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Memory aid. PHOTO: CONOR MIHELL
[ From the editor ] Life After Death
IN THIS ISSUE’S TUMBLEHOME COLUMN, our resident sage James Raffan enthuses that the active chatter on Internet forums allows far-flung canoeists to connect with each other. Of course, they don’t always agree. Last
fall the Canadian Canoe Routes forum de- bated the removal of the bronze cross on Algonquin Park’s Petawawa River that com- memorated Blair Fraser’s 1968 drowning. The anonymous vandal apparently
thought he was defending wilderness by taking a hack saw to a three-foot cross in a park that is 78 per cent tree farm. True, not everyone who has slept in a
tent needs to be immortalized in the wil- derness after death, but Blair Fraser wasn’t just any paddler. Fraser, Eric Morse, Sigurd Olson and a
half-dozen others made up the latter-day Voyageurs, a group of prominent Canadi- ans and Americans who, in the 1950s and ‘60s, re-traced the fur trade routes of the real voyageurs. This would be commonplace now, which is just the point. Back then it was a new idea
8 SPRING 2009
to embark on gruelling wilderness canoe trips for recreation. They became media dar- lings. The Toronto Star even chartered a plane to intercept them on the Churchill River. “The media’s interest could scarcely have
been greater had the Archbishop of Canter- bury been discovered making a northern canoe trip with the Pope,” remarked Morse in Freshwater Saga. Though the Voyageurs were just out for
a good time, the timing was such that they spearheaded a growing appreciation for the cultural history of a nation that had, at its core, a landscape explored, settled and still best-travelled by canoe. Without the kick start Fraser’s Voyageurs
gave to conservation, paddlers would have had a harder time convincing the rest of the country that wild waters are central to our history, our future, and worth preserving. This fight continues. The cross in the photo above isn’t Fraser’s cross, it’s for a paddler who drowned on Lake Superior’s White River. But it might soon also be commemo- rating the waterfall just downstream. It is the second of three hydro sites proposed
for the White. As Conor Mihell explains on page 42, the first site was finished last fall. Fraser’s continuing relevance can also be
read into Amy Stuart’s report on what Can- ada’s high urbanization and immigration rates mean for canoeing. Fewer and fewer Canadians are growing up with a family tra- dition of canoeing. Will canoeing be mar- ginalized by changing demographics? If the answer is no, it’s because of some-
thing Fraser identified 40 years ago. In The Search for Identity (a book of political history, not new-age introspection) he wrote of the Canada he knew. “This land is still empty. …its portages still well marked, its lakes and streams still clean. Most Canadians have never seen this wilderness and never will. It is too far away. But it is typical of some- thing that is within the easy reach of every Canadian, urban or rustic—an empty area of forest or plain in which a man can still en- joy the illusion of solitude. This is the quality that makes Canada unique and gives root to Canadian patriotism.” An idea—and a paddler—worth remem- » IAN MERRINGER
bering.
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