With illustrations by Les Kouba
As I mentioned recently in my review of The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald, I often enjoy reading books of local color when I travel to a new location. Recently, my family traveled through northern Minnesota and then spent several days at an Air B&B in Superior, WI, in order to have easy access to the North Shore of Lake Superior, for the sake of sight-seeing and rock-picking. What a gorgeous location that is in mid-May!
Before departing, I pulled from my shelves the only two books I had about Lake Superior, and finished them both on our short trip. The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald chronicles the fate and follow-up investigation of the lost ship of Gitche Gumee in 1975. Distant Fires tracks the canoe passage of two friends from Duluth, MN, to Hudson Bay in Canada in 1987.
Scott Anderson and his buddy Steve Baker had long dreamed of a canoeing adventure that would challenge their mettle and scratch the itch of adventure their college-aged hearts were feeling. Inspired to follow in the wake of two canoeists from 1930, Walter Port and Eric Sevareid, who paddled their way from Minneapolis, MN, to the mouth of the Atlantic in Hudson Bay, Scott and Steve embarked on a lengthy and arduous journey of big waves and long portages, cold nights and bloodthirsty mosquitoes, that is any true adventurer’s dream. Thankfully, Scott has preserved the events of that epic voyage in this travelogue, and, while not a day-today recollection or a survivalist’s how-to manual, it’s a fun and entertaining read filled with high stakes and wit that keeps the pages turning.
Scott echoes much of what Port and Sevareid wrote in their own book, Canoeing with the Cree (1935, Minnesota Historical Society), taking advice and warning from its pages as they moved northwest. It’s not a book I’d ever heard of before, but one I’m certainly interested in lookin up now!
Along with his colorful writing that kept the scenes vivid in my mind’s eye, Anderson’s dry humor in this book kept me going. One passage serves as a good example of this:
As we prepared to push off in the drizzle, the rangers once again explained that we were to head straight north up to Cache Bay, keeping a large pine to our left and a small island to our right. We would know the right channel by a large bluff. “Whatever you do,” they said, “don’t bear too far to the left. Half the canoeists do and end up in Lost Bay.”
It sounded ominous, but I assured them that I had been to Cache Bay before and that we weren’t stupid and wouldn’t go the wrong way.
Lost Bay, as it turned out, actually was very nice. (37)
Scott Anderson has written two other book (according to GoodReads.com), and I’d enjoy reading him again. If you’re a canoeist yourself, are looking for a nice fireside adventure, or are just curious about what’s north of the North Shore, this is just the book for you.
©2021 E.T.
Read More about The Great Lakes:
- Great Stories of the Great Lakes by Dwight Boyer (1966)
- The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Frederick Stonehouse (1977)
- Distant Fires by Scott Anderson (1990)
- Shipwrecks, Monsters, and Mysteries of the Great Lakes by Ed Butts (2011)
- The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan (2017)