I'd love to say this is is a great book.But it isn't. Go into a large public library, and if they have a section on canoeing the chances are you'll find a copy of Path of the Paddle by Bill MasonI can't be the only person who learned to paddle an open Canoe by reading this book. With a library copy stuck in a plastic bag and resting on the hull, I bruised my knees and my ego trying to make 16ft of uncooperative fibre glass do the things in the diagrams. If it hadn't been for the photographs that equated canoeing with stunning wilderness scenery and beautiful campsites in remote places, I would probably have thrown the book away and retreated to my Kayak.
Bill mason did more to popularise the Open canoe than anyone else. His position is unique, since there is no one with a comparative influence on the art of kayaking. When he died, the British canoe union dedicated a chapter of its hand book to him, a film festival and scholarship were set up in his memory in Canada, and even now, when modern writers of books on the sport of open canoe paddling, like Slim Ray, disagree with what he said, they do so with a with a genial reverence that is rarely found in paddling circles.
Since Mason was such an important figure in my private mythology, I approached Bill Ruffan's biography with mixed feelings. To deal with myths is a difficult task, and Mason was many things to many people: the Author of Path of the Paddle, the maker of other films that were successful, a husband , father and friend.
The dust jacket and subtitle seemed to suggest that Raffan had taken the logical course and chosen to use Mason the paddler and his relationship with the tradition he came to embody as the unifying theme.
Instead the book is a rather logical and thorough attempt to cover everything. Ruffan, as Biographer, has used Mason's career as a film maker to hold his narrative together, and the result is a book that reads like an extended portfolio of a film maker's life. While those films were highly praised, and at least six of them are "about" canoeing, there is precious little about Mason the paddler. And outside of Canada, Bill Mason will be remembered most as the man who paddled rivers in an open canoe and indirectly taught thousands to follow him.
At the end of the book I did not know what it was like to go down a river with him. There are almost no stories about Mason as river traveler from someone else's perspective. There is nothing from the students he worked with on camp. There is little from Paul Mason on what it was like to be the very competent son of a paddling legend. I was not expecting to finish the book relatively ignorant of where Mason got his style and terminology from: it's mentioned briefly, but this subject, Bill Mason's position in terms of the tradition he came to represent, which the book's subtitle claims the book is about, is brushed over quickly.
All in all a disappointment. And an education. Watters couldn't find a publisher for his life of Blackadar: Never turn back. Yet "Never turn back" is a far better biography than Fire in the Bones
