Definitions

A couple of nights ago, Ice brought up a question at dinner—what is the difference between a canoe and a kayak? For a moment the answer seems simple. The four boats sitting outside of the Mountain House are classic examples of both canoes and kayaks: the wide, green plastic boats without a top deck, with two webbed seats, and a series of wooden thwarts across the top are easily recognizable as a canoe, while the shorter and narrower bright plastic boats with a clear cockpit for one paddler and two covered hatches for gear storage is a very typical kayak. There are canoe paddles and kayak paddles, the strokes are different, they are often used in different bodies of water, etc… but there are a wide range of boats that can be called canoes and a wide range of boats that can be called kayaks, so how can the difference be defined? Further complicating things, in England, “canoe” is a blanket term for what we would call kayak and canoe.

In Mason Smith’s essay “You Hear Loons Calling”, he talks briefly about the term “canoe” in the 19^th century. The history of canoes goes back to some of the earliest Native Americans: Smith talks about the early birch bark canoes, with pointed ends reaching high into the air. He says that the canoes in the Adirondacks in the 1870s were similar to Eskimo kayaks and log dugouts, but made out of material typical of European boat building (Rooted in Rock, p. 353). In that case, how is an Eskimo “kayak” so easily compared to an Adirondack “canoe”? It seems like there is not enough of a definition to use these words to distinguish one from the other. If the Adirondack canoe is a more modern style of boat than I had imagined, and was not in fact directly related to the Native American canoes, than how can a canoe be labeled as traditional or non-traditional? Over the summer I worked at a wilderness canoe camp, and they placed more importance on the traditional construction of these wood-canvas canoes than I ever thought possible. The first time I called one of those canoes a "boat", I got dirty looks from everyone in that room before I was semi-politely corrected that these are "more than boats"--they are canoes. That pride for the craft is present in the Adirondacks, but the name of the vessel seems less important. Smith's description of a canoe as a moral object is not about its adherence to a traditional shape, but about the time spent building it and respect for the craft itself. Using a canoe as no more than an ends to a means would be immoral. Maybe, in the Adirondacks at least, the name and specifics of the design are not as important as the time and care that went into its construction.