Bruce Lehmann of Cedar worked on search and rescues with the U.S. Coast Guard in Alaska, has sailed the Great Lakes from Lake Superior to Toronto, and was the first captain of the schooner Madeline. But of all the waters he’s navigated, it’s the humble beauty of the Cedar River and the surrounding Cedar swamp that fascinate him the most.

He and wife Janine Lehmann live on the south end of Lake Leelanau, just “four doors north of the swamp,” on land his family acquired in 1936. “My folks, who went by Bones and Jo, lived here in a log cabin.”

Lehmann says while many know and love Lake Leelanau, only a few have discovered the quiet charms of the Cedar River and Cedar swamp complex that feed it. “Some of my earliest memories were at three years old, riding through the swamp on a flat-bottomed boat with my dad and mother.”

You have to know where to go, avoiding weed beds, but “go up that river and turn around twice and you would think you are in Canada.”

Because of his lifelong stewardship of the Cedar River, Lehmann — who is  known in these parts as the Cedar River Rat — now serves as a consultant to the grassroots Cedar River Waterway & Park team, who intend to improve access for all to the three-mile river that winds through a wilderness sanctuary into Lake Leelanau. 

Here’s more about this lesser-known Leelanau waterway, and the man who loves it:

Leelanau Ticker: Your early memories navigating the Cedar River paved the way for a life on the water?
Lehmann: I worked for the Coast Guard for nine years, some of the best of my life. Then I worked as a lab tech at the State Hospital. Janine was a psych nurse, and I thought so much of Janine I introduced her to my best friend [laughs]. Now here I am. When the State Hospital closed, I wrote my captain’s license, and I wound up sailing schooners for 15 years. Later I did boat restoration, working with [Suttons Bay’s] George Powell from time to time restoring old Coast Guard boats, including a 36-footer that Disney ended up using in a movie.

Leelanau Ticker: You were introduced to me as the River Rat…are you cool with this nickname?
Lehmann: [Laughs] Thank you, Ray Pleva. I don’t mind. In my 75 years that I have vivid memories on the river, I have slowly watched this whole ecosystem change.

Leelanau Ticker: What’s one way it’s changed?
Lehmann: Old Frank Rosinski who lived across the road from us was in his 90s in the 1950s, and he would come down and chat with my folks when we were up. He said there was a big fire at the swamp in the 1800s, I remember going up the river all the way to Cedar and would see charred trees. Those are now gone…compost. The river seemed to be wider then, with fewer weeds.

After decades of weed and lily pad growth, it is getting shallower and shallower, eventually — someday — will become a meadow. There is also a weed curtain at the mouth of the river, and after a big rain event sediment accrues there, also making it shallower and shallower.

Leelanau Ticker: It’s a huge habitat, right?
Lehmann: The Cedar swamp is basically about 3,000 acres between the Lake Leelanau lakeshore and Cedar. About half is privately owned, and the conservancy has been acquiring more, which is good.

Leelanau Ticker: Were there ever buildings or structures along the Cedar river?
Lehmann: The Cedar Rod & Gun Club [started in Cedar in 1936 by Pete Schettek, Rufus Brow, Paul Garvin and Joe Pleva] owned 120 acres and its members built a small building on their river property. My dad was a life member of the club. I have a picture of my mom and dad in front of it.

Leelanau Ticker: Was it a co-ed club?
Lehmann: You are taking the 30’s here…c’mon. [Laughs] It was a trapper shack and their clubhouse. They’d take a boat up or down the river and have meetings in that 12-by-14-foot tar paper shack. There is nothing left of the old clubhouse. It probably collapsed about 1959.

Leelanau Ticker: Big adventures you’ve had on this river?
Lehmann: One Easter vacation, my dad and I came up from Toledo. The ice was off the lake, and we put a canoe in the water and paddled up the river, to look around and do a little fishing. Then a snowstorm hit. We were dressed for 50-degree weather. We are clear up the river, so we pulled the canoe over at the dock at the Cedar Rod & Gun Club and went inside and Dad started a fire in the stove that was there. We were there about three hours waiting for the snow to quit until we finally started home. I was freezing. Dad took his socks off and put them on my hands. We got to the mouth of the river, and he said take your jacket off. I say ‘WHAT?!’ He had me stick the paddle in my jacket sleeve and hold it up and we sailed all the way home on a south breeze.

Leelanau Ticker: What might people not realize about the Cedar swamp?
Lehmann: The good thing about Lake Leelanau is that it has such a huge flushing system: There’s two good rivers, the Solon branch that goes through Solon clear across M-72 and then the Victoria Creek that goes north of Cedar. And there’s numerous other small streams that feed this lake. It’s got a good flush; all you have to do to see that is go up to Leland and look at the water going over the dam.

Another good thing is The Leelanau Conservancy has acquired ownership of all the lake frontage along the swamp. [The conservancy itself calls this 548-acre undisturbed wetland complex “an environmental superhero that protects the health of Lake Leelanau.”]

Leelanau Ticker: Your background is in search and rescue, have you ever done Cedar River rescues?
Lehmann: I got a call at 11:30 one night about 15 years ago, from the sheriff’s dispatch. A guy with a little motor on his small canoe got lost in the swamp. He left his glasses in his truck. He made a bad turn and it got dark and he got scared, and he called 911. They patched me through to him, and I said I know exactly where you are. He was real glad to see me!

Leelanau Ticker: How about a good ol’ fishing tale?
Lehmann: Growing up with George Rosinski and Leo Garvin the Cedar swamp was our playground. One time we went up the Solon branch, trout fishing, and took our 17-foot flat bottomed skiff with an outboard motor as far as we could go and anchored. We stripped our blue jeans off and waded upstream. When we came back, no boat. The only option was walking all the way upstream, barefoot, in the swamp. With the deer flies! At 15 years old, we had to run through the field to the house at the Garvins, in our skivvies.