Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

11. “fucking close to water”: Queering the Production of the Nation

chapter 11 “fucking close to water”: Queering the Production of the Nation bruce erickson Although I have been for the last twenty years, credited with the quote you use, “A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe,” it is not actually my own—at least I don’t think so. —Pierre Berton And somewhere in that self-consciousness, which knows it is fundamentally incompatible with itself, the nation acknowledges that its strategies of self-consciousness are inadequate to their task, and it silently confesses that its existence is also a crime. —Chris Bracken Failure In order to start with honesty, I should inform the reader that my title, and my subject, is an absolute cliché for a novel take on the canoe in Canada. One of the first collections on canoeing in Canada (Raffan and Horwood 1988) contained two articles that started with the proposition, credited to Pierre Berton, that, “a Canadian is one who can make love in a canoe” (Raffan 1999b, 255). Bruce Hodgins (1988), in his contribution to the anthology, reaffirms Berton’s statement by saying that “making love in a canoe is the most Canadian act that two people can do” (45). Philip Chester adds a qualifier, stating, “while this may or may not be true, I would add that, unlike his American cousin, the true Canadian knows enough to take out the centre thwart” (1988, 93). The list of authors who use this quotable quote as an introduction to canoeing in Canada is enough to leave the phrase behind (Benidickson 1997, Chester 1988, Hodgins 1988, Raffan 1999a, Raffan 1999b) and the “bad joke” twist that 310 Desiring Nature? I have added is less than heroic, taken from a Monty Python sketch as it is. However, there is, I believe, more to this—something highlighted by my use of a joke in the title, somewhat along the lines of flogging a dead horse—a talent for making jokes useful even after they have failed. Indeed, my suggestion is that it is failure itself that is captured so effectively by the statement attributed to Pierre Berton. If we continue to follow the use of the equation in Canadian canoeing discourses, we find that it is almost always paired with failure. Raffan, in the prologue to his book on the canoe in Canadian culture, says that his failure is in finding a place in his book for all of the information he collected . One such piece of knowledge is that “it is impossible to make Love in a canoe because this small Saskatchewan town is not on a navigable waterway” (Raffan 1999a, xiii). Ferguson also points to the failure: “Pierre Berton once defined a Canadian as ‘someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.’ But John Robert Colombo was quick to correct him: ‘A Canadian is someone who thinks he knows how to make love in a canoe’” (Ferguson 1997, 158). Benidickson is more methodical in his approach to contemplating the failure: One of the more intriguing examples of collaborative canoe management must centre on the author Pierre Berton’s proposition that a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe (not illustrated). The hypothesis is difficult to substantiate on the basis of conventional research methodology. According to survey results from the late 1980’s, only 18 per cent of the population indicated that they had engaged in sex in moving vehicle “such as a car, boat, train or bus.” (1997, 13) Benidickson proceeds in the next two pages to examine the failure of different historical and fictional characters to succeed in the act. At the end of his book he returns to the action, only to dismiss it through a quotation from a Calgary-based journalist: “’Canadians do make love in a canoe, but . . . this is not considered romantic outside of Shawinigan’” (Lee, quoted in Benidickson 1997, 255).1 Raffan, not satisfied with declaring the act impossible due to geography, returns to the subject in an article, and has the final word on the failure of the statement: In an attempt to settle the attribution of this quote once and for all, I wrote to Pierre Berton to ask when and where he made this quip. In a letter dated 7 March 1996, he replied: “Although I have been for “fucking close to water” 311 the last twenty years, credited with the quote you...