No matter where you are reading this, you likely have a certain affection for the canoe. A recent trip to a U.S. event called Canoecopia helped me realize that the canoe is a much more populous and geographically-dispersed notion than some Canadians like to think. Unlikely as it might seem, there may be room in this realization for improvements in the social and political fortunes linking Canadians and Americans. 

Canoecopia, organized by an outdoor retailer in Madison, Wisconsin, bills itself as the world’s largest paddlesports exposition. Largest, in this instance, means that in an exhibit hall the size of a small township hundreds of equipment manufacturers, boat builders, conservation groups, park personnel, paddling clubs, food vendors, gizmo inventers, and publishers (yes, Canoeroots was there) gathered to hobnob and hock their wares. 

Add to that more than 7,000 canoeists (at least half of whom looked like Bill Mason, including a good proportion of the women) who sloshed in over three days in March. Besides the displays, these willing delegates could avail themselves of an Olympic-sized pool with dawn-to-dusk demonstrations and seven (count ‘em) theatres running simultaneous back-to-back programs every hour. 

While navigating my way across the exhibit floor for the first time, the ever-perky Kevin Callan hied up out of nowhere and said, “Think of it as a Star Trek convention for canoeists.” That’s exactly what it was… a paddler’s mind meld. 

I’d been invited to Canoecopia to speak about Bill Mason but by the time my presentations were done, I had attended programs about all aspects of the canoeing and kayaking world delivered by other people from near and far. And although I had crossed the border with a touch of trepidation (having been refused entry on a previous occasion), the sense of connection to these fellow paddlers, most of whom were American, highlighted a lesson and an opportunity.

Although the canoe has a unique and special place in the hearts of Canadians, if one were to draw a line—let’s call it an isothwart—joining points of equal affection for the canoe, it would be clear that canoeophilia would not cease at the 49th parallel. You’ve got this enthusiastic rump of paddlers in Wisconsin and Minnesota. You’ve got Ralph Frese in Chicago (Uncle Sam’s Kirk Wipper…or is Kirk Wipper Canada’s Ralph Frese?) who argues that the American confederacy was not cast of horse shit and wagon grease, as so many believe, but of birchbark and pine pitch in the hands of French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, who crossed from Lake Michigan through to the Illinois River and down the Mississppi 434 years ago. You’ve got Lewis and Clark. You’ve got the great canoe building companies of the Northeast states. You’ve got boatbuilder Henry Rushton. You’ve got the Adirondack Museum and the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, New York. You’ve got the American Canoe Association and the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association.

At a point in history when crossing the border is getting increasingly difficult, canoeists on both sides might consider showing leadership by working to celebrate what we have in common rather than capitulating to circumstances that would keep us apart. Rivers, fortunately, know no such bounds—the St. Croix, St. John, St. Lawrence, Red, Milk, Columbia, Fraser, Yukon and many more between—maybe it’s time we used them to paddle to meet our neighbours. As Henry David Thoreau once famously said, “Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.”

James Raffan has not yet disclosed why he was once refused entry into the United States.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

• Rainbows form when sunlight bounces off airborne water droplets. When the light enters the droplet it is refracted—or deflected—slightly before reflecting off the back of the droplet. The refraction causes the light to disperse into groups of different wavelengths, which form the spectrum of colour you see.
• If sunlight reflects three times inside the raindrops, a double rainbow forms. The second rainbow is dimmer than the first, and its colours are reversed.
• Neil Diamond, Johnny Cash, Mariah Carey and Dolly Parton have all recorded albums entitled Rainbow.
• Rainbows are only visible when  the sun is low in the sky and behind the viewer.
• The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was named after the Cree prophecy “When the world is sick and dying, the people will rise up like warriors of the rainbow.”
• The rainbow flag first flew in 16th century Germany as a symbol of hope and social change. The gay pride flag flew for the first time in 1978 at San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Celebration.
• A rainbow can be seen best with polarized sunglasses.
• René Descartes injected some empirical rigour into the study of rainbows in 1637. Previously, they had been explained by mythology. In Greece, they were a pathway from heaven to earth for Iris the messenger. In India, rainbows were the bow of Indra, the god of lightning and thunder.
• The first ship of the Royal Canadian Navy was the HMCS Rainbow. 
• According to Christianity and Judaism, the rainbow is a symbol of God’s promise to Noah that there would be no more floods on earth. Hydro-Québec considers this a non-binding agreement.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

There were whispers around camp that there was something otherworldly about him. Some said he was a Wendigo, the semi-human cannibalistic beast from native legend. How else could a man so large—dressed in an orange jumpsuit no less—drift through the woods so quietly that he could appear behind you just as you were bundle planting or balling up a root system and cramming it into the ground?

The sins of bundle planting and root balling aren’t important outside the world of treeplanting, but they were important to Dane. He was the forester charged with making sure we were planting trees that would grow. Dane could make you replant a day’s worth of trees. On top of that he had a moustache all the guys admired and he knew his way around the bush. He was the guy you wanted to have around if the ATV got stuck in a sinkhole. Though probably not a cannibal, Dane commanded respect.

I suspect he can’t paint as well as Tom Thompson, and no doubt Esther Keyser knows better campsites, but Dane the logger is the Algonquin Park icon that springs to my mind when someone mentions the park.

I’ve spent far more time in Algonquin Park with a shovel in hand than a paddle. During three seasons treeplanting there I bounced along many of the park’s 8,000 kilometres of logging roads with a foreman at the wheel, testing the limits of our van’s suspension and stereo systems. I rode to work every morning with my face against the window, grabbing glimpses of lakes that would have been better viewed from a canoe. 

I proved skilled at hiding my planting gear where my foreman couldn’t see it so I could sneak through the buffer of trees between logged areas and lakes. Sitting on the shore I would feel the callouses on my hands and think of how easy it would be to put in a 40-kilometre day.

Once a week we passed the park gate on our way to Pembroke for a day off. I often imagined stopping and changing the name to Algonquin Tree Farm. I thought people should know that 78 per cent of the park is logged.

My dreams of criminal activism went unfulfilled and the sign remained unmolested. Ten years later there is an easier way to register my opinion. Ontario’s Minister of Natural Resources recently asked the Ontario Parks Board to propose ways to reduce logging in Algonquin Park. The board suggested an increase in the amount of park land that is actually given park-like protection from the current 22 per cent to 46 per cent. If approved, almost half of Algonquin could soon be off limits to logging. The MNR expects there will be public consultations when the minister proposes making the change official.

I think I know what sort of consultation Dane would offer the minister. Dane once gave me the impression that, to him, the trees of Algonquin didn’t just look good on a postcard, their pulp would look good in the postcard. 

Dane might tell the minister that Algonquin was initially created to keep homesteaders and settlements away from the valuable wood supply, not the canoe routes we’ve since scribed on a map. 

He might also tell the minister that good people in towns just like the one this magazine is based in rely on logging in the park for their livelihood. 

That’s a tougher one to answer, but the minister could point out that even with these changes more than half of the park will retain its tree farm function. 

The minister could also point out that these changes might save some money in maintenance costs if would-be vandals are less inspired to deface park signs to point out what goes on behind the gates of this supposed sanctuary of provincial wilderness. After all, it’s not just the park gates that have signs. There’s a sign on the road leaving the Toronto airport telling all the tourists that fly here for the wilderness we have left that they are only 252 kilometres from a park that is becoming less and less like a tree farm.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

When it comes to rolling, I think sea kayakers are like Steve Carrell’s character in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin—they can go a long way through life without ever doing it. Perched precariously on the surface as we are, there’s a feeling that eventually it’s going to happen—we’re going to flip and need to know how to roll—but the pressure to be ready for that day that may never arrive can become an obsession and a debilitating fear.

Learning to roll a sea kayak is hard. You’re doomed from the start because the very conditions most likely to flip you are also the ones in which you least want to be practicing. should a sea kayaker ever flip over on a trip—god forbid—that makes for a truly epic moment. Witness Southern Exposure, Chris Duff’s book about his expedition around New Zealand’s south island. It includes a map marking the location of every capsize.

We paddle through the worst stuff with our teeth clenched, hoping nothing goes wrong, and then practice our rolls on sunny afternoons in calm water by the beach where we can call a buddy over to perform a t-rescue when we blow our hip flick, bring our head up first and start carping for air. And thus we never really get it.

That was me a few years ago. To celebrate my 30th birthday I did a long expedition on the open coast, and at the time I had no roll. A strong brace and a “please don’t flip” mantra kept me alive, but the fear of capsizing took the fun out of some of the most spectacular parts of the trip.

ROUGH WATER PRACTICE

It takes rough water practice to really nail the roll. What finally taught me to roll after years of failure was moving from the ocean to the river. A whitewater paddler would never map out every spot he capsized; rolling on the river is like falling down while learning to snowboard—it’s just what you do. You flip again and again at the worst possible times, when the waves are big, the eddy lines are a mess and the water’s full of air and boils.

For a while I harboured sea kayaker fears—what if I flip over, what if I swim? I blew some rolls and pulled the skirt and swam through a few big rapids, but in time the roll became a reflex and my fears vanished. Then I went back to the ocean and found my entire outlook had changed. As competitive roller Cheri Perry says in the new movie This is the Sea 3—describing how it feels to be the master of 30 rolls—“I was afraid of capsizing. Now I’m not afraid of capsizing.”

Now every time I roll up I feel like celebrating. Celebrating that I’ve beaten the fear, that I’ve finally got the skill, and that I’m back up on the right side of that thin line we float on—the side where the air is. I feel like Steve Carrell at the end of the movie, doing his post-virginity Bollywood-style dance number to “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” rolling feels good, and I wonder why I waited so long. 

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2007 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.