they tipped in some rapids and some items were lost. One of the girls who was rescued later showed us her lace panties and said she did not know whose panties she had on,” laughed Ann.

The canoe rental place happened to be next door to a house that looked terribly familiar to Ann. She was certain that the people that cared for her father’s mother in her dying years lived there, and had taken her grandmother from Bay City to their retirement home on the AuSable in Grayling.
“I was frantic, ran up to the door and banged. An older lady answered and I shouted, “I’m Ann Mesiel and I think you took care of my grandmother! They remembered me, and still had one item from my grandmother. It was a gold bangle, oval shaped, with Matie inscribed on it. I wore it for the next twenty years,” said Ann, who considered those trips to be the coolest thing she ever did.

Sandy Indianer (1967) enjoyed the canoe trips on the river, until it was time to dig the latrines. “There were nasty surroundings, but I really enjoyed those trips,” she said, recalling all the wonderful food they made over the campfires.

“I remember one trip that we got caught up in the bend on the river and someone had to help us out. One of the canoes with the food capsized and we lost supplies and food that was too wet to use. There were people on the river who were camping somewhere else that gave us dry matches and enough food that we did not go hungry. It wasn’t a scary river because you could see the bottom and it was slow moving. You just had to learn to stay out of the brush. It was only miserable when it rained and you had not put up your tent. We all had this unhappy camaraderie for a couple days or nights when it rained. I was a good sport and did not whine much, even though I was just as miserable as the rest,” she admitted, “but I always wanted to go back.”

Chris Lambert (1958-65) described a scene from one of her trips that may or may not have been unusual, considering other groups used the river. It was the kind of story that fostered great stories for the campfires later at night. “We saw a guy on the bank and he wasn’t moving, so we poked him or threw something at him and he didn’t move, so we figured he was dead. Finally, when we got closer, he moved and we all took off. We camped out in the open with sleeping bags and would wake up all dewy, but the girls would fall asleep early, exhausted with the long day and ghost stories,” said Chris.

Bev Lemanski camped in the forties and on her trip was paired with Sharon Wilcox. She was in the stern and Bev was in the bow. “Sharon was definitely the more reliable of the two and I was the flighty one. We had dropped our bathing suit straps to get an even tan, and as we went under the bridge, we spotted boys from the Oscoda Air Base waving to us. We had to pull over and stop the canoe because my top had fallen. Those boys were cheering. I thought I would die of embarrassment!”

What adventures did you find on your trips?