Riding the Rouge with Florent Tillon

By Joel Thurtell

It happened.

My motorboat trip up the Rouge River with French film maker Florent Tillon began just as our press release predicted, a bit after eight in the morning of Wednesday, July 8.

To those readers who referred Florent to me, I want to say thanks for steering me into one of the most amazing and thought-provoking experiences I’ve ever had.

This first essay will be short and quick. My wife and I are packing for a trip, and there are many pressures other than writing. But I wanted readers to know that we actually made the trip and passed the better part of that day touring the Rouge River by motorboat.

My particular boat is a 16-1/2-foot Crestliner fishing boat with a 60-horsepower outboard motor. It fishes comfortably with two, but with care, we were able to make it work for four people on our tour.

We trolled at a couple miles an hour mostly, sometimes doubling back so Florent could re-shoot or shoot from different angles. Hard to think of another river with industrial plants set cheek by jowl along a waterfront. Perfect for touring.

Florent asked me beforehand what kind of wildlife we’d see. He read the book by Pat Beck and me, Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River (Wayne State University Press, 2009). He’s very interested in the convergence of animal life with city people, city buildings. He wondered if we’d see any foxes. I told him I doubted it, because foxes are pretty wary. But Pat and I saw lots of blue herons when we made our canoe trip up the Rouge in 2005. Well, either we saw a lot of herons, or we saw one blue heron a lot of times — that was our little joke as we struggled against 30-mph winds on June 6, 2005.

As it turned out this time, we saw lots of herons, common terns, seagulls and even got up close to some turkey vultures feeding on dead fish alongside the river.

There was little wind, and we had a powerful outboard to counter any such trouble.

Florent noted that in Up the Rouge!, I wrote that the Rouge north of Michigan Avenue often seems secluded. We saw lots of wildlife and twice saw an adult female common merganser — the first sightings of this bird ever in summertime Wayne County.

Florent wondered about my use of the word “sanctuary” to describe the country surrounding the Main Branch north of Michigan Avenue. To me, this was one of the most dramatic things I experienced on that canoe trip four years ago. We paddled and sometimes towed our canoe against heavy headwinds four miles along the concrete channel part of the Rouge upstream of the Ford Rouge plant. Suddenly, a few yards past Michigan Avenue, the concrete stops. Your canoe, or your boat, suddenly glides into a forest. 

A couple of times, I stopped the motor so we could listen. An arrogant cardinal peeled off his loud cry and the staccato chatter of kingfishers sounded across the water. It’s as if someone drew a line with a ruler and said from here on will be wilderness. But to the south, it’s concrete, steel, piles of coke, limestone, ore at two steel mills, and there are teh concrete elevators, the salt operation and the stench of the compost business. And in fact, someone DID draw that line.

Quite a tour. The Rouge Gateway Partnership folks have called for tour boats to ply the Rouge, and I think it would be a great idea. There’s now a cut through the concrete channel where you could navigate a canoe, at least, into the Oxbow that leads to Greenfield Village. A tourist could dock or at least ground a boat at Greenfield Village and stop for lunch or a tour of the museum.

We could hear the tooting of the steam locomotive beyond the trees.

But before the Gateway folks start their tours, they might want to consult with the bosses at Severstal Steel, the Russian-owned company that now owns the old Ford Rouge steel mill.

For the second time, Severstal security guars went nuts when my little boat patrolled into the freighter slip. We toured nearly to the end of the slip, which is an enlargement of a creek that is tributary to the Rouge. Florent was taking footage of me and of urban explorer Geoffrey George sitting beside me, and getting background photos of the steel operation.

On our way back, a red fire-rescue truck prowled along the shore, keeping pace with my trolling-speed boat. By the time we exited the freighter slip, the red truck had been joined by three white trucks and some uniformed people walked to the edge of the water and began shouting. Security guards, it seemed. Waving for me to come over.

Well, I recall what happened when one of Matty Moroun’s shotgun-totin’ goons tried to arrest me when I was taking pictures of Matty’s bridge from publicly-owned Riverside Park. These bozos just don’t understand that they aren’t supposed to play bully on public property.

Last year, when I took a friend into the Severstal freighter slip, a guard warned me he was going to report me to the Coast Guard for violating some marine security law. I’ve since learned from Coast Guard officers that the Rouge is a public waterway, as are all waterways. Boaters have a right to travel on the Rouge, and the freighter slip is part of the Rouge and doggonit, a public waterway. As long as I don’t step onto Severstal land, I’m okay, according to the Coast Guard.

The Severstal guards and their bosses don’t understand that they have no authority over anyone on the water. I’ve heard from other boaters, including Bob Burns, the Detroit Riverkeeper, that the Severstal goons have bugged him, too.

Obnoxious.

If anyone wants to start a tourist business on the Rouge, they’ll need to get those Russkies to lighten up.

I’ll be writing more about this amazing trip and my conversations on the water with Florent Tillon and Geoffrey George.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com