Garry Hill paddles the Wildcat Creek through Foster Park on July 22. Hill worked with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to designate the Wildcat Creek, and its south ford, as the third State Scenic River. The designation has also been approved for the Blue River and Cedar Creek. Kokomo Tribune/Kelly Lafferty Gerber
Garry Hill stays busy serving as chairman of the Greentown Board of Zoning Appeals. The 76-year-old is recognized in the community as an environmental advocate and nature lover.
But when Hill brings out one of his favorite canoes or kayaks for a trip down the river, he isn’t known as Garry.
Call him Muskrat. That’s been Hill’s paddling nickname for about 50 years, and it’s well known in nearly every canoe club and river- cleanup group around the state. After all, he’s a member of almost all of them.
He gained the moniker in the 1970s after someone at work, seeing his hippie-inspired long hair and chest-length beard for the first time, said he was “nothing but a scruffy old muskrat.” His friends found it hilarious and the name stuck.
Hill has spent more than half a century paddling Indiana waterways, organizing river expeditions and leading efforts to clean up creeks and streams — like the time he spent days with a crew clearing out around 3,000 tires from an abandoned property near the Wildcat Creek.
In the ’70s and ’80s, he was a competitive kayaker who twice won the state championship in downstream racing. Back then, Hill would paddle as much as 260 days a year to keep in shape.
In 2003, after retiring from Delco Electronics in Kokomo five years earlier, Hill founded Muskrat's Wildcat Creek Expeditions and has organized more than 600 river expeditions around Indiana that are open to anyone who wants to join. The trips sometimes draw a crowd or sometimes just a few people. Although Hill has paddled more than 150 streams around the nation, including about 80 waterways in Indiana, the Wildcat is his one true love. The creek flows near his home in Greentown, and one of its tributaries runs through the small Howard County hamlet of West Middleton where he grew up.
On a recent hot July afternoon, Hill and longtime canoeing partner Dave Inskeep set out for a short trip through downtown Kokomo on the creek — a section of river they’ve paddled hundreds of times.
Hill dons his usual river attire: American flag shorts and a T-shirt from the annual Indiana Paddlers Rendezvous, a weekend outing which he’s organized for 40 years. The canoe is strapped on top of his SUV with a vanity license plate reading “CREE K” and a window sticker saying “My other car is a canoe.” The watercraft that day is one he’s had for years, but it’s not his favorite, Hill noted.
“My favorite of all is a tandem canoe with a pretty girl up front,” he said with an impish smile. As he launches out onto the stream, Hill explains how the city cut off a large bend by digging a canal in the early 1900s to make it flow straight and points out where all the low-head dams, now demolished, once stood.
Nearing downtown, he shows a spot along the bank where a Kokomo Fire Department administrator found an abandoned meth lab on a trip he organized for city officials to promote the Wildcat Guardians, the river-protection and cleanup group he founded in 1990.
A large homeless encampment that has since dispersed was once located a little further downstream, Hill explains. Then he shows the spot where they once found a human skull in the water that police eventually determined had been used for scientific research.
Suddenly, Hill notices a small muskrat on a log jutting out in to the stream. “It’s probably one of my cousins,” he jokes.
Taking a quick break, Hill stops and pulls out some mussel shells he spots in the creek bed, examining them to determine the species and explaining he sometimes goes along with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to survey the state’s mussel population.
Inskeep pulls up to also take a look.
“Muskrat has a personal affinity for the freshwater mussel,” he said after the trip. “He introduced me to those and I’ve got quite involved with them as well.”
Inskeep also credits Hill and members of the Wildcat Guardians with turning him on to paddling. A member gave the retired high-school biology teacher a canoe so he could adopt a section for cleanup, and Hill and others showed him how to safely navigate the river.
That same story has played out countless times since Hill began organizing river expeditions, Inskeep noted.
“Garry has been really instrumental in introducing people,” he said. “Of all the old-time paddlers I know, he’s probably one of the most benevolent when it comes to not complaining about people who come poorly prepared and make a lot of extra work for the trip leader.”
Hill said his passion for getting others into paddling is simple: he lovers rivers, and he wants others to love them, too.
That feeling has stayed with him ever since he stepped into a canoe for the first time in 1972. A friend from work invited him to go on Pipe Creek in Miami County. Hill was 24, and the experience left him in awe.
“We only did about four or five miles and took out, and it was nothing difficult, but I just felt like my life had changed right then,” he said. “Being in that canoe and feeling the movement and flowing with the stream — gosh, it was just wonderful.” Hill still feels in awe of Indiana’s waterways. He writes poems about rivers and his experiences paddling them. One verse he composed has become like a mantra for his life, and he readily shares it with those new to paddling.
“Fall in love with the river, and its music will pull you back from wherever your life may lead,” Hill said.
That passion led Hill to offer a special gift to his most beloved river, the Wildcat Creek. He worked with the DNR to get it designated in 1980 as Indiana’s third official State Scenic River.
Now, after 53 years of paddling, Hill has no intention to stop advocating for Indiana streams. As he sees it, they’re the state’s last vestige of an untamed natural world that has all but disappeared in the modern age.
“We’ve got parks that are great, but not really all that natural,” Hill said. “The streams are really looking back all the way to glacial times. They’re a piece of our environment that’s been here for thousands of years.”
And ensuring those timeless waterways are preserved for future Hoosiers is something worth fighting for, he emphasized.
“ Anything that has to do with our natural, free-flowing streams in Indiana, I want to be a part of it,” Hill said.
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