Canoe & Kayak's Favorite Paddling Tales
20 Great Reads That Entertain and Inspire

11. Sleeping Island, P.G. Downes (1943)
"Here was the world as it had always been, untrammeled, undefeated, a true frontier, one of the last on the continent–going but not gone." So rhapsodizes Downes upon arriving, by canoe, in the Barren Lands of Canada in 1939. There have been many books about travel in this vast, lean country north of the tree line, but few as sensitively and directly written as Downes’. A Harvard psychology grad, Downes was also well versed in cartography, geology, and ethnology, and his writing about the North is informed and meticulous. But Sleeping Island is far from an academic work. It is, above all, a captivating tale of an arduous canoe trip, told in a voice both humble and inclusive, occasionally ironic but never distant. Downes was a smart guy, but not a detached observer; it's his sincere and immense love for this country and its inhabitants that illuminates every page of this remarkable book.

12. Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure, James West Davidson and John Rugge (1988)
When the authors sat down in the 1980s to write this composite look at three related canoe trips–one of them fatal–though Labrador in 1903 and 1905, an account of each journey had already been published. But it's really all one story, and Davidson and Wallace pull it all together here, telling the saga through multiple points of view in novelistic form. And what a saga it is. In 1903 Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., an ambitious and romantic young writer for Outing Magazine (a sort of turn-of-the-century Outside), mounted a trip through largely unmapped Labrador, and perished of starvation before reaching his goal of Ungava Bay. His companion, Dillon Wallace, survived to tell the tale. But that wasn't the end. Two years later Wallace, and Hubbard's widow Mina, now bitter rivals, both set out on separate expeditions to complete the late adventurer's journey. A tragic trip, in other words, was shortly followed by a race. The imagined dialogue in this book is occasionally clunky, but the authors have done a commendable job of weaving together the strands of the story and dramatizing it in a way that none of the earlier books can do, given their biases and datedness.

13. Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan (1994)
In this evocative and hallucinatory first novel, Aussie author Flanagan takes the somewhat trite notion that a dying person will see their life flash before their eyes and pushes it to a dizzying–and frequently dazzling–new level. Trapped in a "keeper" on Tasmania's wild Franklin River after a rafting mishap, the titular guide sees not only his own life replayed in vivid detail, but the entire sad, tangled story of his family stretching back four generations–a genealogy that, with roots in both penal colonies and aboriginal encampments, is in many ways the story of Australia itself. Ambitious, yeah. Sometimes too ambitious, as characters and bloodlines and time periods tend to get hopelessly blurred. But then again, maybe this is the point. Framing all of this is the river adventure, or misadventure. Flanagan convincingly evokes the culture of river guiding, the mystical quality of a remote gorge, and the thrill that even a melancholic, jaded guide can experience after a particularly heady run through such country. "'Yes,' he screams. 'Yes!' And as he punches the air again and again he feels the excitement, the old excitement back, the feeling of being one with the rapid's power and the gorge's passion, the feeling of belonging and living."

14. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner (1953)
In this biograpy of John Wesley Powell, Stegner, the esteemed Western man of letters, dwells at length on the explorer-geographer's 1869 descent of the Colorado River, defending his decision to do so thus: "though Powell's later activities were of much greater national importance, the river journey was symptom and symbol." And let's face it: Powell's pioneering drop through the Grand Canyon also makes for far more visceral and dramatic material than his subsequent tussles with Congress and bureaucracy. But Stegner also pays careful attention to the latter, and as relatively dry–in all senses of the word–that this aspect of Powell's life may seem, it's also riveting in its way. Stegner convincingly argues that Powell was a visionary whose conservationist ideas about Western settlement and water policy were sadly ignored in his time, only to be adopted "partially, belatedly, sidelong."

15. Surfacing, Margaret Atwood (1972)
In her more recent and increasingly ambitious novels, Booker Prize winner Atwood has explored everything from a dystopian future to a mid-century murder mystery, but this, her second novel, is rooted in her own experience of the Northern Quebec wilderness in which she was raised. It's a spare, unsettling story of a woman's search, largely by canoe, for her missing father, told in crisp, stirring language. "Around us the illusion of infinite space or of no space, ourselves and the obscure shore which it seems we could touch, the water between us an absence. The canoe's reflection floats with us, the paddles twin in the lake. It's like moving on air, nothing beneath us holding us up."

16. Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose (1996)
The heft of this 500-page work of history might seem a bit, well, daunting, but it reads less like scholarship than an action-packed novel. Technically it's a biography of Meriwether Lewis, but it's also a definitive and gripping account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It's all here–the hard trek over the Bitteroots, the wild ride down the Columbia, the bittersweet arrival at the Pacific. Enlivening all of this is Ambrose's obvious passion for his subject and love of the landscape (canoeing and trekking the Lewis and Clark Trail was, for decades, a family obsession, he explains). Ambrose sticks to the facts, but can't help inserting his own voice here and there, wondering aloud whether Lewis was depressed when he reached salt water, for instance, and exclaiming elsewhere: "What a multi-faceted man Lewis was." The flaws of the man–his alcoholism, his mood disorder–are duly described, but Ambrose remains in awe of Lewis, without hesitation deeming him "the greatest of all American explorers." And he poignantly relates how, on the night of Lewis' death, the impoverished explorer stretched a rug on the floor (even five years after the expedition, he still couldn't sleep in a bed), while his journals (the one possession he would never sell) rested a short distance away in a saddlebag.

17. The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangrila, Todd Balf (2000)
Part heart-pumping tale of an audacious undertaking. Part thoughtful analysis of what motivates big-water kayakers to push the envelope. And part cautionary tale about Western hubris and naivete. In 1998 four American kayakers attempted a first descent of the legendary Tsangpo River in Tibet, the "whitewater grail," as Balf describes it, and, as most of us now know, only three came back. Balf provides a balanced and sensitive look at this tragedy, which, like any tragedy, is easy to criticize in hindsight. Balf doesn't point fingers. What he does do is vividly evoke the setting–the "bottom of the world"–in which this impossible (or is it?) feat was attempted. And he also offers some astute observations on the lure–and lethality–of deep gorge whitewater. Suspense is sometimes sacrificed in the interest of being tactful, but this is definitely a must-read for anyone with a yen and/or concern for extreme boating.

18. An Inland Voyage, Robert Louis Stevenson (1878)

Before authoring such famous novels as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a 25-year-old Stevenson wrote this paddling travelogue, an account of his 1876 journey with a friend through Belgium and France in a pair of canoes named Cigarette and Arethusa. The prose occasionally has an overwrought, mannered tone typical of the era, but there are also moments of drama and humor that strike a surprisingly contemporary note. In what is probably the funniest episode, Stevenson slams into a sweeper on the Oise River. The fallen tree "bereaved me of my boat," he reports in classic 19th century style, then adds: "But there was the paddle in my hand. On my tomb, if I ever have one, I mean to get these words inscribed: 'He clung to his paddle.'" More memorable still is his assessment that, "After a good woman, and a good book, and tobacco, there is nothing so agreeable on earth as a river."

19. Tales of an Empty Cabin, Grey Owl (1936)
Yes, he was an impostor, an Englishman who took on the identity of an Indian and duped people the world over. But he couldn't fake his enthusiasm for his adopted country or its principal mode of transport. In one passage from this book, an account of a run down the Mississagi River of Northern Ontario, the prose rolls and explodes like something out of Kerouac: "So, speed, speed, speed, grip the canoe ribs with your knees, drive those paddles deep, throw your weight on to them, click them on those gunnels twenty-five strokes to the minute; spurn that water in gurgling eddies behind you, bend those backs, and drive!"

20. Mississippi Solo: A River Quest, Eddy L. Harris (1988)
Like our first pick, an account of a trip down the mighty Miss. But this is an experience of the modern-day Mississippi, as seen through the eyes of a young, urban black man. Harris, a journalist who grew up in St. Louis, sets off with a borrowed canoe, a revolver, and a massive supply of granola bars, to follow the legendary river–"the spine of the nation," as he describes it–from its source at Lake Itasca to its mouth in New Orleans. Part of the charm of this travelogue is the author's self-avowed naivete–he's never done much canoeing before, even less camping. But he bumbles gamely along, opening himself to experience. "As I strip the varnish off my own exterior and expose hidden layers, the river reciprocates and reveals to me what I otherwise would not have known," he writes. An altercation with a pair of Arkansas rednecks leaves him badly rattled, but Harris presses on towards his goal. "I'm not afraid of hard times. The river has taught me how to stick it out and endure."

Jim Moodie lives on the world's largest lake within a lake--Lake Manitou, on Manitoulin Island--and edits the Manitoulin Expositor. He holds a degree in Modern Literature and lapsed certification as a flatwater instructor. Recent reads: "Tree of Smoke," Denis Johnson's twistedly beautiful Vietnam hallucination, and John McPhee's environmental classic, "Encounters with the Archdruid."