Houseboat Chronicles: Notes from a Life in Shield Country - Hardcover

MacDonald, Jake

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592285538 ISBN 13: 9781592285532

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 2004

Synopsis

Explore the wilderness alongside the people who, whether boatside or camped under the stars, call it home.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

This is the story of Jake MacDonald's discovery of some of the last wild places in North America. The Precambrian Shield extends from the Arctic, across much of eastern Canada, and south into the United States. When Jake was still a boy, his father built a cottage in Manitoba. It was here that Jake developed a hankering to live in wild places, and why he decided to quit his graduate studies and explore the distant corners of the continent in a second-hand van.

First he worked as a guide, then as an odd-job person, and ultimately, as a kind of hunter-gatherer of stories. He met Inuit hunters who had been mauled by polar bears and Native trappers who walked routinely across thousands of miles of roadless wilderness. He came to know the cops, the tourists, and the Native people. He made friends with the hardy individuals who made a life for themselves in the wilderness: a German soldier imprisoned in northern Ontario in the Second World War who fell in love with the land; a guide who built an extraordinary houseboat out of exotic wood; and a bachelor known as the Prince who lived in a trailer behind a town's community centre. In telling their stories, Jake MacDonald tells us something about the Shield Country, and something about ourselves.

MacDonald argues that the heart and soul of Canada are to be found in Shield country. On its countless cold lakes, under its impossibly starry skies, we come to know ourselves. Its vastness and indifference show us our limitations and help to define us. This exploration of Shield country is, finally, an exploration of Canada itself.

From the Back Cover:

Jake MacDonald was about eleven when he hooked a fish so big that he felt for the first time the awesome otherness of Nature, so powerful was the action on the other end of his fishing line. That was the beginning of his lifelong fascination with Shield Country, extending north from Canada’s side of the Great Lakes. Over the years, he came to know it well, from the hardwood-covered Great Lakes region, across the vast central landscape of rivers and forest and ancient rock, to the cold northern taiga. He explored this country as a youth when, BB gun in hand, he set out to shoot gophers near his parents’ cottage.
He explored it when he dropped out of college. For an idyllic summer, he lived on an island in northern Ontario—until a bear took over. He explored it as a fishing guide, odd job man, and finally, as a writer, gathering stories.
Partly memoir, and partly reportage, Houseboat Chronicles brilliantly evokes both the wilderness and the people who make a living there.
The author writes about the vibrant native culture, and the precarious existence of the guides, bush pilots, cops, and camp owners who must struggle to live in beautiful, untamable country. The author lived on a houseboat for many years, and still has one, tethered to a remote island. At night, the sky above his floating cottage is filled by the glow of thousands of stars. In this funny, thoughtful book, MacDonald tells us a little about the lives of the men and women who live under those stars.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lyons Pr
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1592285538
• ISBN 13: 9781592285532
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296