Driving home from Chicago after a funeral for an old voyageur who whiled away his long life enabling others in all things canoe, the asphalt rhythm brings heroes to mind. Mile by mile, like stroke on stroke, the shadowed landscape ticks by. The moon slides west. Stars turn.
Thoughts cascade. Canoe heroes come in all shapes and sizes. There’s Marquette and Joliette, Lewis and Clarke, David Thompson and the pantheon of paddling explorers who have inspired so many others. Steve Landick, Verlen Kruger, Victoria Jason, Jon Turk, Don Starkell, among many. And then there’s Mr. Canoehead, the superhero for whom life changed when a bolt of lightning welded a Grumman to his head while portaging.
In a class by themselves are the so-called “Cockleshell Heroes” or “Canoe Commandos” who, in December 1942, left their World War II allied submarines in the Bay of Biscay, under cover of night on open ocean, and paddled toward the coast of France to sabotage shipping in Bordeaux Harbor. Anyone who has dipped a paddle, read the book or seen the film, can imagine the courage it took to willingly engage those suicidal odds.
There are the collectors like Kirk Wipper and the Dean family. There are the gatherers like Deb Williams at Hulbert Outdoor Center in Vermont and George Luste, founder of the Wilderness Canoe Symposium in Toronto, who make it their business to share stories and provide context for our adventuring lives. There are the conservationists like Sigurd Olson, Martin Litton and Bill Mason who inspire us to care and to act for the good of the land, the community, the planet. There are the poets, the writers, the teachers, the storytellers. And then there are the rest of us who paddle on, hungry for inspiration and exemplars of right living.
What makes a hero? I think of my paddling chum Bill Buxton who, idling through mid-Saskatchewan in a bark canoe a couple of summers back, told me of an article he’d written about what those in the tech world call “the long nose of innovation.” It takes 20 years, or longer, he said, for the next big thing to evolve. This means, he said, that any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.
Inventions can be created by instant alchemy of ideas and circumstances but more likely, it’s a much longer and slower process involving persistence, dedication, augmentation and refinement. I think heroism is a bit like that, driven by passion but gilded by time.
Back on I-69, heading east for the border, grooving to the meter of tires on wet pavement in the quiet of the long night home, I think of everyday heroes, like the Chipewyan elder on Great Slave Lake who quietly told me that the only thing we truly own is time. Time. That’s it, he said. Our sole possession. The old voyageur who paddled on just before Christmas was Ralph Frese, son of a son of a blacksmith, who loved canoes like no other. At his packed goodbye service, between voyageur songs and an emotional reading of William Henry Drummond’s The Last Portage, several friends mentioned a sign that hung in Ralph’s shop at the Chicagoland Canoe Base. It read: “If you’re in a hurry, you’re in the wrong place.” Ralph had passion. But more importantly, he gave us time. Heroism, at its essence, is no more complicated than that.
Don’t recognize some of the names in this who’s who of canoe heroes? Learn each of their stories at the Canadian Canoe Museum, where Tumblehome columnist James Raffan is the executive director.
