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Here it is, National Canoe Day, and so far I have only dumped once.

Ah well, what would a summer be without that helpless feeling of being picked up by hurling water and cuffed upside down so quickly you barely have time to close your mouth and pray you’ll miss the rocks before having even to think about how far downstream you’ll end up before you can right the damned thing and start all over again?

Quite frankly, I was probably in far more danger two years ago when I and two other panelists, Trooper’s Ra McGuire and aboriginal leader Roberta Jamieson, sat on that CBC panel and picked the canoe as one of the Seven Wonders of Canada.

As the one who probably argued loudest for the canoe, I was the one who got the death threats after we picked it along with Pier 21, Old Quebec, Niagara Falls, Prairie skies, the Rockies and the igloo over a few other suggestions that had received more votes.

The threats weren’t serious – unless, of course, these dancing rapids along the Madawaska River have somehow been rigged? – but they were indicative of the passion when it comes to the things and places Canadians love most.

Which brings us right back to the canoe.

I am, admittedly, in awe of the foresight that had North American natives design a craft that would fit perfectly, upside down, on cars that hadn’t yet been invented.

What other vehicle on Earth can you use as a hat when it rains – or a shelter when it snows, or even a table when it’s time to eat?

What other country defines its people by their ability to make love in such a vehicle – though fellow paddler Phil Chester insists a true Canadian “knows enough to take out the centre thwart” before proving citizenship.

In these times of cutbacks and soaring fuel costs and increasing concern about the environment, the canoe deserves its special day.

As Pierre Trudeau once put it, “paddle a hundred miles in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.”

Land of the sliver birch indeed

Others will claim the canoe was invented in various forms elsewhere, but the Canadian canoe, as we know it, is all here.

I stand with legendary Canadian riverrat Bill Mason, who used to say “First God created a canoe – then he created a country to go with it.”

In a book on a shelf behind me, John Jennings even goes so far as to claim “Canada exists as it does today because of the canoe.

“In the United States it was the horse that determined the national boundaries,” the Trent University professor writes in The Canoe in Canadian Cultures, “in Canada, the canoe.”

It was the canoe that made native travel and hunting, European exploration and the fur trade possible. In the centuries since those early birch bark giants were the workhorse of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, the canoe has been transformed by design and materials until today a typical river like the Madawaska will have everything on it from unscratched and shining cedar strips in the flatwaters to banana-shaped creek canoes and fiberglass, Kevlar and even aluminum canoes pounding through the rocks and the whitewater. As well, they will be joined in by kayaks of a half-dozen different shapes and dozens of different colours, all playing the rapids and eddies with an expertise that ranges from the rank amateur to the Olympic potential.

It is a scene played out across the country, east to west and south to north, with multiple variations but one given: always, a canoe will be involved somehow.

To get a sense of the vast variety in canoes, you can’t do better than a visit to the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario.

For many, it is the equal of the Portrait Gallery of Canada. The difference, of course, is that the Canoe Museum exists.

It is also a good reminder that time doesn’t actually race as quickly as we are led to believe.

In a few months it will be 70 years since the scholarly Queen’s Quarterly stated, as simply as possible, that “The ingredients of a holiday in Canada are idleness, water and a canoe.”

Tell me, what has changed since?