Me and My Canoe: The Gripping Story of Paddling the Hayes and Mississippi Rivers to Span the Continent.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

As the title suggests, this slim volume reveals the nature of the relationship which exists between Brad Bird and the watercraft suspended at the centre of our Canadian cultural ethos. Present in his genes was the influence of his great-great-great-grandfather, James Curtis Bird, who succeeded Governor Robert Semple (killed by the Métis at the Battle of Seven Oaks, near Red River, in 1816), and his ancestor’s country wife, a Cree woman whom he called Elizabeth. Their sons, in turn, worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company as tripmen. Brad Bird’s first love was a 12 ½-foot Vanguard, purchased at a Sudbury service station in 1968 during the course of a family camping trip. He was nine years old. “Paddling became a passion once we got that little red canoe. It became a passion that later overrode other concerns, such as making a living.” That passion fuelled a relationship which took Bird, his canoe, and his partner some 6,000 kilometres, first from The Pas to New Orleans, then, four years’ later, from The Pas to York Factory.

As important as these trips were to the participants, they may seem less so to the readers. The paddlers experienced the kindness of strangers and discomfort occasioned by the weather, they camped out, ate tinned and scavenged food, got arrested but not much delayed at the American border, argued, got sore backs. They also encountered the “storm of the century” and got snowed and iced in before they reached the Mississippi, an event which forced them to travel several hundred kilometres by car (covered by canoe in the summer of 1977). Ice continued to beset them on the Mississippi and they were saved from certain death above a spillway by their own skill and prowess, and a tugboat captain whose crew plucked them from the stream. They completed their trip by paddling the last hundred miles above New Orleans though a chemical fog generated by plants lining the riverbank. The trip to York Factory was uneventful and, perhaps, of less interest to the reader.

This account is not particularly well structured, nor does it enter very deeply into the spiritual depths of the subject. Those who aspire to replicate the route or portions of it will find little of practical use in planning their expeditions. There are better-written, more insightful, more inspiring accounts of canoeing experiences. R.M. Patterson’s Nahanni journals come immediately to mind.

Not recommended.