Paddling through Canada

There are a lot of travel writers these days setting off ‘in the footsteps of’ someone else, gathering clues and arguing with ghosts. This is partly pragmatism: there are so few untouched trails around that you might as well make a virtue of necessity, lend your narrative some historical backbone and a point of comparison. It means that as you stare across at an interlaced network of concrete motorways and slab-like apartment blocks, you can contrast the contemporary carnage with the three wooden huts your predecessor observed, or discern the vestiges of the past among the urban clutter. Yet at times the genre can flag: the footsteps simply aren’t compelling, the structure is creaky, the premise ultimately dubious. The genre easily becomes formulaic — earnest depictions of the pursued, self-indulgent musings from the pursuer. This all makes Robert Twigger’s book something of a relief: a ‘footsteps’ book that also passes muster as a truly interesting journey, told with wit and panache.

Twigger treads in the footsteps of an 18th-century Scot called Alexander Mackenzie, who made the first crossing of North America in a birchbark canoe, riding fast-flowing rivers through the Canadian Rocky Mountains, from Fort Chipewyan, near Edmonton, to the Pacific coast. Twigger decides to take his own birchbark canoe along this 2,000- mile route, hoping to become the first person to ‘retrace his route in a traditional craft since 1793’. He is eager for adventure, in search of an escape from his comfortable house on the edge of Oxford, his ‘reliable Japanese car’ and his view of ‘everyone’s satellite dishes and TV antennae’. Yet he’s aware of the difficulty of really escaping: ‘The old challenges … have become the tourist routes of the present day,’ he mourns. ‘Expeditions were now characterised by how ludicrous they were … ours was pretty ludicrous.’