I recently started re-reading Calvin Rutstrum’s books, one
of my favorite authors of my youth. I
had almost completely forgotten how much I liked his writings. As the jacket
presentation on one of his books say; “if you ever go to the woods… or even
just dream about it, you want Calvin Rutstrum as your guide”!
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| Illustration by Gary Jones |
Here is a snippet on how to portage your canoe!
“As we were making a portage around a rapid, we met two
Indian youngsters dragging a birchbark canoe over the portage. A girl and a
boy; they could not have been more than ten to twelve years old. One on each
side of the canoe's bow, handling it with a cross pole fastened to the gunwales,
dragging the stern along the trail. What was ingenious about the arrangement
was that the canoe’s stern was suspended in the crotch of an alder sapling elevating
the canoe's stern above the rough trail. The stem of the sapling sliding on the
trail also served as a spring to take the ground undulations and incidental
bumps. It was a method I had never seen used before, something these youngsters
had learned from their elders”.
Here is a list of Calvin Rutstrum's books, many still available in libraries
or on the internet:
Way of the Wilderness (1946),
Memoranda for Canoe Country (1953)
The New Way of the Wilderness (1958)
The Wilderness Cabin (1961)
North American Canoe Country (1964)
Wilderness Route Finder (1967)
Paradise Below Zero (1968)
Challenge of the Wilderness (1970)
Once Upon a Wilderness (1973)
The Wilderness Life (1975)
Chips from a Wilderness Log (1978)
A Wilderness Autobiography (1979)
Hiking Back to Health (1980)
A Columnist Looks at Life, Here's Cal Rutstrum (1981)
Backcountry (1981)
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