Idleness, Water and a Canoe

 Reflections on Paddling for Pleasure
 By Jamie Benidickson.
 University of Toronto Press, 299pp
 ISBN: 0-8020-7910-5

Review by MICHAEL PEAKE -- Che-Mun Editor

Canoelit Home Page

 Now here's an interesting book. Idless, Water and a Canoe is essentially a bibliography on steroids. That's a great compliment, because as we all know, bibliographies hold the distillation of a great amount of knowledge.
 And Jamie Benidickson, a professor at the University of Ottawa, is without a doubt, a possessor of a great deal of canoe-related information and he lays so much of it out in the 299 pages of Idless, Water and a Canoe.
 The title, by the way, comes from a 1940 academic article which defined the three principle ingredients of a holiday in Canada. The idea of the canoe as it relates to things Canadian is very strong and has a great appeal to academics who like to pursue man's search for portages etc.
 Benidickson must have spent a huge amount of time - and fun - gathering and collating these thousands of canoe thoughts, ramblings, vignettes from the last two centuries. It's very tough to resist the temptation to just jump in anywhere since it's really a collection of 16 essays ranging from The Canadian Summer Boy (on summer camps); Rock Dodging and other Perils (Rapids) and Consuming Wilderness.
 In his first chapter, Popular Images and Personal Experiences, Benidickson writes;
 "The canoe remains a surprisingly common and important feature of the urban landscape. No visitor to Canada could ever fail to see it depicted somewhere, for in recent years the canoe has appeared prominently in commercial advertising campaigns promoting milk, cigarettes, alcohol, credit cards, real estate and at least one provincial lottery. Had it not been for an unexplained scandal involving the loss of dies and samples, the canoe would have been on every one dollar coin in Canada."
 It's a somewhat surprising revelation. Canoes are indeed used throughout media even hi-tech stuff - like the new website CANOE which ostensibly stands for Canadian Online Explorer. Canadians carry canoes around in their more than on their backs.
 There are contributions from a lot of familiar names in this book; Eric Morse, Bill Mason, Hubbard and Wallace, Trudeau, Blair Fraser and, yes, yours truly. But they are all snippets of things from a great many people. Benidickson builds his case as a good academic would with footnotes for mortar and quotations for straw.
 This book is best read slowly. Each chapter is stuffed with ideas that take an educated canoeist's mind cruising off in many directions. The author continually offers up choice quotes and references that perhaps leave you wanting more but by then he has moved on.
 Jamie Benidickson has done a great service to the academically-minded paddler. This book is thoughtful, well-researched and a great canoe trip on its own.