The Manistee River starts as a small spring. In a humble state in America's Midwest, the Manistee curves through pine forests, rural communities, and sand dunes, eventually terminating in the vast expanse of Lake Michigan, delivering thousands of gallons of water a day. It’s not unlike how we all start out: small shriveled things relying on the care of the environment around us to grow big and strong, to flow into a larger sense of purpose and community.

But 80 miles into a bikepacking trip along the Manistee’s shores, I was too exhausted to philosophize. Nothing had gone as planned. The day was unseasonably warm for late spring and in Northern Michigan the sun is punishing, relentless in its radiation. A broken derailleur limits my shifting to 3 gears, forcing my decade old gravel bike off the shaded singletrack and onto a sand-bogged forest road. All that remains of the nearby trees are stumps—clear cut by the power company to gain access to dam-generated hydroelectricity. The electric thrum of those lines keeps me company, occasionally raising the sweat slicked hairs on my arms and neck. Utility trucks tick by methodically, kicking up clouds of fine gritty dust, forcing me to a non-existent shoulder and leaving ruts in the road, rendering it unnavigable. 

Biking this power line road had not been my plan. Instead this was supposed to be an idyllic weekend, tracing a new bikepacking route in Northern Michigan, using the Big Manistee and Little Manistee rivers as a guide. The result of meticulous planning with komoot’s satellite maps toggled on and off, I had charted a 196-mile loop, to be completed in three days of riding.

This wasn’t a random quest. After a few years bouncing around the world, my wife and I had recently decided to make the permanent move back to Michigan. These weren’t the salt water breaks of Indonesia or the high desert mountains of America’s Southwest we had recently called home, and our constant moving resulted in locational whiplash. I was in search of a sense of place and the Manistee River was a lodestone, a point of constant return. Friendships come and gone, bachelor parties, solo trips, trail runs and overstuffed packs. My wife and I backpacked along it as one of our first dates, and years later, I proposed on the bluffs overlooking our favorite bend in it’s winding course. Family lore has my great-grandfather riding logs down it’s rapids as a teenage lumberjack. Or at least northern rivers just like it. But it had been years since I’d been back, and many things had changed. I’m a dad to two little tricksters. I have a smattering of grays at the temples. My back hurts frequently. The river seemed like an old friend who could ground me in the present and the past simultaneously, establishing a working relationship with our new, old home.

As a parent, solo adventures come at the generosity of your spouse and are measured in hours, not weeks. I had three days to complete the trip and no chance of making it a loop and covering the ground I wanted to. So I managed to convince Quinn, a friend and photographer, to shuttle the trip for me. We met years ago on a work photoshoot and connected over a mutual appreciation of harebrained schemes and big ideas. A few years back he had shuttled and photographed an ill-fated attempt to canoe the Au Sable, another of Michigan’s impressive northern rivers. That trip ended poorly (aluminium canoe, shoulder injury, whiskey drinking retreat). This ride, we both hoped, would have better prospects.

Twelve miles into the first day and finally hitting a groove, I shifted with a grinding sound, pedaling against a sudden lack of resistance. I skidded and swerved, attempting to fall graciously. Picking myself up, I realized my derailleur had snapped well beyond my ability to field repair. Luckily, Quinn was still on hand and I had just enough cell service to get ahold of him, the reverberations of failed canoe trips past echoing in both our minds. But they proved to be just that: reverberations. A quick, frankensteined repair by a local bike shop got the bike running again, albeit with a road bike derailleur that allowed for only three gears. But I was moving, if several hours behind. 

A blur of orchard adjacent pavement roads, rabbit trails of singletrack, and a blissfully paved riverside pedestrian path took me to the first evening’s campsite on the shores of the Manistee. Quinn said his goodbyes for the day and wished me luck with my remaining miles. Tomorrow, I would be on my own. 

Stretching out of the bivvy early next morning, legs cramped from close quarters and groggy from a late night conversation with my campsite neighbors—chain smoking ultrarunners generous with their pantry and their cooler beers—I was eager to start out. But a mile or two past camp, it became exceedingly clear the bike wasn’t up to the job of north country singletrack. Michigan doesn’t have any mountains of note, but the glacial carved interior hills are full of punchy, root strewn climbs and hairpin descents. In short, not friendly to an old gravel bike limited to three gears. Confronted with the possibility of an all day, mosquito-haunted hike-a-bike in carbon shoes I chose the sensible option. I backtracked to my campsite and pulled up my downloaded maps on komoot, rolling the dice that my hours of research and meticulous planning should be cast aside in favor of time actually riding the bike, instead of pushing it.

Which brings me back to the powerline road, drifted with fine white sand and basted by the sun’s UV rays. Smell of hot pine, hot sand, the sound of the chain, the sting of sweat dripping into my eyes, the hum of the electric lines getting under my skin and in my head. And the question of why? Why am I doing this? When I could wake up to mischievous giggles of two littles ones, strong coffee, and a day by the lake instead of grainy cowboy coffee, buckets of sweat, and pedaling an overladen, semi-functional bike. With miles and miles to go before I could rest, part of me was certain the end would never come.

That evening did arrive, like all evenings except the last eventually do. Exhausted and grimy after a series of unfortunate events involving crashing a rural family reunion in lycra (me, not the family), actually crashing, rerouting yet again to avoid ankle deep sand, dehydration, my navigation skirting me around the serene section of river I was most looking forward to cycling, and a completely full campsite. Trials and tribulations. So instead of a prime campsite on the dunes overlooking Lake Michigan, evening arrived in the form of a cheap motel and gas station pizza and too much exhaustion to take a shower. But it still arrived.

I think of the river as constant, though clearly it’s not. The same water doesn’t flow down the Manistee now as it did when I knelt on one knee high on its shore, or when I shepherded an underprepared group of highschoolers on their first backpacking trip. Rivers change, both the landscape around them and themselves — constantly new, constantly refreshing, different entities over the thousands of years they traverse the landscape.

The morning came with fog, and I pedaled through the silent, still sleeping city of Manistee out to the pier jutting into Lake Michigan. It was just me and the fisherman, my lens clouded as I snapped a victorious self portrait. From there I knew I had a long pedal ahead of me, following the Little Manistee back inland to the small town of Luther and the fresh clothes in my car. Reflecting on how nothing went to plan the past few days, I anticipated long and arduous miles ahead. And of course, the Little Manistee, the smaller river I was just meeting for the first time, was kind and hospitable. The day was full of shade trees and tightly packed gravel, closely hugging clear, bubbling trout-filled water. Ample cold water on demand, dirt roads with barely a sand pile in sight, gas stations with snicker’s ice cream bars and Gatorades spaced at perfect intervals. 

A river has a different kind of consistency than the land. When you return to a place, feet firmly rooted in a field, the very stones you stand on are the same as when you left. A river not so much. A river’s consistency isn’t in the billions of drops of water that compose it, but rather that it will always flow. The water refreshes itself, the river remains the same. Flowing onward, wearing down rock, carving a landscape in its image. Everything else changes, but the river remains. Because, then again, who's to say those same molecules of hydrogen and oxygen hadn’t completed the same long journey, in the years since I had proposed to my wife or in the decades since my great-grandfather floated, balancing on hobnailed boots on giant trunks through the rapids. That those atoms had flowed out into the vast expanse of Lake Michigan, evaporated into the summer heat, pushed inland by summer winds only to fall back into the river as a late evening storm, destined to repeat that cycle again and again over time immemorial. And at the end of it, meet me there, halfway, at a little trout stream surrounded by hot pines, both familiar and brand new.

Words by Matt Medendorp, photos by Quinn Badder

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