Tim Kent, a former Oak Park resident, used to play trumpet with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But that was just his day job. His true vocation was building birch-bark canoes and retracing the route of the French fur traders across Canada. Each summer, he and his wife, Doree, would take their sons, Kevin and Ben, and spend their vacation paddling the next section of the 3,000-mile route.
Well, after 15 years, they finally completed the journey, recounted in Kent’s new book, A Modern-Day Voyageur Family. “This ancient water highway,” as Kent describes it, stretched from Montreal to the Great Lakes to Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca in northern Alberta between 1618 and roughly 1760. The Kent family, by the way, now lives full time in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The book is an odyssey itself, 760 pages with 36 color photographs and maps, accompanied by a DVD containing 370 photos, with music and narration by Tim Kent and friends. If you’re interested, you can order the book from Silver Fox Enterprises, P.O. Box 176, 11504 U.S. 23 South, Ossineke, Mich. 49766 ($59.95 plus $6 shipping). His Web site is www.timothyjkent.com.