This article originally appeared in Canoeroots and Family Camping magazine.

I really don’t know what made me want to explore the world, let alone in a canoe.
 I grew up in a Chicago suburb where Wisconsin was considered somewhere far-off and foreign. Maybe it was my inexplicable interest in African wildlife; I visited Chicago’s stately Field Museum of Natural History, with its immense African Hall, every chance I got. Or maybe it was my penchant to devour classics like Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Is- land and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Even the Mississippi River was exotic and enthralling to a city kid.


But, digging deeper, I believe it was my discovery of canoeing that helped rock my sheltered world. Seeking a means to commune with nature somewhere closer to home than Africa, I purchased an Old Town Tripper and ventured—often blundered—through places I had only imagined up to then: the Florida Everglades, Missouri Ozark rivers, spectacular canyons of the Rio Grande. My horizons quickly expanded far beyond the urban jungles and cornfields of Illinois.

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to canoe in 25 countries and on all seven continents, but I’m still humbled by how big our planet is and how precious little of it I have visited. Running my index finger over the smooth curve of a globe in my living room in central Colorado, my mind begins to wander. I dream about canoeing far-flung places with challenging waters, unfamiliar cultures and more unknowns than knowns: Botswana, Tasmania, Peru, Ellesmere Island, Vietnam, Moldova. The list goes on and on. It’s impossible to see around the bend, which only raises the possibilities.

I like that about traveling, about paddling. Once you slip your bow into the current and let it usher you downstream, everything is possible, or seems to be.

When everything clicks on a paddling trip, I find not only the rugged wilderness I am seeking, but also a new way of appreciating the world. An appreciation of the unique qualities of the country I am visiting—its history, culture and the people I reach out to and meet along the way. Traveling by canoe allows me to discover my internal compass as well as be guided by an external one. By going with the flow, not fighting it, I find myself floating through life and oftentimes laughing along the way.

Following the path of the paddle these past 35 years, my passion for travel still burns as bright today as when I was that youngster fantasizing about tripping down Ol’ Man River.

Canoeroots columnist Larry Rice uses his global travels to justify his personal fleet of 18 canoes. 

This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Spring 2012.

A paddling buddy once told me that kids are like orcas—beautiful in pictures and best admired from a distance, hard to care for and most likely fatal if you get too close. I used to think this was funny—but now I know better.

My wife and I are standing on a frozen beach that winter has wiped as clean as a baby’s bottom. We have a date with each other, the first one in months, but more importantly, we have a date with the water—the first time we’ve paddled together since our oldest child was born four years ago.

I watch her dress in layers of polypro and Gore-Tex with latex accents. Bend to pull on—good gawd—knee-high neoprene boots. Gulp. It’s March in the North Country and a heatless spring sun tosses its rays across the near freezing water, but right now she’s looking hotter than the Bahamas.

What you need to know is that we fell in love on the water one star-crossed and kayak-crazed summer half our lives ago. Paddling is more than what we do, it’s who we are—or more like who we were.

Hoisting the boats hip-high we crunch through rotten, knee-deep drifts down to the water’s edge. In the distance I hear a county plow truck scraping along the highway, but on the water all is still. Our cores are like jelly donuts and the boats seem unsteady. I’m flapping wildly with little to show for it, like a baby bird falling from a nest. I’ve paddled a bit since the kids arrived but it was always in a fog of guilt thick as stink on neoprene.

A few miles go by and now we’re falling into our old rhythm, matching strokes and talking easily. The beach fades behind us. We talk with hope about the upcoming summer. We will hire more babysitters. We will guilt-trip the grandparents. There will be more paddling.

We’re getting out to the point now. It’s a northwest-facing stab of sandstone cliff that gathers ice like crumbs in a car seat. Our bright boats are swallowed whole in the hushed kiss of brash ice whispering an endless parable of change. It’s a tale of winter’s dwindling youth and the lake’s growing wisdom. In the back of a sea cave, meltwater plip-plops a lecture on glaciers and patience. I close my eyes and see birthday cakes, a used tandem, salt-and-pepper eyebrows and laugh lines. The water is electric cold but I dip my hands to the cuffs and hold them there as long as I can.

On the paddle back we’re trying to figure out how four years passed so quickly. We decide child rearing can be like hypothermia—it’s no big deal at first, you’re just a little cold and wet but then that becomes normal and numb and by the time you need to do something about it you can’t. You can’t rely on your friends to help because, let’s face it, they’re already goners. You just glubglubglub down into the orca-filled waters of minivans and soccer practices, dance recitals and dental appointments.

We pull off the water at dusk, drive into town and get a good meal and a better room. Today we shook off the chill of a four-year bout with hypothermia and paddled like it was the first time. But tonight we’re not taking any chances: I’ll be dressed for immersion.

Aaron Peterson is a well-adjusted full-time writer, photographer and toddler wrangler.

This article originally appeared in Adventure Kayak, Spring 2013. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.

Sooner or later, everybody who owns a canoe scans the boat in the rosy light of evening and wonders what adventures it has been on and what future odysseys are in store. A trip upstream to the source of the local river? A trip across the country? In a nation of rivers like Canada, it’s easy to think that with the right boat, the proper gear, enough food and dollop of daring and ingenuity, epic journeys are possible for any- one willing to take a risk.

And then there’s John Smith of Peterborough.

It was the spring of 1934. Smith, 34, had spent the previous five years being a whaler and merchant mariner. But he had returned home to realize a dream that had been brewing in his fertile mind since his early adult years working for the Peterborough Canoe Company. The dream was simple. He would paddle a 16-foot cedar-canvas canoe, called “Pride of Peterborough,” from Peterborough, Ontario, to Peterborough, England—solo across the Atlantic.

Really. He would load the boat with 500 pounds of fresh water and hard tack, sew a canvas cover to keep waves at bay. All in, he would leave the George Street wharf on the Otonabee River in June and, in two to three months, would be relaying personal greetings to family and friends in Ireland. Then onward across the Irish Sea to Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, on the River Nene.

And that’s exactly what he set out to do. The reporter who broke the story in the Peterborough Examiner was initially skeptical. But Smith’s shy demeanour and earnest determination convinced him otherwise. “Yes sir, Smith is serious,” he wrote. “For the past eight months… he has been analyzing carefully the various problems involved. And right now he is busy seeking a canoe of the proper type and arranging for the food rations and equipment he will carry with him.”

Smith… well… didn’t make it. He’s buried in an unmarked grave near Stephenville, Newfoundland. He made his way safely to the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula and, from there, struck out into the open waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to make the 435-kilometre crossing to Newfoundland.

His journal, which turned up as beach flotsam in a waterproofed tin can, detailed that partway over he stopped aboard a freighter whose captain gave him a hot meal, a mariner’s rubber safety suit and a map and sent him on his way again. Somewhere between there and Newfoundland, Smith came a cropper.

His body washed up in one place, his surf-bashed canoe in another, the tin can containing his journal in another; all pieces of Smith’s impossible dream.

It was on those beaches that Smith’s story would have faded into obscurity had it not been for two Peterborough artists who have kept the tale alive.

Singer and songwriter Glen Caradus premiered a splendid new ballad about John Smith at a concert at The Canadian Canoe Museum earlier this year. When asked, he allowed that he was inspired to write the song by an art installation created by Mount Pleasant, Ontario, artist JoEllen Brydon.

In the early 1990s, Brydon was pulling up flooring in her 19th-century farmhouse and came upon old newspapers that included a June, 1934 edition of the Peterborough Examiner. So captivated was she by Smith’s story that she created a whole art installation around the tale—18 paintings installed on a wall behind a 1930s-style diner counter where visitors can sit on padded chrome stools and read reprints of the Smith story as it appeared back in the day. This work is now in the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.

Not only do we need John Smiths for inspiration, we also need artists like Caradus and Brydon to keep their stories alive. The stories they tell remind us that epic journeys of discovery, whatever the vehicle, whatever the goal, begin far closer to home than most of us ever imagine.

All it takes is a dream.

James Raffan is the executive director of the Canadian Canoe Museum.

This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Summer/Fall 2009.

Okay, it’s not War and Peace, or even an early edition of How to Shit in the Woods, but it’s noteworthy when a little-known volume called The Rob Roy on the Baltic by John MacGregor, first published in 1866, is being re-published in 2009.

MacGregor revolutionized waterborne travel in Europe by turning around to face forward in what was essentially a rowing scull. Instead of rowing with oars he opted to alternate dips with a double-bladed paddle. His dream was to tour the Baltic and also paddle through Europe passing out religious tracts (but that’s another story) on water- ways possibly too small for a conventional rowboat. About the decision to “canoe” in- stead of row across Europe, he wrote:

“It was clear no rowboat would serve on a voyage of this sort, for in the wildest parts of the best rivers the channel is too narrow for oars, or, if wide enough, it is often too shallow; and the tortuous passages…that constantly occur on a river winding among hills, make those very parts where the scenery is wildest and best to be quite unapproachable in such a boat, for it would be swamped by the sharp waves, or upset over the sunk- en rocks, which cannot be seen by a steersman [facing the stern].”

MacGregor named his 15-foot decked canoe for his famous ancestor Rob Roy and when he returned from his odyssey in 1865 he wrote the best-selling A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe. In it, he celebrated paddling just for the sake of paddling, which was then a novel idea. Building on the book’s success, he founded the Royal Canoe Club and the idea crossed the Atlantic.

And so began the sport of recreational canoeing, say some. Recreational canoeing in Canada inspired by a Brit? Maybe, in part. For more on the story we need to look into an exhibit at The Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterbrough, Ontario.

Its name is Harmony and it’s a lightweight decked canoe very similar to MacGregor’s. One might assume Harmony is derivative of Rob Roy, after all, the two were built only 10 kilometres from each other. But that gets turned upside down by research which suggests that Harmony was built before John MacGregor cooked up his design and paddled off to become famous.

In piecing the story together it seems that Dr. George Mellis Douglas purchased Harmony when passing through London and had the craft shipped home for his son Campbell. According to Douglas, writing in Forest and Stream in 1886:

“This canoe was built [before] Mr. MacGregor brought canoeing into notice by the publication of his well known cruise in the Rob Roy… On the eve of my departure for India in 1865, I had her sent out to Quebec… Last year I remembered my old canoe and had her sent to me at Lakefield, where she was renovated and again put in com- mission this spring. The Harmony is a paddling canoe, pur et simple [sic].” In the fullness of time, the son Campbell had a son—another George Mellis Douglas—who was one of the first Barren Land explorers to extensively photograph the Northwest Territories in the early 20th century. He lived out his days paddling Harmony, much in the spirit of MacGregor, on Lake Katchewanooka, not far from Harmony’s current home in the museum.

Was there a relationship between George Mellis Douglas, the elder, and John MacGregor? Did MacGregor model his boat after Harmony? Is Harmony the canoe that started it all? Questions. Lots of questions. A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe (readable at www.ibiblio.org) or Rob Roy on the Baltic (re-released by Dixon-Price) are excellent places to start looking for answers

This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Late Summer 2011.