Canoe Country Quotes

“Kotcheff recalled after a northern trek with Trudeau. “He was by far the best dish-washer, fire-maker and camp organizer. He put some of us to shame.… Not only was he fit, he turned out to be one of the best canoeists and sternsmen in the group. If anyone succumbed to the elements, it wouldn’t be Pierre.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada

“What sets a canoeing expedition apart,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau wrote in an essay a quarter century before he became Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, “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.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada