Canada Post honors Mr. Canoe
By ChristianWeek staff
OTTAWA–His love of canoeing in Canada’s wilderness was as legendary as his filmmaking career. Now Bill Mason, the intrepid paddler, environmentalist and deeply committed Christian, is being honored by Canada Post.
 |
An image of
Mason–in his canoe, of course–is among
four in a newly-released series of stamps
commemorating–fittingly–
"Legendary Canadians." The others are
sports announcer and philanthropist Harry
"Red" Foster, mountaineer Phyllis
Munday and naturalist Napoleon-Alexandre Comeau
(for whom Baie-Comeau, Quebec, is named). Mason, who was born in Winnipeg in 1929 and died at Meech Lake, Quebec, in 1988, produced 18 films, most of them for the National Film Board, and most of them about canoeing. A news release from Canada Post Corporation describes him as the "most successful filmmaker in the history of the National Film Board of Canada." He earned some 60 honors, including two British Academy Awards and two Oscar nominations, and his films were borrowed, purchased and seen by more people than those by any other NFB filmmaker. In 1974 his Cry of the Wild outgrossed Papillon, The Sting, American Graffiti and even The Godfather in its first week. |
Mason’s love of canoeing began during his childhood summers at Lake Winnipeg. Later, as a counsellor at Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s Manitoba Pioneer Camp, he developed his skills as a white water canoeist.
Respected worldwide for teaching canoeing methods (his book Path of the Paddle has long been the number one text in the canoeing world), Mason eventually became known as Canada’s "Mr. Canoe."
Yet, as a Christian, wrote friend and former IVCF colleague Wilber Sutherland when Mason died a decade ago, it pained him that so many of his fellow Christians "could love God and yet be indifferent to environmental concerns."
Sutherland, who himself turned to
filmmaking in his later years (he died in 1997) wrote in ChristianWeek
(Dec 6/88) that Mason’s love of nature and his love
for God were inextricably intertwined. "Life was a
seamless whole for Bill."
Mason’s loves are brought together in the title of a
1996 biography,
Fire in the Bones: Bill Mason and the Canoeing Tradition,
by James Raffan (HarperCollins). The book’s title is
a quote from Jeremiah 20:9, the text used at Mason’s
funeral.
In a letter to concerned friends after he was diagnosed with cancer, Mason wrote: "My obsession has been to share the wonder and infinite beauty of the world God has created and to help people develop an appreciation and concern for it. My optimism is rooted in my faith that God has not forsaken us."
