BIOPHILIAC
Travels with Neegik An intimate history of humanity’s default watercraft words & photos :: Leslie Anthony Before Neegik sailed across the Prairies, tacking west against a 20knot wind. Before she suffered the indignities of a crusty veteran attempting to reclaim his youth. Before she resided near the sandy beach and played with laughing children. Before she traversed Algonquin Park south to north and south again one year, then south to north and onward to Temagami the next. Before the years spent mentoring a city boy in the ways and means of bushcraft. Before all of that, Neegik was but a blueprint on a drawing board. Since 1914, Les Canots Tremblay Ltee. of St. Felicien, in the Lac St. Jean area of Quebec, had manufactured classic cedar-strip canoes ranging in length from 14 to 20 feet, collectively known as the Chibougamau line. The sixteen-foot model was called a Huron. In 1972, I was gifted a red Huron for my 15th birthday. I named it Neegik (“otter” in Ojibwa). And it changed my life. As the oldest manufacturer of canvas-covered canoes in Canada, Tremblays were of surpassing quality, in my day coated in a tough new vinyl-canvas laminate known as Verolite. Appropriately for the territories it would ply, Neegik was built to handle rough or fast waters, with a 36-inch beam, 12.5-inch depth, and 1-inch keel to effect maximum stability. I’d eventually replaced its rawhide-lattice seats with woven lace versions, and swapped out the center thwart for a mahogany carrying yoke.
In the mid-1980s, after a decade of rugged canoe tripping and abusive whitewater had left Neegik bruised and beaten, a crafty friend who never let any project intimidate him led us in an amateurish restoration. We tossed the heavily scarred and UV-faded Verolite, replaced broken ribs and re-covered the boat in standard heavy canvas, painting it forest green; we also removed the mangled keel, rationalizing that the craft worked better as a fast-turning solo boat (as she was mostly then employed). As a non-essential element, a keel could always be replaced sometime in the future. (Some 25 years later, I did just that prior to a two-week canoe trip with my daughter.) Neegik—whose name I inexplicably fixed to the bow with the kind of brassy, peel-and-stick letters one might find on a rural mailbox—was my first real possession. It also became my companion, and canoeing—both act and history—my adolescent obsession. I revered Bill Mason, the great doyen of Canadian canoeing, whose book, Path of the Paddle, summed “The canoe is the simplest, most functional, yet aesthetically pleasing object ever created. In my opinion this is not a statement that is open to debate.” So immersed was I in this craft, that in bowed homage I undertook a semesterlong project of building a scale-model birchbark canoe in Grade 9 art class to understand the process. As a marvel of easy, low-drag propulsion, the canoe is humankind’s default watercraft. Dugouts are most common because
Neegik at Hurdman Lake, Algonquin Provincial Park.
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