On March 2nd the Supreme Court of Canada overturned a Montreal school board’s decision and ruled that Gurbaj Singh Multani should be allowed to go to class wearing his kirpan.

Five years ago, when Gurbaj was 12, his ceremonial knife accidentally fell onto the grass in the playground. If he’d been quicker to get it back in its sheath, the bell would have rung and he would have gone to class. Instead a teacher spotted Gurbaj’s dagger.

The school board said wearing a kirpan violated the school’s safety code, which prohibited the carrying of weapons. Also on school boards’ lists of prohibited weapons is the Swiss army knife.

Gurbaj and his family, all Orthodox Sikhs, won their case because the kirpan is a religious symbol. Even with the red and white cross and the millions of people who swear by them, no court would consider Swiss army knives a religious symbol. To young boys, however, (and some girls too) receiving one is a rite of passage. To a 10-year-old, a Swiss army knife is the world. It is a pocket full of adventure.

A kid with a Swiss army knife is a kid who can pick his teeth, cut his nails, open a can of beans or a bottle of pop. he can saw a tree or whittle a marshmal- low stick; remove a sliver or cut some rope. There are so many good uses for a pocketknife, especially when camping, and so many good lessons we can teach our kids about respecting knives and using them properly.

Using a jackknife safely around camp, or any other place for that matter, you could follow the Boy Scout tips for knife safety. Scouts learn how to open, close, clean and hand their pocketknives to someone else. They always cut away from themselves and cut slowly so the knife won’t slip. and they always maintain their circle of safely, working at least an arm’s distance from anyone else. Kids who learn to respect a pock- etknife understand that it is a sharp cut- ting tool, not a toy and certainly not a weapon.

Children receive their first knife, like I did, from their dad, grandfather or uncle, often on a special birthday. With it comes a trusting look and a pat on the back that says, I know you’re old enough to be careful and look after this.

My first pocketknife was a Swiss army camper. It was red of course with a spread of 13 useful tools. For a year I was never without it. But like Gurbaj I had my knife taken away in school; it probably still lives in the top drawer of Mr. Loker’s wooden desk. Even in the late ’70s at a rural public school it was unacceptable for a kid who didn’t have a pair of scissors to pull out his jackknife and cut a piece of string.

By the time Loker waddled over to my desk to make the bust I’d cut the string, folded the knife and had it back in my pocket. Loker told me to hand it over; it was policy; there was something he called the greater good; and what if everyone carried a knife in their pocket?

I thought for a minute before answering, and then told him that if everyone carried a knife in their pocket nobody would ever need scissors, or screwdrivers, or bottle openers, or tooth picks, or nail files, or…

This article first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.

• In a good year, Canada exports more than 350 million dew worms to the United States, enough to fill 29 million Styrofoam containers.
• In a bad year, Canoeroots editors find an average of 19 discarded dew worm containers on the shores of eastern Canadian waterways.
• Mountain dew is Tennessee slang for bootlegged whiskey.
• Frost is dew that forms when surface temperatures are below freezing.
• Mountain Dew bottles of the 1960s displayed a gun-toting hillbilly taking aim at a government man.  

This article first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.

Keep an eye on the weather:

Electrical storms most often occur onhot, humid afternoons when anvilshaped thunderhead clouds form. Currents of ascending warm air and descending cold air rub against each other and produce an electric charge within the cloud. Fork lightning occurs when a bolt of electricity closes the circuit between the negatively charged bottom of the cloud and the positively charged earth.

Take shelter before the storm hits:

You can calculate your distance in metres from a lightning strike by counting the seconds from  ash to crash and multiplying by 300. But before assuming you are out of range remember that storms can be many kilometres in diameter and that lightning can travel laterally to strike the earth at a point not directly underneath the storm.

Don’t be the path of least resistance:

Decrease your chances of becoming a human lightning rod by not lingering on prominent ridges or canoeing across lakes before a storm. Set up camp away from tall trees and exposed places where you would become the highest point. Instead, take shelter in an area of small trees.

Know the lightning position: 

Crouch on the balls of your feet to minimize your contact with the ground and insulate yourself with a sleeping mattress if possible. If you are in a group, spread out in a straight line at least  five metres apart to reduce the likelihood of a strike jumping from one person to another.

If someone is struck:

Lighting strikes usually affect the body’s electrical system. The heart may stop, but it will often resume spontaneously. Look for vital signs and initiate CPR if necessary. And don’t worry, victims do not carry an electrical charge.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.

Perkin’s 1996 book Talking to Angels is comprised of three autobiographical stories. the middle one is about his summer of self-imposed Arctic exile on the Northwest Territories’ Baillie River. He lived in a converted meat locker with a weather radio, roaming wildlife and breathlessly spacious beauty as his only distractions. His lyrical writing penetrates the sublime violence of a northern spring break-up and the life and death truths apparent in the carcass of a scavenged musk ox.

This middle section is most popular with canoeists, but the first third of the book prefaces his time in the Arctic. It documents his decline into mental illness as a young man. Written against a backdrop of the wider insanity of 1968—an escalating Vietnam war and the assassinations of Martin luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy—Perkins writes of living in an Alice in Wonderland world where nothing makes sense but the feeling that he has “lost his keys,” and can’t find them no matter how hard he looks. He portrays himself as the only sane observer in a maximum security ward and writes, in dripping metaphors, that he’s floating adrift, swimming in darkness, sinking, drowning… his escape attempt ends with him knocking on the hospital’s back door, too tired and drugged to get away.