Book Review: Fire in the Bones: Bill Mason and the Canadian Canoeing Tradition.
by Richard Furman

Raffan, James. Fire in the Bones: Bill Mason and the Canadian Canoeing Tradition. Harper Collins(1996). $27.00

I must have been five years old when, one night, my parents came home from the movie theater. They thought the were going to see a film called "Call of the Wild," based on Jack London’s story. However, the film they had gone to see was called "Cry of the Wild." My mother, who was very insistent on things like plot and more or less constant dialogue, described the film by commencing a howl. My father soon joined in and before long my sister and I had added our voices. From then on our family could scarce see a full moon without howling. Although I had no idea who he was, or that 25 years later I would be studying his films in my quest to "keep the open side up," this was the very first impact Bill Mason had on my life.

In the paddling community, we tend to think of Bill Mason primarily as a canoeist. The voice of gentle, patient instruction that narrates his "Path of the Paddle" films, the strains of music as he spins his canoe in place and runs rapids define him to us. We know he painted. We know he made films, but by and large most of us regard him first and foremost as a paddler. Raffan’s book opens our eyes to another man, one most of us never expected to find behind the man in the red canoe. A man whose life was a veritable whirlwind of projects, whose ambition was driven by a determined Christianity that was the basis for his love of nature. Canoeing, throughout most of his life, was a means of getting himself, a small crew and a lot of equipment out into remote locations for his film projects. The purpose of the film projects was evangelism for his own God-in-nature brand of Christianity.

Raffan introduces us to this Bill Mason in a way I feel confident Bill would have approved of. His writing style is very cinematic, so much so that in the first page of the book the mind’s eye can see Bill twirling with a canoe on his shoulders, the pan across the faces of the people gathered for Paul’s wedding, the return to the shot of Bill dancing and then a cut to a close-up of the hospital band on his wrist. The visual writing style is perfect for telling the story of a visual artist.

Raffan proves that it is impossible to write Bill Mason’s biography without also writing a history of the environmental movement in Canada, a history of the evolution of canoeing, and a bit of Canadian history as well. This makes for a great deal of richness, and excellent contextualization of Bill’s life and the effects of his works on the world at large. And with Bill caught between the burning desire to evangelize for the Creator’s works and the desire to enjoy them in solitude, Raffan does not need to look very hard for the dramatic tension that makes every book work.

Fire in the Bones has opened my eyes to a Bill Mason I never knew existed, a Bill Mason hunched over an editing table cobbling film footage painstakingly shot into the form the story-board in his mind demanded. Who would have guessed that Bill only learned formal canoeing technique when he needed it for "Path of the Paddle?" It is an honest look at the life of a legend, full of the love and admiration his subject deserves, but free of the hero-worship that is always tempting when treating the life of a man who taught no less than three generations of paddlers. Raffan’s book is a must-read.