Marvin Fournier launched two canoes off a city park boat dock on a recent December afternoon, as he has done countless times for over a decade. The vessels were decked out in twinkling Christmas lights, the remnants of a prior paddling outing on the river — a holiday tradition with fellow river canoe guides.
“We put up Christmas trees and decorations, and we went on the main stem,” he recalled. “We sang songs, and people were singing from the bridges with us. It was incredible.”
Fournier discovered the magic of the river 15 years ago when he started leading canoe trips with Friends of the Chicago River. He’s one of several volunteer guides underpinning the nonprofit’s efforts to increase accessibility and share love for the river.
Because they are all volunteers, Fournier added, “there’s no ego.”
The organization’s executive director, Margaret Frisbie, can attest to that.
“The first time I met Marvin, he said, ‘You know, I’d pay to do this.’ I was like, ‘Careful!’ ” Frisbie said.
“It really has changed my life,” Fournier said, maneuvering his oar under the water’s surface. His expertise has grown so much he got hired as a kayak instructor for REI four years ago.
Friends of the Chicago River originated from a canoe trip when the organization’s founder Robert Cassidy paddled the river in 1979 for a Chicago magazine article. “That was our founding story,” Frisbie said.
For almost three decades, canoe guides have volunteered with the nonprofit to take locals and tourists exploring up and down the river. Now 35 to 40 people volunteer annually, including veterans like Fournier and younger apprentices like his nephew.
One of those longtime volunteers, Chris Parson, joined in the mid-1990s. Now in his 80s, he has “pretty much retired” from leading trips on his own due to health issues, but continues to haul boats with the trailer hitch on his car.
“It’s been really a lot of fun to watch it grow and to help it grow,” he said. “In any event, I can’t let the group go because, of course, they’re all my friends.”
Like the characters in the 1964 stop-motion animation special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the guides are an interesting group with diverse backgrounds, Fournier said.
“I call it the ‘misfit toys of canoeing,’” he said, “because we have lawyers, craftsmen, teachers, students. We have a whole eclectic, and it’s just worked so well.”
The programming they lead is just as varied, including custom trips, team-building events for companies, planting native vegetation along the river’s edge, litter and trash cleanups, Halloween paddles and moonlight outings dreamed up by guides.
“We basically are there to interpret meaning, to tell them about what the river is like, what’s going on with the river, the plantings, the improvement in water quality, all of those things, and the bottom line is to keep everybody safe,” Parson said.
That mission of safety goes hand in hand with the nonprofit’s advocacy for stronger water quality regulations so more people can enjoy the river — not only in boats, canoes and kayaks but also by swimming in the water. For more than a decade, Friends of the Chicago River has been pioneering efforts for an open-water swim. It almost happened this year but was relocated because of permitting issues.
Fournier recalled once taking a group of teenagers vacationing from Europe on a river paddle.
“And these kids start taking off (their clothes) to go swimming,” Fournier said. “They got Speedos on, bikinis on. I go, ‘No, no, no, no, no. We’re not swimming yet.’”
Because of the city’s industrial history, the river is known for being polluted and full of trash. There’s still work to do, but the water quality has improved significantly in the last few decades and advocates say the waterway is healthier now than it has been in the past 150 years.
Canoe guides have had front-row seats to the river’s rebirth and growth, including a bounce-back for fish populations from fewer than 10 species in the 1970s to more than 70 nowadays.
“What used to be a dangerous place, what used to be a sort of a dark mark on the city, has now become an attraction,” Parson said. “And it’s there for people of all kinds, all interests — birds, wildlife, nature, native plants — all of these people can find places to go along the river.”
On the North Branch outing with Fournier, Frisbie pointed out a swimming muskrat, a roosting red-tailed hawk and a great blue heron. As dusk approached, a large coyote skulked around on the riverbank.
Parson has seen great horned owls and beavers. It’s always exciting, but nothing compares to witnessing someone go out on the river for the first time.
“I think my favorite memory — and it’s a recurring memory because it happens all the time — is when you take someone out who’s never been in a canoe, let alone paddling the canoe and been responsible for steering it,” he said. “Give them a little bit of instruction, a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of help, and then see their reaction when they get out there in nature, and see all of the wildlife that we see on the river, right here in the middle of this metropolitan area.”
“That, to me, is the most rewarding part of the whole project,” he added.
The paddles led by volunteer instructors offer participants, as well as the guides, a different way to experience the city, according to a close friend of Fournier and longtime volunteer guide Tom Judge.
“It gives you a whole new perspective,” Judge said. “You see things from a different angle.”
And he means literally. He had driven over the Diversey Avenue bridge a million times, he said, but something changed the first time he paddled underneath it. Many Chicagoans, however, take the river for granted.
It’s why the canoe volunteer guides take their role so seriously, to educate and increase accessibility and thus advance conservation efforts.
“It’s a pleasure to see that there’s work to be done, of course, but the more people that know what a valuable resource it is and can be, the more likely we are to get where we all want to go,” Judge said.