From a Wooden Canoe
Reflections on Canoeing, Camping and Classic Equipment
by Jerry Dennis
Illustrations by Glenn Wolff
St. Martin's Press, $21.95
ISBN 0-312-19979-1
Dawns and sunsets are better up here. They have a clean smell to them, invigorating on one end and calming at the other. Even up north they are enhanced somehow by wooden boats, a red and black Mackinaw cruiser, a good axe, a wet dog, a campfire.
Jerry Dennis' newest jewel, From a Wooden Canoe, wraps the classic tools of an outdoor life in a daydream video complete with a masterful sound track. This is no small accomplishment in print. The essays capture dew drops and mist, the water songs of dipping paddles and rain on granite. They sting our eyes with wood smoke, wash us in starlight, and wrap us safe in an old wool coat. I could touch and feel the grain of his canoe paddle and gaze with satisfaction at the tightly stacked camp wood.
This is a collection of elegant, short essays by a serious, gifted writer. The work is perfect as a bedside companion; each piece promises a respite from tabloid news, plastic, and microchips. When I began to read my first inclination was to pace myself, to savor the book õ its feel, its taste. But I was highly stressed by disturbing news of a dear friend gravely ill, combined with the yearly emotional abyss of tax time. I read it straight through. It soothed me somehow. Perhaps it was the image of my father in his red and black hunting coat, watching a snowy tree line, .348 Winchester in the crook of his arm. It might have been the memory of a frost-covered camp on the Little Manistee, or the sweet smell of cedar from a hundred swamps. It was all of these and more.
Sometimes when I've managed to construct that rare, decent sentence, a swagger develops, a cup of literary smug is poured. When this happens I turn to one of four literary craftsmen, read just a few pages, and am brought back to my humble reality. The writers are Jim Harrison, John McPhee, Thomas McGuane, and Jerry Dennis. These folks write often enough about the things I love to be cabined together on special shelves. They can never be bundled into a category like outdoor writer, novelist, poet. From a Wooden Canoe joins Dennis' earlier works in my special bookcase. RWOL
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