There are a small number of people in the world who make a living building birch bark canoes, and Ferdy Goode is one of them. Not the little ones you see in gift shops; the real deal. The kind you actually paddle.
Ferdy, who lives near Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, doesn’t mind walking a mile to get to an unnamed lake for a morning of fishing. During a bushwhack, he stops, stoops, and grabs a large, orange blob the size of a baseball I walked right by seconds ago. “Lobster mushroom.” He grins. “This is lunch.” If you spend any time with him, you get used to it; a man who sees everything. But pass a birch tree, and the rest of the world disappears. Nothing exists but him and the birch.
Ferdy is currently working on his 83rd canoe. Trust me when I say that 83 canoes is a lot of canoes. He already has a buyer lined up.
Ferdy was born at home in 1949 near Woodruff, Wisconsin. He was delivered by Dr. Kate Newcomb, the famous Northwoods doctor, who spent more time on house calls than in a clinic, since there wasn’t one until she founded it. “Yup, I’m a Doctor Kate baby,” Ferdy laughs.
Ferdy’s mother worked at the Simpson Electric near Lac du Flambeau. His father was a mechanic, and his uncle owned a construction company.
Hunting, fishing and foraging were a way of life, not a hobby, and they were family activities. “Back then, the law was that you could have two lines in the water per person, so the entire family went ice fishing. We kids walked around checking tip-ups and making sure everything was working okay.”
A naturally curious young man, Ferdy gravitated toward bushcraft, the ability to live outdoors. Drop Ferdy into a boreal forest with an ax, knife, and some cord and he’ll figure it out. That’s what Ferdy does; figure it out.
When he was 25, his grandfather gave him a half acre of land in Vilas County. Ferdy proceeded to cut trees, slick off the bark, and build a log cabin. No formal instruction; he did it the Goode Way: Get all the books you can find at the library, ask questions from people who knew, and study existing log homes. “I moved in and immediately felt at home. No power, no phone, no gas.” He pauses, grins, and says, “But no bills either.”
The art of building a birchbark canoe was almost lost. The Indigenous elders who made the canoes were aging, and the generation after preferred more utilitarian craft that required no maintenance. As interest resurged in the 1970s, there was a rush to document and film as many builders as could be found. Some of the elders had not built a canoe since they were teens.
A native Ojibway, Ernie St. Germaine, was commissioned by the federal government to offer courses to help bring back the native skills in danger of extinction. The program was designed for native youth, but there were fewer takers than expected, so St. Germaine called Ferdy, then 30 years old. Not only did he get to learn about building birchbark canoes, the participants received a stipend of $30 if they met income qualifications. Ferdy learned birch bark canoe building from Marvin DeFoe, a young and enthusiastic instructor from the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
They worked for five days and built a six-foot scale model, using all the techniques you would need to build a full-sized canoe. “It was an enlightening experience, a spiritual one, that changed me,” Ferdy says. “It put me on a path that I am still on after 45 years.”
Bark isn’t just for canoes. Bark baskets and vessels were created to store all manner of foodstuffs. With the waterproof back, skillful stitching, and the addition of pitch to seal the seams, bark baskets hold water without leaking. More importantly, they can hold maple sap, which many tribes collected and cooked down to make syrup.
Bark baskets provide an opportunity for the makers to show off their artistic skills. Scraping away the red winter bark will allow the artist to create functional baskets.
Ferdy learned how to decorate bark vessels with porcupine quills, supplied by road kill. Both the bark and quills are worked wet, and as the bark and quills dry, the quills will never budge. The patterns are endless.
Then he started looking at snowshoes. “After World War II, my dad bought five pairs of army surplus snowshoes, the standard 11 by 56 Alaskans, for five bucks a pair. That’s what I grew up on.” Snowshoes were a practical necessity, used for hunting, fishing and transportation.
The snowshoes built by Indigenous people are a far cry from modern sport snowshoes. They were works of art, but form ever follows function. The different shapes made by the various tribes and regions were made to work best in their environs. Powdery snow and trapping in dense forests required large surface areas with a tight weave for flotation. Long walks across prairies and open lakes called for longer shoes that would go straighter with less effort.
Ferdy studied them all, and selected the most difficult style to make: the Atikamekw style snowshoe. The Atikamekw people live north of the mouth of the St. Lawrence river in Quebec.
I have a pair of Ferdy’s Cree snowshoes, oval ones with a super-fine weave, used in places such as Newfoundland. They also work quite well in Wisconsin, with the exception of heavy, wet snow. There’s nothing better than a walk in the woods on these pieces of functional art.
He builds paddles too. “All you need is a good ax and a knife, and some sandpaper maybe.” He uses cedar, spruce, maple, birch, basswood or white pine to make his paddles. “I really like black spruce if I can get it. It’s light and durable.”
Has he ever made a perfect canoe? He surprises me and says yes, he has. “I found a perfect birch tree, straight, no bad knots, and cut it down. The bark almost fell off in my hands. Then I saw a perfect cedar, and cut that. It split perfectly, and the whole canoe came together just so easily.”
What makes it a perfect day for him? “I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I decided there is no perfect day; every day is different. I just take it one day at a time, and see what happens. Perfect is something you strive for, but rarely achieve.”
