From a Wooden Canoe (1999)

If your idea of relaxation is ''humping a seventy-five-pound canoe and a sixty-pound pack over a winding, uneven, hilly, rock-strewn, log-obstructed, mud-sucking, mosquito-laced, backwoods trail,'' then you know just what Dennis is talking about in his plainspoken paean to the great outdoors. But even if your fresh-air activities are limited to the neighborhood park, From a Wooden Canoe, a homespun collection of essays, will give you a whiff of the possibilities that lie beyond — like canoeing in Canada, ''with water so clear you can count pebbles on the bottom forty feet down, and air so crisp it's like snorting shots of pure oxygen.'' B