Foreword

On May 7, 2009, Jack Clarkson visited his mother's gravesite and told her about the adventure he was about to undertake. He reassured her that everything would be okay and told her not to worry.

In truth, it was Jack who needed reassuring. He was about to set out with his long-lost cousin, Gerald Hoggarth, on a 1,000-kilometre canoe trip on the Qu'Appelle and Assiniboine Rivers, from Buffalo Pound Lake north of Regina to The Forks in Winnipeg.

The Qu'Appelle River water levels were exactly as many had said they would be—low—and would only drop lower as the season passed. Jack knew it was time to go.

"But what's the hurry," he reminded himself. At seventy-nine years of age, he was retired and had time on his hand. So too did Gerald, at age sixty-nine.

The weather and water levels were not the only factors spurring Jack on. He knew that his sister Janet was losing her battle with cancer. Time was not on her side.

Clarkson's canoe trek was not for his sake alone. It was to raise money for cancer research to help people like Janet and so many others who were fighting the dreadful disease. Throughout the trip, Jack would carry with him the memory of the many who had not survived—his mother, his childhood buddy who had passed away in April, his canoe partner's brother, his wife's parents, his sons' grandfather, and many good friends, hunting partners, fishing partners, and fellow businessmen. "The list goes on and on," he wrote in the personal journal that he kept during the days leading up to the trip and throughout his 26 days on the water.

The Clarkson-Hoggarth Canoe for the Cure trek raised more than ten thousand dollars for cancer research.

In Around the Next Bend, Jack Clarkson relates his day-by-day encounter with the Qu'Appelle and Assiniboine Rivers during the trek. Around the Next Bend is written in the style of the North West and Hudson Bay Companies fur traders of the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. It is written in a way he wishes other travellers in the years since had done.

Around the Next Bend is a heartfelt celebration of the fur trader's legacy. More poignantly, it is a plea for younger generations to recognize Canadian rivers as passages through time, to restore them and to protect them.

From their vantage point riding low in their seventeen-foot Old Town canoe, Clarkson and Hoggarth witness some of the most beautiful scenery and wildlife anywhere on the prairies—thick groves of poplars draping over the river banks, deer, moose, beaver, waterfowl, muskrats and the odd otter. Their time off the water allows them to reconnect with relatives and old friends who are intrinsically tied to the river and to make knew acquaintances with people who have a spiritual connection to the Qu'Appelle and Assiniboine Valleys.

Nothing prepares them, however, for the despairing damage that is being done by so many others who seem to have adopted an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude.

With Around the Next Bend, Jack Clarkson is raising a red flag on two of Canada's historically significant rivers that are for now still alive and crying for redress.