Intangible (Spring 2023)

INTANGIBLE

A VOICE FOR WILDNESS AND WONDER

SPRING 2023

SIGURD OLSON

ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTE

NORTHLAND COLLEGE

INTANGIBLE

OUR MISSION

The Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute prepares people to meet the challenges of the future with intellectual and artistic creativity by promoting and protecting experiences of wildness and wonder.

To realize its mission, the Institute hosts LoonWatch, the Timber Wolf Alliance, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards, and numerous events for young people and adults.

LOONWATCH

LoonWatch protects common loons and their aquatic habitats through education, monitoring, and research.

TIMBER WOLF ALLIANCE

With a particular focus on Wisconsin and Michigan, the Timber Wolf Alliance uses science-based information to promote human coexistence with wolves and an ecologically-functional wolf population in areas of suitable habitat.

SIGURD OLSON NATURE WRITING AWARDS

Established in 1991, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards honor the literary legacy of Sigurd Olson by recognizing and encouraging contemporary writers who capture the spirit of the human relationship with the natural world and who promote awareness, preservation, appreciation, or restoration of the natural world for future generations.

YOUTH AND ADULT PROGRAMS

To promote experiences of wildness and wonder for young people and adults, the Institute offers annual internships, camps, clinics, lectures, conferences, retreats, and outings.

THE COVER

Editing by Alan Brew Design by Brian Donahue, bedesign, inc.

© 2023 Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute 715-682-1223

soei@northland.edu • northland.edu/soei

Whenour daughter was six weeks old, my wife and I buckled her into a lifejacket that was nearly as large as she was and laid her carefully in the bow of our canoe, the final step before we paddled into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness for a two-night excursion.

Ten months later, our daughter joined us for a ten-day canoe journey, and we celebrated her first birthday in a stand of old-growth white pines, a single candle in her morning pancake. On the final day of our trip, she reached over the side of the canoe, a tiny paddle in her hands, and took her first stroke, imitating her mother.

The following summer, her brother joined us, nestled in the stern of the canoe. We’ve been paddling together ever since, and although the kids are grown now, paddling and portaging their own canoe, we continue to spend at least a couple of days together in the Boundary Waters each year.

Canoes. They are an elegant manifestation of indigenous ingenuity. Crafted originally, and still, from cedar, spruce, and birchbark, they have been transporting individuals and families through the intricate and expansive waterways of the north for millennia.

In an essay titled “Tradition,” Sigurd Olson writes reverentially about two canvascovered canoes that he owned, describing them as “works of art” made “in the old tradition when there was time and love of the work itself.”

In this issue of Intangible, we feature four builders of wood and canvas canoes who helped to define and are carrying on this old tradition. Committed to craft, indebted to those who came before them, and paddlers all, these builders demonstrate how beauty and grace emerge from a perfect alignment of form and function. Enjoy!

Detail of a Loon Works canoe in the Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum collection. Photo by Jonathan Martin.

I have two canvas-covered canoes, both old and beautifully made. They came from the Penobscot River in Maine long ago, and I treasure them for the tradition of craftsmanship in their construction, a pride not only of form and line but of everything that went into their building.

—Sigurd F. Olson , “Tradition,” Reflections from the North Country

PHOTO BY JONATHAN MARTIN

Left and above, Joseph Lucius canoe in Craig family collection.

Below, John LaRock built Lucius canoe in the Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum collection.

BUILT BY JOS. LUCIUS

dinner with a beautiful young woman. We sat at a tiny table in the kitchen of a third-story apartment. The kitchen, like the house itself, was old and badly in need of paint. I had spent the better part of the afternoon simmering a Bolognese sauce and had splurged on a decent bottle of wine. Cold wind blew snow through a cone of streetlight. We raised our glasses to toast and the phone rang. I let the machine answer.

Isat down

“Alan,” boomed a voice from the distance, “I understand you have met a woman.”

It was John Rogers, a friend, mentor, and legend of the Brule River. It was the Brule River that had inspired my recent move to this Northern Wisconsin town. I needed to be near it.

“Well, I hope she is built like a Lucius canoe, elegant and sturdy from stern to bow.”

The beautiful young woman looked at me, “What is a Lucius canoe?”

It was a fair question. At its most basic level, a Lucius canoe is forty or so one-inch strips of carefully milled cedar, cinched to spruce ribs, and crowned with hardwood decks and gunwales. Most are painted dark green. In the bow, a “Captains chair” slides along parallel planks to adjust for trim. The sports, who these canoes often transport, cast for trout from an armchair.

Joe Lucius, of Solon Springs, Wisconsin, understood the needs of Brule River guides, and in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries he created an ideal platform from which to cast a fly. His boats were nimble, and they poled well because, before the age of car shuttles, guides spent as much time poling upstream as they did paddling down. Poling was an efficient technique on the sandy, rocky bottom of the Upper Brule, and it saved wear and tear on precious paddles.

In his wonderful little book, From the Log of a Trout Fisherman, Arthur Tenney Holbrook describes the service of a Lucius canoe he had built in 1904:

It has been to the mouth of the river a dozen times, has been paddled and poled around the head of Lake Superior from the Brule River to Duluth, and has had many trips in the baggage cars of the old Duluth South Shore Railroad. Novices have shot the Falls and rapids in it, smashed it on rocks, overturned and wrecked it on many occasions –and yet I fished from it last season and the grating was dry.

The Lucius boats that remain on the Brule today are not subjected to such punishment, and they tend to be treated with a sense of totemic reverence, although they are certainly still capable of the duty for which they were designed. Damian Wilmont, of Superior, Wisconsin, guides clients in his lovingly restored Lucius every summer, often casting the fly patterns that were popular when the boats were new.

What is a Lucius canoe? It is a direct connection with a not too distant yet tantalizingly simpler past, a handmade object that embodies the spirit of a river sacred to many.

And, about that phone call. John has long since gone to fish around the next bend, but I married the elegant young woman I was having dinner with that night. We fish the Brule together often, sometimes from a Lucius canoe.

Alan Craig is an artisan who lives with his wife in a refurbished log home near Mason, Wisconsin. A past employee of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, Alan completed seminal work with the Institute’s archives and is responsible for the creation of the Sigurd Olson archival display case in the entry way to the Institute. Currently, Alan works with Sharptail Construction restoring and creating beautiful homes in the woods of northern Wisconsin.

BY ALAN CRAIG | PHOTOS BY JONATHAN MARTIN

to

THE LOON WORKS

TEXT BY SHERRI VENERO | PHOTOS BY JONATHAN MARTIN

Fond of canoes since I was a child, I learned to paddle by making a few strokes on one side of the boat and then repeating the action on the other side, frustrated that I couldn’t cross the water in a straight path. Then, in May of 2012, I attended the Wisconsin Freestyle Canoe Symposium at Camp Anokijig in Plymouth, Wisconsin. Here precision boat control was taught by American Canoe Association (ACA) certified instructors, including Tom Mackenzie, builder of Loon Works canoes.

Tom was quite a storyteller, and throughout that weekend symposium, with Tom smoking a pipe and wearing his “canoeing bathrobe,” we learned a great deal about his journey. In 1973, while teaching courses in earth sciences at Edgewood College, Tom decided to pursue his interest in birch bark canoes, learning how to build them by “hanging around” with canoe maker Bill Hafeman from northern Minnesota.

Tom’s interest in boat building led him to start The Loon Lake Boatworks in 1977, where he did restoration work. Two years later, he renamed his business The Loon Works, a nod to his affinity for the loons of northern Minnesota, where he often harvested materials for his canoes.

Learning from restoration experience what worked well and what could be improved, Tom designed and built his first wood and canvas canoe in 1984 and 1985—an experience that showed him he was a better builder than designer. Fortunately, Tom met David Yost, a legendary canoe designer, shortly thereafter, and they hit it off. Their first boat together, the MY (MacKenzie -Yost) Bug, went into production in 1986.

Tom believed that building canoes and teaching went together; he wanted folks to play in his boats, feeling how the boat and paddle responded to the water. When working with kids, Tom would provide very little instruction, allowing them to figure out how to move a boat through playful experimentation with a paddle. But as the second chair of the American Canoe Association’s freestyle activity committee, Tom valued precision boat control as well and often helped people learn how paddle strokes can be used to guide a canoe in doing “what it already wants to do.” Tom learned that if people had an opportunity to paddle his canoes, they would buy them.

Facing and to right, detail of Loon Works canoes in the Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum.

Tom appreciated how boats connect people. In the late 1970s, Jill Dean noticed one of Tom’s birchbark canoes on top of a vehicle outside of his house. She returned with her husband, Jeff Dean, and soon thereafter Jeff and Tom worked together to found the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association, an organization whose assemblies at Paul Smith’s College in Saranac, New York, provide opportunities for people interested in wooden canoes to gather on an annual basis. Jill and Jeff Dean went on to establish and fund the Canoe Heritage Museum in Spooner, Wisconsin, where a number of Tom Mackenzie’s Loon Works canoes are on display.

Shortly after I attended the Wisconsin Freestyle Canoe Symposium in May of 2012, my family and I had an opportunity to visit Tom MacKenzie in his Anderson, South Carolina, workshop. Together we helped build one of Tom’s Solitaire canoes, and, as he carefully selected strips of wood that would become the ribs of the boat, we learned the value of “working slow to work fast.” Tom paddled on in October of 2015.

Sherri Venero is an accomplished freestyle canoeist who cherishes her Loon Works canoes and the time she spent with Tom Mackenzie, both on and off the water. Currently serving as the chief financial officer for Northland College, Sherri still sneaks away to participate in the canoe gatherings that Tom inspired and supported.

Left, mold for Loon Works Solitaire canoe; all others, 1978 birch-bark canoe constructed by Thomas MacKenzie. Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum collection.

TOM BELIEVED THAT BUILDING CANOES AND TEACHING WENT TOGETHER; HE WANTED FOLKS TO PLAY IN HIS BOATS, FEELING HOW THE BOAT AND PADDLE RESPONDED TO THE WATER.

AND FUNCTION FORM

For Alex Comb of Stewart River Boatworks, building wood and canvas canoes did not begin with canoeing or fishing or wilderness. It began with his eighthgrade woodworking class. He just really liked working with his hands. “For Christmas, I would make presents from wood and that’s just what I did in high school.”

In college, Alex took a tech-ed course at the local high school to keep making Christmas gifts and some furniture. “The instructor had two students making cedar strip canoes,” he said. “I had never heard of it. That’s really cool. You strip down cedar and glue it. This was 1970.”

He bought a design from the Minnesota Canoe Association along with some fiberglass and resin. He

found cedar from a Sear’s supplier and built a cedar strip canoe in the garage of a friend.

Comb graduated with a degree in psychology and social work and moved to Boston, where he worked for a magazine for seven years. While in Boston, a friend said to him, “All you want to do is go back to Minnesota and build canoes.”

Comb remembers thinking, “That’s the strangest thing I ever heard.” But once his friend said it, he knew it was true. He moved back and started a short-lived business making tofu, worked as a carpenter, and then he was a building contractor. He started to build a woodcanvas canoe as a winter project.

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY JULIE BUCKLES

Comb knew wood-canvas from the Old Town canoes he paddled as a kid. He also made wood strip and lapstrake canoes because he was a woodworker first. But the wood strip and the lapstrake canoes take more time, need more exactitude, are less tolerant of mistakes.

“Wood canvas is a genius of an idea,” he said. “A light weight canoe that’s pretty tough. It’s amazing what these canoes can take. And they’re repairable. And easy to replace parts.”

He based his design on the Canadian Chestnut canoe known for its stability and performance. Wood and canvas canoes are built on a form—picture an upsidedown canoe. The builder steams, then bends strips of cedar using the “form” to create the shape, nails on planks, wraps the canoe in canvas, and seals it with a special paint.

Comb divides his time between repairs and new canoes, with three to four canoes (and rowboats, too) in

various stages of progress. It takes him about two months to complete a canoe. A wilderness paddler himself, he says he prefers to sell to canoeists and fishermen. He doesn’t want his boats hanging in someone’s living room.

“Boat design is important to me. I have chosen models or designed boats for how they perform on t he water, not so much for their looks,” he said. “I think they can be beautiful, too, but that is form following the function, not some fanciful design.”

Julie Buckles and her husband built and continue to paddle a wood and canvas canoe based on an E. M. White design. Author of Paddling to Winter: A Couple’s Wilderness Journey from Lake Superior to the Canadian North, Julie was also part of the communications team that conceived and birthed Intangible . Currently, she owns and operates Honest Dog Books, a new and used bookstore in Bayfield, Wisconsin.

All photos, Stewart River Boatworks canoe shop in Knife River, Minnesota.

HEADWATERS CANOES

The Headwaters Canoes

workshop in Wakefield, Quebec, is exactly where you’d expect custom wood-canvas canoes to be made. Weathered siding blends into the hills of Gatineau Park, a vast greenspace adjacent to Canada’s capital of Ottawa. Snow clings to the eaves on cold winter days. Woodsmoke curls from the chimney and warm light spills from the windows, drawing you inside where builders Kate Prince and Jamie Bartle shape cedar, ash, and cherry into the iconic canoes that defined Canadian wilderness canoeing.

Headwaters builds about a dozen new canoes each year, in addition to restoring twenty or so more. That’s a far cry from the heyday of the Chestnut Canoe Company, which inspired Headwaters’ founder Hugh Stewart to carry on the tradition of building “working” woodcanvas canoes. Stewart spent time in Chestnut’s New

Brunswick factory, a factory that turned out thousands of canoes per year, supporting the exploration of Canada’s hinterlands by geologists and foresters before the advent of floatplanes. He acquired several Chestnut building forms when the company closed in 1979 and started building canoes in the 1980s, before handing the business over to Kate Prince and Jamie Bartle in 2017. Countless other canoe manufacturers have attempted to reproduce Chestnut designs in modern aramids and plastics, but Headwaters’ high-volume Prospectors and sleek Cruisers come the closest to the originals’ style and performance—a point of pride for the builders at Headwaters.

For Prince, a big part of building traditional canoes is celebrating their history and demonstrating they’re still capable of hard wilderness trips. “Canoes of all types have a certain beauty and functionality,” says Prince,

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY CONOR MIHELL

Above, Conor Mihell, Jamie, Bartle, and Kate Prince in Headwaters Canoes shop, Wakefield, Quebec.

who grew up canoeing with her family at summer camps in places like Algonquin and Killarney provincial parks. “But my appreciation for wood-canvas has grown as I’ve learned more about their unique history and taken longer trips with them myself.”

When Stewart owned Headwaters, he always insisted on taking recess from canoe construction for summer expeditions in northern Canada. Such experiences shape “research and development” in profound ways. For Prince, using 17- and 18-foot Prospectors for a two-month trip in the Yukon confirmed her conviction that “there’s nothing you can’t do in a wood-canvas canoe.”

Each Headwaters Canoe takes more than one hundred hours to construct: Starting in autumn with the laborious process of milling locally sourced, rough-

“MY APPRECIATION FOR WOOD-CANVAS HAS GROWN AS I’VE LEARNED MORE ABOUT THEIR UNIQUE HISTORY AND TAKEN LONGER TRIPS WITH THEM MYSELF.”

—KATE PRINCE

cut eastern white cedar into ribs and sheeting, and ultimately finishing in spring with the application of multiple coats of varnish and paint. Curiously, the defining features of a wood-canvas canoe—ribs steambent over a solid building form and a hull enveloped in a taut canvas skin—each entail barely an hour of work. Much of the effort lies in sheeting the canoe in waferthin cedar planking and painstaking jobs like sanding and rasping, which are crucial to creating smooth curves and a glossy finish.

Just like paddling, canoe-building is a reflective process. In her decade at Headwaters, Prince has come to understand how companies like Chestnut appropriated Indigenous technologies to facilitate the development of Canada’s frontier. Canoes are no longer being used

to stake claim to the land, but Prince says paddling a wood-canvas Prospector, whose checkered history is inherent to its name, should encourage reflection and acknowledgment of Canada’s colonial past. “We’re all part of the historical continuum,” she says. “When you paddle a canoe, you have the opportunity to become part of the process of reconciliation and finding a better pathway forward.”

Conor Mihell has paddled and portaged wood-canvas canoes for many miles along waterways in the Canadian arctic and sub-arctic. Like Prince, he has found that there is nothing you can’t do in a wood-canvas canoe. Author of The Greatest Lake: Stories from Lake Superior’s North Shore, you can follow Conor at conormihell.com.

Left and above, Headwaters Canoes shop in Wakefield, Quebec.

The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions.

Kate Prince, co-owner of Headwaters Canoes. Photo by Conor Mihell.

—Sigurd F. Olson , “The Way of a Canoe,” The Singing Wilderness