By Ellen Foley Special To Channel 3000

For 10,000 years, a slip of land north of Madison was the center of this continent's commerce. This past weekend, we took a peek at what has been deemed the equivalent of O'Hare Airport for the canoe civilizations.

We thought we were just going on a hike to an undiscovered trail. But by the day's end, serendipity had renewed our sense of wonder at Wisconsin's natural assets.

My husband wanted to hike in Columbia County because we hadn't explored there before. He found a place in his walking trails book called the Marquette Trail, aptly named for two middle-aged, modern explorers raised in Milwaukee.

We were surprised at the trailhead by a tour offer for the Old Indian Agent House. We wanted to be outside and we were leery that the house might be some sort of tourist trap selling moccasins and it would interrupt the karma of our walk along the water.

It was only by luck or perhaps divine intervention that we stopped in the office and set up a tour for after the hike.

The rolling trail took us out into acres of prairies where the wind blew through our hair in a deep exhalation of history. "This is good for the soul," Tom said. My husband spent the better part of a year in a hospital room. Open prairies are heaven to him.

We looped back to the Old Indian Agent House just as it started to rain. The genial guide ushered us into the 180-year-old house built for an Indian agent and his family. The house is filled with hands-on history. It is remarkably large and smartly arranged. We were smitten.

The guide reminded us that Portage is the patch of land between the Fox and the Wisconsin Rivers. The Fox River flows north to Canada and the Wisconsin River runs south to New Orleans, bestowing upon this rather humble piece of real estate a wildly important place in geography. Technology in the form of railroads, car and airplanes has made us forget that this magical piece of land stands humbly against the hum of modern highways.

With all the recent depressing news about the ongoing environmental disaster after the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, we were honored to nod to the marshy land around Portage that filters our water and the two powerful rivers that bring fresh water to mid-continent America.

In the early 1800s when you couldn't get very far without a boat, Portage was a crowded, vibrant trading center where Indian nations, explorers, French fur trappers and frontier families from the upstart United States did business on treks to and fro the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. When the American government took over, it built a fort and a house for its Indian agent who kept the peace by paying the Indians for their land and helped them by repairing their traps and providing food during lean times.

The Old Indian Agent House, restored by the National Society of the Colonial Dames in the State of Wisconsin, was built in 1830 to house Juliette Kinzie and her husband, John. We were so intrigued we bought at the gift shop Juliette's book about her life in Wisconsin before it became a state, and we gawked at the story of her granddaughter and namesake, Juliette Gordon Low, who started the Girl Scouts founded on lessons from grandma.

We were drawn to Wauona Trail, now a residential and commercial paved street but at one time known as the 2,500 paces needed to carry or pull your boat or goods between the rivers, opening up a quicker route from the East Coast to the unknown wild regions south of Green Bay.

We ate at Trail's, a Wisconsin supper club with a popular fish fry. I kept expecting fairies to appear or some epiphany to startle us because we were sitting at the place where rivers go in two opposite directions. We did have a good meal at a reasonable price and were uplifted by the human sound of conversation in the bar that mercifully did not have Musak. It felt like a place where neighbors cared enough about each other to ask them questions about daily life.

Portage is also famous as the childhood home of noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Zona Gale. They have gained the notice of Bill Cronon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and Madison native, who studies history, geography and environmental science. Cronon is writing a book about Portage.

I reminded myself after we got home that Turner and Gale were interested in how people on the ground experience life rather than lofty theories about how people should live. They would have found Juliette Kinzie a kindred spirit if they had read her vivid memoir titled "Wau-Bun," the Ojibway word for "the break of day."

We hope Cronon's book brings a new dawn to Portage. It is indeed a geographically, culturally and historically magical place. We hope that whatever its fate, the town that time and history seem to have forgotten, still will be a place that, as Tom said, is good for your soul.