Survival of the Bark Canoe

by John McPhee

Some kids grow up wanting to be president. Henri Vaillancourt, a New Englander of French-Canadian descent, grew up wanting to build canoes. In Survival of the Bark Canoe, John McPhee writes about how bark-canoe building survives at the hands of Vaillancourt and a (very) few other craftsman, and he writes about the survival of two particular bark canoes that he, with Vaillancourt and some friends, took (sailed?) on a week-long Maine canoe trip. The two stories intertwine: craft and craftsmanship; loons, rain, leaking tents; a little bit of wilderness and tension; choices, a little history, and of course, bark canoes.

This is a short, pleasant book. It would probably benefit from a diagram and a photograph or two, but McPhee's writing leaves nothing to complain about. One of the things I like is that McPhee is comfortable with contradiction, and feels no need to pin every detail down and explain it. As he canoes, for example, he writes about the log drivers who shepherded logs along the same rivers a century ago:

To pick a middle jam was sometimes fatal. If these men had been shooting each other instead of shooting rapids, their lights would now shine with the cowboys'. "Go down and pick a jam on the Heater," their boss would tell them, and without a quiver they went off to die.

And a page after this romanticizing, he quotes Thoreau from The Maine Woods, in commentary on what the loggers were actually doing:

The chopper speaks of a "berth" of timber, a good place for him to get into, just as a worm might. When the chopper would praise a pine, he will comonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.

And they canoe, in bark canoes that themselves have killed at least one birch apiece, amidst a wilderness and a river permanently altered by those loggers from a century ago.

On the other hand, not everything is contradictory. "Warren and I have been eating freeze-dried food, which I, having had little of it before, was interested in trying; and having tried it days on end, I looked forward all the more to the [freshly collected] clams." (Maybe you need to eat freeze-dried food on a camping trip for a week to appreciate this!)

There were five men and supplies on the trip, and 2 bark canoes. Vaillancourt builds these canoes entirely by hand, about seven a year. "He uses a froe, an axe, an awl, a crooked knife - and with the last three alone could build a canoe." There are no nails, just split root lashings and wooden pegs. "To the eye, [they] were perfect in their symmetry. Their color was pleasing... In the sunlight of that cold November morning, they were the two most beautiful canoes I had ever seen." This book was written 20 years ago; with luck, Vaillancourt is still building.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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