Popularly thought of as a recreational vehicle and one of the key ingredients of an ideal wilderness getaway, the canoe is also a political vessel. A potent symbol and practice of Indigenous cultures and traditions, the canoe has also been adopted to assert conservation ideals, feminist empowerment, citizenship practices, and multicultural goals. Documenting many of these various uses, this book asserts that the canoe is not merely a matter of leisure and pleasure; it is folded into many facets of our political life. Taking a critical stance on the canoe, The Politics of the Canoe expands and enlarges the stories that we tell about the canoe's relationship to, for example, colonialism, nationalism, environmentalism, and resource politics. To think about the canoe as a political vessel is to recognize how intertwined canoes are in the public life, governance, authority, social conditions, and ideologies of particular cultures, nations, and states. Almost everywhere we turn, and any way we look at it, the canoe both affects and is affected by complex political and cultural histories. Across Canada and the U.S., canoeing cultures have been born of activism and resistance as much as of adherence to the mythologies of wilderness and nation building. The essays in this volume show that canoes can enhance how we engage with and interpret not only our physical environments, but also our histories and present-day societies.

Even as a teenager, John Beattie felt drawn to the ocean, but it was twenty-five years before his dreams of sailing the globe in his 35-foot yacht Warrior Queen could begin to come true. His voyage began in England and continued to the South American coast and into the depths of the rain forests via uncharted tributaries. The adventure reached a stirring climax during his return voyage from Venezuela. One day at dawn, hundreds of miles from land, he spotted a man dying of thirst aboard a drifting open boat, a man given one last slender chance to live.

In August 1998 Kim Trevathan summoned his beloved 45-pound German shepherd mix, Jasper, and paddled a canoe down the Tennessee River, an adventure chronicled in Paddling the Tennessee River: A Voyage on Easy Water. Twenty years later, in Against the Current: Paddling Upstream on the Tennessee River, he invites readers on a voyage of light-hearted rumination about time, memory, and change as he paddles the same river in the same boat-but this time going upstream, starting out in early spring instead of late summer. In sparkling prose, Trevathan describes the life of the river before and after the dams, the sometimes daunting condition of its environment, its banks' host of evolving communities-and also the joys and follies of having a new puppy, 65-pound Maggie, for a shipmate. Trevathan discusses the Tennessee River's varied contributions to the cultures that hug its waterway (Kentuckians refer to it as a lake, but Tennesseans call it a river), and the writer's intimate style proves a perfect lens for the passageway from Kentucky to Tennessee to Alabama and back to Tennessee. In choice observations and chance encounters along the route, Trevathan uncovers meaningful differences among the Tennessee Valley's people-and not a few differences in himself, now an older, wiser adventurer. Whether he is struggling to calm his land-loving companion, confronting his body's newfound aches and pains, craving a hard-to-find cheeseburger, or scouting for a safe place to camp for the night, Trevathan perseveres in his quest to reacquaint himself with the river and to discover new things about it. And, owing to his masterful sense of detail, cadence, and narrative craft, Trevathan keeps the reader at the heart of the journey. The Tennessee River is a remarkable landmark, and this text exhibits its past and present qualities with a perspective only Trevathan can provide.

The lives of philosophers would be dull reading if they were as tidy as their thoughts often tend to be. Alastair Hannay describes how he 'slid' into philosophy but found it a useful means of transport for a life framed here in metaphors of the sea, an unruly element that has played some part in a not always tidy life. Although the philosophy option attracts some because it suits their talents, the less talented may look to it for guidance in making sense of their lives. Hannay's own 'episodic' interest led him by chance to a life-time of active engagement with philosophers of all kinds. An encounter with the works of Soren Kierkegaard opened the way to a personal take on a profession that easily ends in abstractions but which, when its questions are brought down to earth, sees market-place and academic philosophy from a perspective that allows the one to enrich the other.