When Terry Dickinson went salmon fishing on a northern Maine lake almost 40 years ago, the water was dotted with the pontoon planes that had flown most of his fellow anglers to the remote site. But at the northern end of the lake, lying forlorn on the shore was a 20-foot wood-and-canvas canoe. “I thought it was beautiful,” Terry says, “and I decided I wanted to have something like it someday.”
Some years later, he built his own.
That was the first of four canoes Terry has hand-built from traditional materials. The one he last completed was a small, ten-foot model — a “trapper,” as Terry calls it. His newest canoe sits nearly finished in his garage at his home in Fletcher, a watercraft that Terry’s building for a buyer in New York at a final cost of about $6,000, including delivery by Terry himself. The canoe, a 20-footer that Terry calls a Grand Laker, has ribbing of white cedar that Terry steamed and bent to shape on a mold. Planking of western red cedar forms the hull that, in the next step of construction, will be covered with stretched canvas and waterproofed in the finishing stages with paints and varnishes.
“It can carry five people, or three people and camping equipment, or you and me and a moose,” Terry explains. It can be powered the old-fashioned way, with paddling, or with an outboard motor mounted on the squared stern. Powered up, the canoe can travel at about 11 knots, even on rough lake water, because of its low “rocker.” That’s the term canoe enthusiasts use to describe the curve of the hull as seen from the side (think of a horizontally held banana). The shallower the rocker, the more stable the canoe, although at some loss of maneuverability. “It’s the SUV of northern lake canoes,” Terry says of his Grand Laker.
Canoeing formed an integral part of Terry’s boyhood in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where his father was a wilderness guide and where Terry spent much of his time hunting and fishing and, yes, canoeing in pursuit of those activities. Canoes came in handy, too, for Terry’s 35-year career as a wildlife photographer, the fruits of which filled the Reflections of Nature gallery he and his wife Sandy opened on Broadway in Asheville on their move here from the northeast. Terry’s fondness for the canoe was evident as he stood in his backyard next to an older version of the one he’s now building, stroking the varnish glistening on its wood frame. Its two-horsepower motor provides a gentle push for leisurely wandering on a quiet lake.
Canoes are among the oldest means of human transportation. The oldest known canoe was excavated in the Netherlands, dated to the 7,000 BC. The name itself comes from indigenous Caribbean tribes, for whom it denoted a simple dugout or kenu. European immigrants to North America quickly adapted Native American birchbark canoes for navigating the rivers and lakes they encountered in their push west. Shorter than Terry’s Grand Laker, at about 14 feet, and with a weight of some 50 pounds, traditional birch canoes were light enough to be portaged when necessary, were able to carry a good deal of cargo, and were easily repaired if damaged by rocks. Without canoes, Lewis and Clark would never have made it to the Northwest coast and the Hudson River fur trade, an economic engine of 17th and 18th-century North America, would never have been possible.
Birchbark canoes easily crossed the 4,000-mile network of lakes and rivers that formed the trade’s supply route from Montreal to the Pacific Ocean, so efficient that they remained in active use until the late 19th-century. The canoe was crucial enough to Canada’s history that until recently, the country’s silver dollar depicted a Native American and a fur trader paddling on the reverse side. By the turn of the 20th century, canoeing had also become a leisure and competitive sport, officially recognized for Olympic racing competition in 1936.
These days, canoes — whether paddled, sailed or propelled by a motor — can be made from a variety of materials, from plastic to polycarbonates to aluminum, but Terry prefers the smell, feel and history of a handcrfted wood frame boat. After the one in his garage is finished later this year, he has one more in mind — like his first, a smaller ten-foot trapper— which sadly may be his last canoe. A recently diagnosed illness has robbed him of 65 percent of his sight, making a magnifying glass necessary at times for the work. But given that it can take six months or more to build one canoe, financial reward has hardly been an incentive and will hardly be missed. “Building canoes,” Terry says, “is a labor of love.”