Sex and Canoes
...although not necessarily together. Makin' whoopee in a canoe is hard, or so omphale23 has informed me*.
First, the sex:
Title: I Know I Am But Summer To Your Heart
Author: nos4a2no9
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Fraser/Kowalski
Length: 2830 words
Prompt: leaves
Notes: Many thanks to meresy and malnpudl for detailed, fast and exceptionally savvy beta work. I couldn’t have done it without you, chicas! The title is shamelessly stolen from one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's brilliant works. No limbs were harmed in the making of this story. Pinky swear.
I Know I Am But Summer To Your Heart
And I also wanted to share with you a wonderful little excerpt from Beauty Tips from Moosejaw. (Yep. Still on that. Someday I'll read a new book). We were talking about Canadian history over at sageness's place, and Sage wrote, "And I've been reading about the Northwestern Company [a fur-trading network that operated in Canada in the 18th and 19th century). It's like Latin American history all over again, except with ice instead of malaria. I cannot wrap my head around Ottawa just handing the west over like that. I just...it is SO contrary to my family's history, US history, etc."
That got me thinking about geography, and why Canada looks the way it does on a map. It's such a vast territory compared to our southern neighbour, and it has always looked a little ragged and uneven to me, compared with the neat patchwork of the American map. Why does it look that way?
Well, it turns out that Canada is a Canoe Map
[The North-West fur trading company] helped set the contours and boundaries, as well as the east-west axis, of what would one day become Canada. French explorers and Canadian woodsmen opened pathways to European trade, and the Scots built these into a transcontinental network, but they were all relying on routes that predated European arrival by hundreds and even thousands of years. It was Native trading patterns that dictated the course the NWC would follow. Historian Arthur Lower is credited with the satori-inducing aphorism "Canada is a canoe route." But we can take Lower's insight even further: more than anything, Canada is an aboriginal trade map. It was a map traced not with quill and ink, but with birchbark and paddle.
...Canada's three major drainage systems, from Hudson Bay to the Great Lakes to the Mackenzie Delta, radiate water routes, virtually all of them navigable. It's an incredible system of rivers, with low heights of land and wide basins separated by surprisingly manageable portages, most just a few kilometres long. Even now, if the mood strikes you, you can take a canoe from Montreal to the Rockies or up to the Arctic Ocean.
"You get the feeling," canoeist and filmmaker Bill Mason said, "that God designed the canoe first and then set about creating a country in which it would flourish." (Ferguson, 2004).
So, there you go. I can't be the only one utterly charmed by this idea, right? Right?
*Sorry, O. I know I'd promised that your secret would die with me, but I can't resist a good canoe anecdote.
First, the sex:
Title: I Know I Am But Summer To Your Heart
Author: nos4a2no9
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Fraser/Kowalski
Length: 2830 words
Prompt: leaves
Notes: Many thanks to meresy and malnpudl for detailed, fast and exceptionally savvy beta work. I couldn’t have done it without you, chicas! The title is shamelessly stolen from one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's brilliant works. No limbs were harmed in the making of this story. Pinky swear.
I Know I Am But Summer To Your Heart
And I also wanted to share with you a wonderful little excerpt from Beauty Tips from Moosejaw. (Yep. Still on that. Someday I'll read a new book). We were talking about Canadian history over at sageness's place, and Sage wrote, "And I've been reading about the Northwestern Company [a fur-trading network that operated in Canada in the 18th and 19th century). It's like Latin American history all over again, except with ice instead of malaria. I cannot wrap my head around Ottawa just handing the west over like that. I just...it is SO contrary to my family's history, US history, etc."
That got me thinking about geography, and why Canada looks the way it does on a map. It's such a vast territory compared to our southern neighbour, and it has always looked a little ragged and uneven to me, compared with the neat patchwork of the American map. Why does it look that way?
Well, it turns out that Canada is a Canoe Map
[The North-West fur trading company] helped set the contours and boundaries, as well as the east-west axis, of what would one day become Canada. French explorers and Canadian woodsmen opened pathways to European trade, and the Scots built these into a transcontinental network, but they were all relying on routes that predated European arrival by hundreds and even thousands of years. It was Native trading patterns that dictated the course the NWC would follow. Historian Arthur Lower is credited with the satori-inducing aphorism "Canada is a canoe route." But we can take Lower's insight even further: more than anything, Canada is an aboriginal trade map. It was a map traced not with quill and ink, but with birchbark and paddle.
...Canada's three major drainage systems, from Hudson Bay to the Great Lakes to the Mackenzie Delta, radiate water routes, virtually all of them navigable. It's an incredible system of rivers, with low heights of land and wide basins separated by surprisingly manageable portages, most just a few kilometres long. Even now, if the mood strikes you, you can take a canoe from Montreal to the Rockies or up to the Arctic Ocean.
"You get the feeling," canoeist and filmmaker Bill Mason said, "that God designed the canoe first and then set about creating a country in which it would flourish." (Ferguson, 2004).
So, there you go. I can't be the only one utterly charmed by this idea, right? Right?
*Sorry, O. I know I'd promised that your secret would die with me, but I can't resist a good canoe anecdote.