Only in Canada could a canoe lead to a death threat. But that's exactly what happened to Globe and Mail writer Roy MacGregor when he served as a judge for the Seven Wonders of Canada contest on CBC in 2007. Seems the city of Thunder Bay was some peeved that its pride and joy, the Sleeping Giant, was overlooked for greater wonders, such as the lowly canoe. It turns out that the angered contestants didn't really want to kill Roy, they just wanted to make a point. In his 50th book, it is the national storyteller's turn to explain his allegiance to and affection for this country's "first and still favourite means for getting around." The often surprising tales in this engaging book show that the canoe, as an icon, is more freighted than at first it might appear. In fact, MacGregor asks readers to think of the canoe as "neither artifact nor symbol, but … one of the great Canadian characters."
Spun as if with twirls of wood smoke around an open fire, there are appearances here by lots of the usual suspects in the Canadian canoe dramatis personae: Bill Mason, Pierre Trudeau, Anahareo and Archie Belaney, Blair Fraser, Esther Keyser, Tom Thomson, Frances Anne Hopkins and Fannie Case, often aligned in new combinations or with an unexpected contextual twist.
But, on MacGregor's way, travelling the backwaters of the Canadian canoeing experiences, there are new and relatively unknown characters as well, all with great stories, well told.
Particularly luminous in that pantheon of unknown paddlers are brothers Phil and Lorne Chester, with whom MacGregor regularly paddles. If Bob and Doug McKenzie, of SCTV infamy, were canoeists, then the Chester brothers would be their reincarnation, stars of a Mel Brooks-ish tale (think Blazing Paddles), parsed with humour and impeccable timing, that navigates the brink between too corny for words and deeply instructive in their zeal for Canada, canoes and all that melds the two into passion in a country of rivers. Serious stuff in a deceptively breezy package.
And in one of the most surprising narrative turns in the book, MacGregor parleys readers from Round Lake Centre, a town just south of Algonquin Park, to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. The unlikely (and, spoiler, sad) story of the Nile Expedition will be new to even the most committed canoe-lit consumers, but it, too, illustrates what this author does best. Blending a journeyman storyteller's sensibility with thorough historical research that reveals the geopolitical context of Canada's participation in a nasty skirmish over British control of a key trading hub at the confluence of the White and Blue branches of the mighty Nile River, he takes readers on a military canoe trip in the heart of Africa. Who knew?
Canoe Country is a rollicking good read – engaging, thought-provoking and, at times, startling in the quirky turns of the research and storytelling, as far as it goes. MacGregor weaves a convincing argument that the canoe is one of Canada's great characters. But we learn almost nothing of its pre-contact roots and origins. Of this colourful character's formative years and its indigenous ancestors, we learn little. The people who gave Canada the canoe in the first place are conspicuous in their relative absence in these pages. Set within the evolving scholarship of canoes, including works such as Canoe Nation by Bruce Erickson and Inheriting a Canoe Paddle by Misao Dean, there is more to be said about the canoe.
As such, any book about "the making of Canada" needs a chorus of founding voices that is noticeably absent here. In every watershed within this riparian country, from coast to coast to coast, when local people turned to local materials to meet a need to move or to communicate, the solution was invariably a canoe – a vessel without decks, made of bark, skin or cedar. This was the conveyance that was taken up by the French, reluctantly adopted by the English, and now – so ably illustrated in this new book – occupies a special place in the Canadian collective imagination.
But at the heart of the canoe story of Canada are the experiences, the technologies, the languages, the generosity and the cultural durability of Canada's First Peoples, who, like the proponents of Canada's wonders, might have something to say about Roy MacGregor's choices.
James Raffan is the director of development at the Canadian Canoe Museum. His most recent book is Circling the Midnight Sun.
Editor's note: Canoe Country: The Making of Canada is Roy MacGregor's 50th book. Incorrect information appeared in the original version of this article.