Here’s a beautiful Passamaquoddy paddle from the National Museum of the American Indian. I hope to carve one like this sometime this winter, but with a bit of a different grip.
What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.
For it is a condition of such a trip that you entrust yourself, stripped of your worldly goods, to nature. Canoe and paddle, blanket and knife, salt pork and flour, fishing rod and rifle; that is about the extent of your wealth. To remove all the useless material baggage from a man’s heritage is, at the same time, to free his mind from petty preoccupations, calculations and memories.
— Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 15th Prime Minister of Canada, published in 1944. View the full essay here.
