Into the wild, just next door

Emilie Zibble stood on a beach on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis last week, looking apprehensively at a 24-foot canoe on the sand in front of her.

The Minneapolis sixth-grader had just finished eating lunch with her sixth-grade class, and was getting ready to go back out on the water.

"It's really fun, but it's really tiring," said Emilie, who goes to Northeast Middle School and was on a daylong canoe trip with her school. "You have to paddle and you have to make sure everyone else is paddling."

Despite sore arms, she said, it was "way better" than being in school.

Northeast Middle School sent its entire sixth-grade class out on the Mississippi last week with a Minneapolis-based group called Wilderness Inquiry. The trips are designed to give city kids -- most of whom had never been in a canoe before -- a taste of the wilderness near home. And they invited me to go with them.

Wilderness Inquiry has been piloting a program this year to get thousands of students -- both through summer school and during the school year -- out on the river for trips.

Working with the district and the National Park Service, Wilderness Inquiry hopes to ramp up the program over three years, to eventually get 10,000 kids a year on the river. This year, they served 4,500, and about 1,800 of them are from the Minneapolis public schools.

"I grew up in the Twin Cities, and I'd call myself kind of a Boundary Waters snob," said Greg Lais, Wilderness Inquiry's executive director. "I thought you had to drive 200 miles to be in the environment."

But with the Mississippi River right here, you realize it's 15 minutes away. That's 15 minutes from hundreds of thousands of people, and that means hundreds of thousands of kids."

Not surprisingly, a daylong canoe trip with 135 sixth-graders is not exactly relaxing. After the kids hustled off of buses at the East River Flats by the University of Minnesota, they were all given life jackets and canoe paddles. The life jackets had handles written on the back so the boat leaders could call out names. I was "Mona Boa." The others in my boat, a group of quiet sixth-grade girls, included Razorback, Sacramento Splittail, and Desert Tortoise.

The kids piled into 10-passenger Voyageur canoes. With the staff, there were 16 canoes making their way down the river. Quite a sight for those who spotted us from bridges or other boats.

One boat sang "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" as they paddled. Another counted, trying to get everybody to paddle at the same time (it didn't work). Others gave their boats names, and chants. One boat was the "Night Hawks." My boat mates dubbed themselves the "Celebrities."

And, of course, there were races. When the Night Hawks overtook the Royal Kings, one of them shouted, "How's the weather back there?"

'Tight' and 'cool'

Sixth-grader Mustafa Abdi called the day "tight" and "cool."

"It's perfect and fun," he said. "It's kind of like exercising. I want to come back."

Truvontee McElroy's favorite part was going over the waves created when a barge passed by.

Part of the trip's value, said language arts teacher Veann Beutler, was that the students got to see the Mississippi River up close. The sixth-grade humanities curriculum at the school covers Minnesota history, and the river is a vital part of that.

"Now, they have something to refer to when we're talking about Minnesota history," said Beutler, who organized the trip and called it a "phenomenal opportunity." "They'll get a sense of how big and powerful the river is."

Wilderness Inquiry has been around for 30 years, Lais said, and the group does outdoors trips all over the world.

The trips involving students have been paid for with a combination of support from different foundations in the area. Last week's trip was paid for with part of a $10,800 grant from the Pohlad Foundation to get kids from north Minneapolis on the river. Wilderness Inquiry is also working with groups of students from St. Paul, charter schools, private schools and nonprofits.

Student Maria Dominguez said she thought the canoe ride was "a little scary" when the waves came, but "it was cool."

After lunch on a sandy beach, the canoes went through the Ford lock and dam, and the kids were yelling as they slowly dropped 38 feet -- the equivalent of moving 6 million gallons of water, according to one trip leader. Then, they landed at Hidden Falls in St. Paul.

"I think it's great," said Tammy Anderson, a physical education teacher at Northeast. "It's good for the kids to get out here and have fun, and get some exercise."

Emily Johns • 612-673-7460