Editorial
PASSING ON A TRADITION. PHOTO: JON BOXALL
HERITAGE CANOES
Collect them before they are gone
KIRK WIPPER SINGLE-HANDEDLY collected 600 canoes and watercraft, gathering the largest collec- tion of its kind, the collection that would become the foundation of the Canadian Canoe Museum. If he’d taken instead to collecting Star Wars action figures, old Coca-Cola bottles or Russian dolls I’d admire his passion just the same, however I’d look upon him as I do those who walk cats on leashes and pepper their lawn with garden gnomes. My guess is that Wipper was fuelled by the ex-
citement of the chase, the feeling of holding his- tory in his hand, and the gratification of knowing that someday he would pass along his collection. I got a my first sense of this a few months ago,
when I heard of a neighbour selling his 14-foot Ca- nadian Canoe Company cedar canvas canoe. John’s canoe isn’t historically significant like many
in Kirk Wipper’s famous collection. I couldn’t even uncover the name of the model from looking up the serial number in archived catalogues. However this canoe does have a history, John and Pip Layfield’s history—a story of a young couple escaping the hustle and bustle of Toronto in the hopping 1950s. Part of the negotiations was that I wanted the
two original paddles and I insisted John tell me about the path the canoe has travelled. Listening to John tell me about his early trips
to Algonquin Park and Georgian Bay, I smiled, because I’ve paddled many of the same routes, even camped on the same rocks. He told me how, as newlyweds, he and Pip would venture deep enough into the park to flee the crowds. Crowds? How could there have been crowds 50 years ago? John and Pip were given their canoe in 1956, the
heyday of canoe manufacturing in Canada, a time when four major canoe manufacturers had set up shop in Peterborough, Ontario. The same year, the largest of them, the Peterbor-
ough Canoe Company, reported selling more than 8,000 canoes. However, bad management, rising labour costs, a trend toward motorized recreation and the greater efficiencies of building canoes from fibreglass and aluminum soon led to the bankrupt- cies of all four canoe companies, beginning with the Canadian Canoe Company in 1960. I bought a piece of history, something that can’t
be replaced. Even better, it is a piece of history that is as good today as it was when John and Pip first dipped it in the cool waters of Opeongo Lake. The fibreglass and aluminum canoes that
pushed out the Canadian Canoe Company will never replace it. Nor, I reckon, will we look back on the Kevlar, carbon and Royalex canoes of today with the same appreciation we have for the early cedar canvas boats. When I was growing up, my grandfather had a
16-foot cedar canvas Prospector. I’d borrowed it many times and always hoped this family heirloom would be handed down to me, so that I could hand it down to my kids. It has instead drifted toward my uncle’s family. Since then, I’d never considered collecting ca-
noes. I would just paddle them until they collected enough scratches and dents and then replace them with another. But now, with two kids and only one heritage canoe to pass along, I can see that I’ll need to add another canoe to my collection. And so it begins. —Scott MacGregor
CANOE ROOTS n 5
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