The three intrepid voyageuses of Mid-America, about 2012, are pictured midway through their transit of the Mississippi River from its source in northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. Front to back, they are Anne Sherve-Ose, Debbie Stephens-Knutson and Debbie Lennox-White.

Episode One — The Great Adventure Begins

By Robert E. Oliver

It was mid-winter 2004 when Debbie Lennox-White phoned her friend Anne Sherve-Ose to ask if she’d join her for a canoe trip on the Mississippi River the following summer.

Without hesitation, Sherve-Ose was “all-in.”

For those who know her, this wasn’t a surprise; canoes, and canoeing, are a recurring theme in her life. The plan, as much as there was one, was to begin at the river’s source in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and paddle to the Twin Cities.

Thirteen years and 2,340 miles later, they reached the Gulf of Mexico.

Now, climb aboard and discover America’s Great River as few will ever see it: from a canoe.

Born in Minot, North Dakota, Anne Sherve attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota in the late ’60s and early ’70s. She changed majors several times. First came music. Next, English. Then, philosophy. A life-long fitness enthusiast — she’d taken many physical education classes at college — Sherve discovered sometime in her junior year she only had enough credits to graduate as a P.E. major.

“I graduated from a so-called music school with a degree in P.E.,” she said.

In the summer of 1977, she was an Outward Bound instructor in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, teaching students to canoe, portage, use a compass, and, generally, survive in the wilderness. Thus began a love affair with canoes and the Boundary Waters that would last a lifetime.

Seeking wider adventure, she applied to the Peace Corps, but it was the United Church Board of World Ministries that urgently needed her to fill an immediate opening at its girls school in Izmir, Turkey. Seemingly amazed it happened at all, she remembers, “I had a month to get visas and shots, pack a trunk, and say goodbye.”

Sherve was officially a missionary on the payroll, but proselytizing in Turkey was illegal, so she taught music and P.E. instead.

“I lived with Americans my own age, made excellent friends, traveled a lot, went scuba diving nearly every weekend, learned Turkish, and played the organ in the only Christian church in Izmir. I even had a standing gig singing and playing guitar in a bar!”

Her excellent adventure over, she came home to Iowa, fell in love, and married Alan Ose, a farmer near Williams. Soon, she was employed by the Northeast Hamilton Community School District in Blairsburg, teaching preschool and coaching volleyball.

“That particular career ended with the arrival of two babies, but when the second child entered kindergarten, I took a job teaching music at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School in Webster City.”

After earning a Masters in Music Education from St. Thomas University, St. Paul, Minnesota, in the early ’90s Sherve-Ose, as she became known after her marriage, was appointed music instructor at Ellsworth Community College in Iowa Falls, a position she held from 1998 to 2016. While music got her the job, she couldn’t suppress her by now innate instinct to get into a canoe each summer.

That need was fulfilled when she began teaching a class at Ellsworth that took groups of college students to the Boundary Waters each summer. In addition to mastering the canoe and essential wilderness survival skills, her students painted, carved and wrote stories and poems for humanities credits.

Who wouldn’t enjoy a summer like that?

Now officially retired, Sherve-Ose works six months a year at the U.S. Forest Service visitor center in Cook, Minnesota, on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Over her time there, she’s built trails, dug latrines, put up trail signs, and even cleaned outhouses. Mostly, though, she helps visitors with permits and reservations, and advises them on how to get the most out of their dream adventure in one of America’s finest canoeing venues.

Sherve-Ose and her husband raised their family on a farm near Williams. Like farm wives everywhere, she can drive a tractor and hold her own when it comes to the many chores which make up life on any farm, including remodeling a machine shed.

Of farming, she wisely said, “It’s a good life if you have your finances under control.”

Now, meet two of Sherve-Ose’s St. Olaf classmates: Debbie Lennox-White and Debbi Stephens-Knutson. Both Sherve-Ose and Lennox-White were teachers during their working years; Stephens-Knutson was a public health nurse. Lennox-White is a life-long student of Native American history, in which canoeing plays an important role. She became the expedition’s unofficial photographer, and provided many of the photos for this series of articles.

Stephens-Knutson had no canoeing experience, but was a willing learner. Beyond friendship, the three shared what Sherve-Ose calls “a love of the outdoors, a willingness to get out of our comfort zones, and a spirit of adventure.”

At least eight other friends and relatives have joined in for a week’s paddling over the years, all except one of them being women.

Lennox-White explains: “We have nothing in principle against men, but they usually want to run things, even if there’s only one of them in a group of women. That wasn’t the trip we had in mind.”

The only male ever to infiltrate the sacred sisterhood was Benoit Peillon, a teenaged foreign exchange student from France.

As you read this, in early July 2024, the threesome are paddling their 18-foot Alumacraft canoe far, far to the north, nearing the south shore of Hudson’s Bay. It’s a region home to polar bears — hungry polar bears to be precise — but that’s a story for another time. First, we must come to grips with the Father of Waters, the mighty Mississippi River.

*The earliest European explorers of North America’s interior rivers were Frenchmen Jacques Cartier, Rene-Robert LaSalle, Fr. Jacques Marquette, and Samuel de Champlain. Often called “voyageurs,” literally travelers in English, they were far more than that. They needed superior skills as boatmen, woodsmen and hunters, and the courage and pluck to explore the vast region along the Mississippi River they named New France. From 1534-1763, French, French-Canadian, and Metis voyageurs explored the continent’s mid-section, almost entirely by canoe. The less used, less familiar word “voyageuses,” the feminine version of voyageur, appears in our title as the canoeists of this story are women.

Next time: Paddling from source to cities