On the Kaw ? As Ralph Newell helped my wife and I climb into a canoe on the Kansas River in Lawrence, he advised the water was shallow enough that, “If you tip over, the best thing to do is just stand up.”

“This is my kind of river,” I thought.

If it’s the thrill of whitewater canoeing you want, the Kansas River is not your ride.

But the Kaw has its own thrills and charms.

It’s perfect if you want to get away from the world. You can paddle up to rippled sandbars and stroll barefoot, watch birds, and listen to the wind slicing through the treetops.

We paddled from just below the Bowersock Dam in Lawrence to Eudora, turned right and up a short way on the Wakarusa River where Newell, who with his wife, Kim, operates the Lawrence KOA Campground and the Kansas River Canoe Co., picked us up to return us to our car.

Newell said our trip, which took about 3 1/2 hours, was about seven river miles, which because of our meandering paddling technique was probably more like 20 miles.

We saw every inch of that portion of the river.

Along the way, we startled a flock of geese, watched herons dip their beaks into the water, and when we stopped for a break at one sandbar, and as I tipped up my can of soda to drink, I spotted high in the sky two large birds riding the wind currents. We think they were the eagles that Newell said were nesting in the area.

The junkyard

The trip was not without its eyesores.

A three-plus-hour canoe trip on the Kansas River gave writer Scott Rothschild a chance to witness its natural beauty and a few eyesores.

Evidence of human activity was strewn along the banks and in the water. The evidence included rusted cars, tires and liquor bottles. While some of the landscape looked pristine, other parts looked like junkyards.

To those who love the river, the two faces of the Kaw are reflective of how we treat it.

Under federal law, the Kansas River should be clean enough for contact recreational use, such as swimming, where a person’s body is fully immersed in the water.

In reality, the Kansas River is nowhere near clean enough for swimming, with fecal coliform bacteria counts many, many times what would be allowed for such activity.

Even eating fish caught in the Kaw is a dicey proposition.

Advisories are posted, warning people against eating fish caught in certain areas because of high levels of chlordane in fish tissue. Chlordane was a chemical used in pesticides, but it was banned by the EPA in 1988 because it can damage the nervous system. But the chemical continues to travel through the food chain.

In 2002, American Rivers, a nonprofit conservation organization, listed the Kansas River as No. 4 on a list of the nation’s 10 most environmentally endangered rivers.

It described the Kaw as “festering under a smothering load of livestock manure” and accused the Kansas Legislature of relaxing clean-water standards despite warnings from the federal government.

Needs more friends

Bob Angelo, a high-ranking environmental scientist with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said the Kaw certainly was stressed environmentally from waste and pesticides in runoff and sand-dredging operations.

But, he added, that didn’t keep him off the river, or from taking his son and Boy Scouts there.

Water-quality issues are difficult political problems to resolve, but he said the river could be cleaner through just a little effort by educating folks to stop throwing trash in streams. “It’s just a terrible thing that occurs,” he said.

Angelo described the river as a wonderful place to learn and wonder about living things.

He said he had found fossilized remains and evidence of glaciation there. Early explorer accounts describe the Kaw as a beautiful area full of otters, beavers and minks.

Exploring the river, he said, “ties together the past, present and future. It would be a real shame if people decided that they didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”