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In Greenville, New Hampshire, a small town in the southern part of the state, Henri Vaillancourt makes birch-bark canoes in the same manner and with the same tools that the Indians used. The Survival of the Bark Canoe is the story of this ancient craft and of a 150-mile trip through the Maine woods in those graceful survivors of a prehistoric technology. It is a book squarely in the tradition of one written by the first tourist in these woods, Henry David Thoreau, whose The Maine Woods recounts similar journeys in similar vessel. As McPhee describes the expedition he made with Vaillancourt, he also traces the evolution of the bark canoe, from its beginnings through the development of the huge canoes used by the fur traders of the Canadian North Woods, where the bark canoe played the key role in opening up the wilderness. He discusses as well the differing types of bark canoes, whose construction varied from tribe to tribe, according to custom and available materials. In a style as pure and as effortless as the waters of Maine and the glide of a canoe, John McPhee has written one of his most fascinating books, one in which his talents as a journalist are on brilliant display.… (more)
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Only John McPhee could write about Henri and the canoe. All of McPhee’s books and articles are classics, and this one is no exception. McPhee describes, in loving detail, the entire process of building one of these canoes, from the splitting of the tree for the thwarts and ribs, to laying on the birch bark. Henri never uses power tools. Indeed, all he needs are an axe, an awl, and a crooked knife. Even the paddles he carves himself. McPhee, Vaillancourt and a couple of friends take a trip into the wilds of Maine, which have remained almost unchanged since Thoreau wrote about them more than a hundred years ago. It’s here that Vaillancourt finds his birch trees. All of them are steeped in Thoreau although Vaillancourt sneers at his impracticality, arguing that you can use nature without destroying it, and that Thoreau could travel in a bark canoe, yet when asked to describe how it was constructed could not. That Thoreau set several forest fires accidentally and walked away from them does not sit well with Vaillancourt either.
Sleeping at night in the Maine woods can only be described as “insectile.” While mosquitoes cannot make it through the screens on the tents, no-see-ums can. “They home on flesh. They cover the hands, the arms, the neck, the face. Like an acid, they eat skin. They are not ubiquitous, but they have been with us now for two nights in a row. At 3 A. M., I got up and . . . went into the water like a fly-crazed moose. I stayed in the lake in the dark for an hour . . . only the nose out — dozing.” Thoreau slept in the smoke from a fire covered with wet logs in a vain attempt to repel the insects. The Indians would never have made a warm weather camping trip. They weren’t fools. The tribes who lived there left during the summer months. They went, much like the Bushes, to the coast and Kennebunkport.