By mid-afternoon I was sick of staring at whitecaps and wanted to paddle anyway. Kim and Chip were engrossed in a game of Yahtzee and waved us away.

Our plan for that day had been to paddle north into the Little River, a route that would have taken us straight up- wind across the open arm and into a likely wind tunnel.

“Chip doesn’t think they should paddle today,” Jim said as we unfolded the map to look for a sheltered route we could paddle ourselves as a day trip.

We pushed off from shore and bowed our heads into the wind. Soon we were sitting on our hats to keep them from blowing away and my arms were aching from pushing into a wind that seemed intent on and capable of pushing backwards.

Days are as long as the night is short on Lake Superior in June. Still, darkness had already fallen by the time we landed on Old Woman Beach, flipped over our 36-foot canoe and scarfed down a scant dinner. Now, the first of my voyageur crewmates are snoring restlessly and after a last slug of rum, I’ll join them. In a couple of hours—well before dawn—we’ll be back at the paddle.

To settle a debate among some paddling friends about just how tough the voyageurs were compared to modern paddlers, we gathered 13 coureurs du bois wannabes and piled into a replica of a fur trade canoe to paddle part of a historic trade route along the coast of Lake Superior Provincial Park. We would head northwest for 80 kilometres—a typical voyageur day—to the mouth of the Michipicoten River where the remains of a fur trade post that once meant a day or two of rest and rum for the voyageurs can still be found amid shoreline alders.

Our craft is a fibreglass replica of the voyageurs’ birchbark canot du maitre. This 36-foot monster was the ideal way to transport loads on the larger rivers and lakes between Montreal and Fort William at the head of Lake Superior. A high bow and stern made it seaworthy in large rapids and Great Lakes swells, yet its shallow draft let its crews find protection from sudden gales in the shallowest of coves. At 600 pounds, it was light enough to be carried over portages by voyageurs glad to get a break from paddling.

Two hundred years ago dozens of these canoes paddled this shoreline every year, loaded down with four tonnes of such trade goods as rifles, ammunition and cooking pots. At Fort William the Montreal brigades would rendezvous with a fleet of 25-foot canots du nord each packed to the gunwales with furs from the nearly endless waterways of Canada’s interior.

After one hell of a party and a hasty, hungover exchange of cargo, the canoes retraced their routes: the canots du maitre returned to Montreal so the furs could be shipped to Europe, and the canots du nord headed upriver to the scattered trading posts of the interior.

It only takes a few minutes on board to realize that paddling a voyageur canoe is like riding in a school bus. They are about the same length and both encourage sing-alongs and juvenile humour. In the bow, the avant sets the pace in stroke and in song and rows of bench seats segregate gung- ho paddle-pushers in the front from bad-ass lily-dippers in the back. Getting 12 to 14 paddlers in synch is as easy as keeping a bus load of grade-schoolers quiet, but when it happens, the canoe cruises at 10 kilometres per hour.

Among voyageurs, there were no lily-dippers. They paddled 65 strokes per minute for 18 hours a day and were paid a pittance in company credit. Once ashore, respite came with a chunk of pork lard, a slug of rum, some stale tobacco and too little sleep on a cold beach. Most walked with a hunchbacked spine and many died young of a hernia or heart attack on a remote portage.

I managed to convey that we needed to take control of the situation and our paddles started swinging. We crossed the current just high enough to drop through a slot between two rocks. After punching the hole and taking advantage of the slower water behind it we angled hard left and powered across some crashing standing waves and into one of the miniature eddies that once seemed so distant. 

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.