The river you can only walk to on a boardwalk

The Grass River doesn’t look like much of a river. It’s a slow green ribbon of water that wanders through cedar swamp and sedge meadow, linking Lake Bellaire to Clam Lake right in the middle of Antrim County’s Chain of Lakes. You can’t really hike its banks — the ground is fen and bog, the kind of wet that swallows a boot. So people built a boardwalk and went out over it instead.

That anyone can walk there at all comes down to a fight in 1969. A landowner named Alfred Austin had a 62-acre piece along the river and a developer’s interest in it, and rather than see the wetland filled and platted, he and a county conservation man named Warren Studley rounded up worried neighbors to protect it. They called it the Grass River Wildlife Project. The idea caught: by the official dedication on August 21, 1976, they had a thousand acres set aside, and the preserve has since grown past 1,500.

The boardwalk came in pieces, the way these things do. The Sedge Meadow Trail went down in 1982, and over the years the network spread into seven miles of trails with names borrowed from the region’s history — Chippewa, Nipissing, Algonquin. A long stretch of it floats just above the cedar wetland, so a kid in a stroller or someone using a wheelchair can roll out over ground their grandparents would have called impassable.

It’s a quiet place. Orchids and pitcher plants grow in the fen, herons stalk the shallows, and the river slides by without much hurry. The thing to remember, standing out there on the planking with skunk cabbage on both sides, is that this was nearly somebody’s subdivision — and a handful of neighbors decided a swamp was worth keeping.