Читать книгу Canoeing with Jose онлайн

10 страница из 81

Lorinser’s face lit up like a match to birch bark. He asked if I knew of a book called Canoeing with the Cree.

I shook my head.

“It was actually written by that guy,” he said, pointing to a bust in the middle of the library. He went on to explain how Eric Sevareid had paddled from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay with his friend Walter Port, a distance of some 2300 miles. They undertook the expedition when they were just 17 and 19 years old.

After the journey, Lorinser continued, Sevareid graduated from the University of Minnesota, and went on to become one of Edward R. Murrow’s courageous correspondents, the first to report on the fall of Paris to Nazi forces in June 1940. When I learned that Sevareid had been denied the editor in chief position at the Daily following a controversial column he’d written in 1934, my admiration for him was boundless. And according to Lorinser, Canoeing with the Cree was his first published work.

I pumped Lorinser for details of Sevareid and Port’s route, astonished that there was a passage by waterway from Minnesota to Hudson Bay. But it had been years since he read the memoir, and he couldn’t recall much more than he’d told me already.