Canoeing Quotes

I was a bad kid for a while. I`d break curfew, smoke bud, drink booze, all the usual stuff. My parents sent me to an all-boys boarding school when I was 12 -- a school designed to even out uneven boys -- and I was constantly caught smoking. You had to chop wood if you got caught smoking, so I was always chopping wood. It was a very outdoorsy school. You got graded on white-water canoeing, or they`d send you out into the woods with a pack of matches and you had to build a quinzhee and survive out there for a few days. I liked that aspect of it. When I was 16 they asked me not to return. I technically wasn`t kicked out, but I guess they caught me smoking and drinking one too many times. I still look back at it fondly as the place I learned to smoke. I can kill butts with the best of them.

Millions of Americans each year use our national forests to go hiking, fishing, hunting, camping, swimming, horseback riding, and canoeing.

(But if Boyden grew up canoeing across cold-water lakes and tramping through the birch forests with his relatives, no one ever explained their connection. His parents were raised during the 1930s when native heritage was considered shameful and many mixed-race people would pretend to be white.) I think my grandmother lived with this quietly, unhappily, ... My mother just refused to recognise it so didn`t grow up with any kind of prejudice.