Voyageur Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe eBook Robert Twigger
Download As PDF : Voyageur Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe eBook Robert Twigger 
Best-selling author of Angry White Pyjamas travels across the Rocky Mountains by canoe
Fifteen years before Lewis and Clark, Scotsman Alexander Mackenzie, looking to open up a trade route, set out from Lake Athabasca in central Northern Canada in search of the Pacific Ocean. Mackenzie travelled by bark canoe and had a cache of rum and a crew of Canadian voyageurs, hard-living backwoodsmen, for company. Two centuries later, Robert Twigger decides to follow in Mackenzie's wake. He too travels the traditional way, having painstakingly built a canoe from birchbark sewn together with pine roots, and assembled a crew made up of fellow travelers, ex-tree-planters and a former sailor from the US Navy.
Several had tried before them but they were the first people to successfully complete Mackenzie's diabolical route over the Rockies in a birchbark canoe since 1793. Their journey takes them to the remotest parts of the wilderness, through Native American reservations, over mountains, through rapids and across lakes, meeting descendants of Mackenzie and unhinged Canadian trappers, running out of food, getting lost and miraculously found again, disfigured for life (the ex-sailor loses his thumb), bears brown and black, docile and grizzly.
Voyageur Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe eBook Robert Twigger
This is a great wallop of a river-road book in the tradition of the English wanderer who is dedicated to peeling off the seemingy intact veneer of the present to reach the denser heartwood of the past and illume the shoddiness of now.The main eye-opener for many citizens of the USA will be to learn that it was NOT Lewis and Clark, backed by the full might of the US Army and eager support of President Thomas Jefferson, but the entrepreneurial Scotsman Alexander Mackenzie who first traversed the North American continent to reach the Pacific Ocean -- and he did it across Canada in a birchbark canoe, mostly upriver and against the current, with a roughneck crew of rum-rationed backwoodsmen 15 years earlier in 1793.
It is Mackenzie's route that Robert Twigger, after building his own birchbark canoe, and his pick-up crews labouriously pursue over three summers, pittng brawn, brain and bloody-mindedness against everything the Canadian wilderness (and various outposts of Canuck civilization) can throw at them.
Like the eccentric Victorian travel writer George Borrow (and many others since -- Thesiger, for one, John McPhee for another), Twigger distrusts the "dark Satanic mills" of his day. Civilization, especially urbanization, leaches out something essential from the human endeavour, rendering it feeble, feckless and insipid.
This is a constant theme of the book, a yearning for a more muscular reality where the risks (grizzly bears, getting lost, nasty rapids) are real and the subtle rewards commensurate. More than once the Twigger lads spurn local creature comforts to tramp back to their tent and a more heart-felt truth, such as (at the end, when they are by a lake) "the ever-present loon calling across the water".
Beneath all that we hold valuable in the juggernaught of technological evolution, our blinding exponential rush towards Kurzweil's avowed Singularity, lurks something even more valuable that we scorn or romanticize in a Walt Disney way. Twigger sums it up on page 383:
"I saw what I valued most about the wilderness was the way it stripped away all the BS impedimenta of ordinary life, all the rubbish we've persuaded ourselves we need to live with,all the symbols that show we've got more money and status than our next-door neighbour. Those games sickened me and that is why I was glad when I walked back with Joe from the log cabin ... for our austere campsite."
This is a riproaring tale of adventure full of history, keen observation and assorted fascinating characters met along the way. The trip parallels Mackenzie's original (and even more strenuous effort for there were no maps then), with frequent quotations from the Scotsman's best-selling late 18th century journal. No one will read Twigger without finding that deepest of all refreshments: a sense of hope and continuity.
Special mention, too, must be made as to the excellence of the book's maps and photographs which gives this book that extra dimension of solid usability. You have a clear sense of where you are, what it looks like and with whom you're vicariously travelling. The publishers of most modern travel books stint on this vital visual bonding glue, thereby needlessly losing many armchair readers who find it hard to steer by sheer text alone.
Shake the hand and thank every Mackenzie you meet for giving us their illustrious namesake hero who made this vivid journey -- TWICE, the second time upriver with Twigger and his rugged gang!
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Voyageur Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe eBook Robert Twigger Reviews
This is not a serious book, and I believe that it is not supposed to be. It is an adventure book, and once again, Rob Twigger is out to prove his metal ... and in my mind he does so (along with his companions ... let us not forget them), without compromise. It might seem a little immature to many, but not to me. I believe that this book displays a strength of character in Rob unmatched by the average guy (or gal) who has sold his soul to the corporation (myself), and has never done anything adventurous (or stupid?) (thankfully not me) in his/her life. Rob decides on his quest, gets the bit between his teeth, and never releases it until he accomplishes what he sets out to achieve, irrespective of incredible hardships.
So if you want to read a "boys own" adventure narative that goes back to the purity of travel through the wilds of Canada, and captures the hardships that must have been experienced by the early voyageurs, then this is the book. This was a hard quest by hard men ... both the original trip made centuries ago, and this contemporary trip by Rob's team ... from the building of an original bark canoe, through honest accounts of personal strife and conflict, one of the team having his thumb "ripped" off, wading upstream through rapids jumping from submerged log to submerged log towing a loaded canoe, negotiating dangerous rapids that they knew they might not survive, to the final trek out to the west coast.
This book kept me on edge from start to finish ... when I hoped they would turn around and do the whole trip again in reverse !
This is a great wallop of a river-road book in the tradition of the English wanderer who is dedicated to peeling off the seemingy intact veneer of the present to reach the denser heartwood of the past and illume the shoddiness of now.
The main eye-opener for many citizens of the USA will be to learn that it was NOT Lewis and Clark, backed by the full might of the US Army and eager support of President Thomas Jefferson, but the entrepreneurial Scotsman Alexander Mackenzie who first traversed the North American continent to reach the Pacific Ocean -- and he did it across Canada in a birchbark canoe, mostly upriver and against the current, with a roughneck crew of rum-rationed backwoodsmen 15 years earlier in 1793.
It is Mackenzie's route that Robert Twigger, after building his own birchbark canoe, and his pick-up crews labouriously pursue over three summers, pittng brawn, brain and bloody-mindedness against everything the Canadian wilderness (and various outposts of Canuck civilization) can throw at them.
Like the eccentric Victorian travel writer George Borrow (and many others since -- Thesiger, for one, John McPhee for another), Twigger distrusts the "dark Satanic mills" of his day. Civilization, especially urbanization, leaches out something essential from the human endeavour, rendering it feeble, feckless and insipid.
This is a constant theme of the book, a yearning for a more muscular reality where the risks (grizzly bears, getting lost, nasty rapids) are real and the subtle rewards commensurate. More than once the Twigger lads spurn local creature comforts to tramp back to their tent and a more heart-felt truth, such as (at the end, when they are by a lake) "the ever-present loon calling across the water".
Beneath all that we hold valuable in the juggernaught of technological evolution, our blinding exponential rush towards Kurzweil's avowed Singularity, lurks something even more valuable that we scorn or romanticize in a Walt Disney way. Twigger sums it up on page 383
"I saw what I valued most about the wilderness was the way it stripped away all the BS impedimenta of ordinary life, all the rubbish we've persuaded ourselves we need to live with,all the symbols that show we've got more money and status than our next-door neighbour. Those games sickened me and that is why I was glad when I walked back with Joe from the log cabin ... for our austere campsite."
This is a riproaring tale of adventure full of history, keen observation and assorted fascinating characters met along the way. The trip parallels Mackenzie's original (and even more strenuous effort for there were no maps then), with frequent quotations from the Scotsman's best-selling late 18th century journal. No one will read Twigger without finding that deepest of all refreshments a sense of hope and continuity.
Special mention, too, must be made as to the excellence of the book's maps and photographs which gives this book that extra dimension of solid usability. You have a clear sense of where you are, what it looks like and with whom you're vicariously travelling. The publishers of most modern travel books stint on this vital visual bonding glue, thereby needlessly losing many armchair readers who find it hard to steer by sheer text alone.
Shake the hand and thank every Mackenzie you meet for giving us their illustrious namesake hero who made this vivid journey -- TWICE, the second time upriver with Twigger and his rugged gang!
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