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Last fall, we had an unusual warm spell and so we decided to have a little socially distanced outdoor Thanksgiving with a couple of friends, Amy and Gunnar and my daughter, Nova. It was a lovely evening and a really nice way to spend a pandemic holiday. The topic of my upcoming adventures arose in conversation and Amy and Gunnar recommended I read the Minnesota classic travelogue, “Canoeing with the Cree”. Sylvia filed that idea away and surprised me with a copy of it as a gift about a week later.
The book tells a story of friends Eric and Walter, two young men from Minneapolis who decided to canoe from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay in Canada after they finished their senior year of high school in 1930. Turns out that this is possible to do, although extremely difficult and dangerous, especially in a canvas canoe. They had to canoe up the Minnesota River, against the current, to its source, Lake Traverse on the Minnesota/South Dakota border. Then they had to portage a short distance and pick up the Red River of the North which flows north to the Hudson Bay. Quite a feat! “Canoeing with the Cree” is a gripping adventure with many surprising elements and it launched the journalistic career of Eric Sevareid, one of the two, and now a Minneapolis celeb. I was a little surprised by how this 90-year-old story spoke to me; I loved it.
I’d been casting around for an interesting boat name for quite a while, and the right one had, to date, eluded me. I was thinking it should be French, as I’m a bit of a Francophile and had been to France twice in the last couple of years. The issue was finding a French name that doesn’t sound pretentious — not easy it turns out. I had on my list names such as “Rose Des Ventes,” “La Quete,” “Cirque,” “Amelia,” and so on. All of these sounded too hoity-toity for my taste.
Early in the book, Eric and Walter named their canoe “Sans Souci,” which translates to carefree, and colloquially to, no worries. I had my name. I am forever grateful to Amy, Gunnar and Sylvia for the inspiration!
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Great name. Love the story.
Love the name. Also the name of the palace that Henri Christophe, one of Haiti’s independence leaders, built in the town of Milot, close to Cap Haitian. It’s at the base of the mountain where the Citadel–an imposing fortress intended to insure the French never returned–was constructed. Maybe in your Caribbean sojourns you’ll have a chance to check it out.