Log Jams and Sandbars

•December 24, 2025•

by Janet Roney

The old man fishing from the Kaskaskia River bridge at Vandalia said, “It’ll be smooth sailing from here to the Mississippi, boys! There’s no more logjams for the rest of the river.”

This was good news to my three older brothers (teenagers at the time) and my father in the summer of 1952. They had lost track of the number of logjams they had portaged around since leaving Findlay a few days before. Every portage meant unloading their fourteen-foot wooden outboard motor boat, Ida, dragging the boat, motor, and supplies straight up steep banks, through brush, poison ivy, and cornfields on top of the bank, and lowering it all back down to the river so they could continue to the next logjam. When they were not portaging, they were often wading in the river, dragging their boat over sandbars. Their once-in-a-lifetime adventure floating down the Kaskaskia to the Mississippi had become hard work.