Birchbark Canoe

 

 

It’s a book.

 

My friend John B gave it to me 40 years ago.  It’s the only book he ever gave me, so I knew it was important to him.  I figured it would be charming.  A novel.  Maybe something along the lines of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which was popular at the time.  Discoveries.  Life lessons.  Perhaps an epiphany at the end.

 

I meant to get to it right away, but I was busy and didn’t.  Then somehow never got to it.  Carried it with me all this time.  It’s always been in my intentions.  Well, I got to it.  Charming?  Nope.  In fact, it was pretty dry.  It was a self-account of a “white” guy (as he was referred to in the book), who got enchanted by first, birchbark canoes, and eventually Algonquin Indian language and culture, the center of focus being their birchbark canoes, a tradition from the 1800s, and could a white man learn to make one, and document how, before the Indian tradition completely disappeared.

 

Ultimately the author did learn to make a birchbark canoe, of course, otherwise no book.  But the book was but a blow-by-blow account about how he got there.  No story.  No drama.  No life lessons.  Just an account.  So what made this book so important to Johnny?  Johnny was, and always was, a craftsman.  When we were early teens, in Southern California, too young to have a car or go surfing, we rode skim boards.  Find a piece of 1/8 inch plywood about 2 feet by three feet, shape it round on the front, seal it with varnish or lacquer, and you’ve got a skim board.  Take it to the beach and watch the waves come in.  When a wave goes back out and leaves behind a nice flat thin sheet of water, run, throw the board down on the sand/water next to you at about the same speed you’re running, and hop on it.  You want as long a ride as you can get before you hit deeper water or the next wave coming in.

 

But a simple skim board, that wasn’t enough for John B.  It wasn’t long before he was out in his garage building different shapes, sizes, and fiberglassing them.  His skim boards were functional, durable, and well-crafted.  As we got older, and we got cars, he got a station wagon, a “woodie” so he could go surfing.  It wasn’t long of course before the equipment in his garage was producing custom-built surf boards.  It went that way all his life.  In the army he found a choir to join and ended up its director.  When he was part of the country rock band Slumgullion, back in the 80s, he played the electric bass, but not just any bass.  He mastered the fretless bass to expand what it could add to their music.  When he moved on to become a pilot, it wasn’t long before he became an instructor, and other than a long stint as the Red Baron, flying an aerobatic biplane (as the lead pilot of course), he carried that flying professor profession on for the remainder of his life.  I wondered to him why people would hire him to teach them how to fly when they had already graduated from flight school.  He answered that learning to fly, and getting your license was just the beginning.  There were infinite subtleties to master beyond that.  In his spare time, he crafted guitars and ukeleles in the woodshop in his basement.

 

But back to the book.  I understand the appeal for Johnny of a how-to book for building a birchbark canoe; sourcing local materials, and using the tools and techniques that had been handed down for millennia.  Bark from a large birch tree, large enough that an entire canoe can be made from one piece, not pieces stitched together.  Framing consisting of ribs, slats, stems (the bow and stern ends), gunwales, and thwarts, made from cedar, pine or spruce.  All sourced from different trees, split to specific dimensions, soaked, bent, and shaped with native tools.  For all of the seams and bindings, supple split spruce roots.  Sealant made from spruce gum or pine resin.  Of course, not just any of the above will do.  They all have to have their own best characteristics for the process to come together.  I see the attraction.

 

But another thing.  I didn’t have a bookmark handy, and this book is something I don’t want to deface by folding a page, or lying it on its face, and wouldn’t you know, something dropped out of it that would make a fine bookmark.  A card for Pop’s Woodshop.

 

As a young adult, Johnny learned that he was not the artist Karl Seethaler’s natural son.  During the intake process for joining the Army, which required documentation such as birth certificates, he found a different dad listed there.  As was often the custom in the 1950s, kids were not told that they were adopted, so as not to concern them.  The only dad he had known all his life was not his “birth” dad.  His biological dad was an ever-present friend of the family known as Pop.  When John Bowman Seethaler mustered out of the Army, he dropped the Seethaler name of the father that he had never felt connected to, and from then on went by, simply, John Bowman.  He spent more time with Pop, whose avocation interestingly enough was as a woodworker; a family trait we watched develop in John B, well before we knew where it came from.

 

So now, while I didn’t actually enjoy reading the gifted book, I truly enjoyed revisiting Johnny.