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Filming in the Froth
Northern Wilds summer 2006 Adventure filmmaker Cliff Langley is going crazy. "I can't do anything," he told me in an interview. He raised his right arm, which hung in a sling, to prove his point. "It's driving me nuts." From what he said, I assumed he had been injured and inactive for weeks. I was wrong. He had been hurt for six days. "I messed up my elbow kayaking the Split Rock River last Thursday," he explained. "Ripped my elbow pad off. Chipped the bone, too - I can feel something moving around in there." Recently the only outdoor pursuit he's been able to pursue is running with his dog Ziibi (pronounced "zeebee"), a red and white Siberian husky whose name means "river" in Ojibwe. Cliff grew up in Ely and Milwaukee, but "didn't know whitewater kayaking existed" until high school. "In May of 1997, I came up to visit my dad, and we took a drive up the shore. Every couple of miles there was another river with waterfalls and raging whitewater. I was floored. I was in awe. I think my exact words to him were, 'I'm gonna move up here and take college and learn to kayak.'" That's exactly what he did, attending Fond Du Lac College and the University of Minnesota-Duluth. But first he took some time to do some good. "When I first moved here, I worked for the Conservation Corps for a year. That was hard work. I personally have planted over ten thousand trees, mostly red and white pines. I know because I counted." While Cliff was in the Corps and in college, he and a few of his buddies taught themselves to kayak. "We just threw ourselves into things that maybe we weren't quite ready for. When I think back, I'm amazed we're still alive. We called those days 'yard sale days,' because everyone would be swimming and there would be paddles and kayaks floating everywhere, like a big yard sale." One of Cliff's best kayaking buddies is Joel Decker. "He's this super-nice, responsible guy, and I'm an irresponsible jerk. We're like yin and yang. It's a good partnership." Cliff may be exaggerating about the "irresponsible jerk" thing, but he's right when he says they work well together. A short video they made together, Dakib, won the "Accomplished General" award at the 2006 National Paddling Film Festival. "Dakib started as a pipe dream two or three years ago. Joel and I had just watched a kayaking video called Valhalla - we call it 'whitewater porn.' All action, no substance. A few days later, I had to drive to Milwaukee. I was driving on a long stretch of highway at night. My phone rang. I picked it up, and the first thing Joel said was, 'I have an idea that will change our lives. Let's get a prosumer camera and make kayaking videos.' So we went in halfsies and bought a Cannon GL-2." The pair filmed two seasons of kayaking and spent 60-100 hours editing the footage, adding music by a variety of local artists. They settled on the name Dakib, which is Ojibwe for "cold water." "The best part of making Dakib was watching the finished video and reliving the sweet moments in it," Cliff said. "After jumping into that video, the bug bit me hard. Now I have a lot of adventure stories I'd like to tell with a camera." He added that he has "no delusions of getting rich or famous doing it." He and Decker are working on another kayaking video - "more of a story about how we run rivers and why." Cliff loves North Shore rivers for many reasons. "There's a high concentration of quality runs. You can run two, three rivers in a day. That's why the north shore is really hard on kayaks. My favorite run is the Cascade River near Grand Marais. Remote, beautiful, class four or five whitewater. You can take it as far and as fun as you want. I've never paddled any river anywhere in North America that was a better creek run than that." That's saying a lot - Cliff has paddled nearly every major kayaking area on this continent, including Alaska. But, he says, "the north shore is my favorite paddling area because it feels like home. You can run a river all the way into the lake." I asked if he had any advice for would-be whitewater freaks. "North Shore rivers are usually brown from glacial clay or tannic acid. When you get to the lake, you have to paddle out to where the water is blue and then do a roll to appease the lake. It's good karma. If you don't roll, you're asking for trouble." |
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