Maps of Dreams and Dreams of Maps

In 1952, Jonathan Berger, age seven, began paddling with his mother on the local Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia. Between 1958 and 2025 in the company of camp mates, friends, loved ones, children and grandchildren he has paddled across northern Quebec, northern Ontario, eastern Manitoba, and parts of Saskatchewan. Apart from three years as a peace corps volunteer in Burkina Faso, West Africa, he has paddled every summer since 1958. In the late fifties he attended Wabun, a canoe camp on Lake Temagami in northeastern Ontario and travelled across the Temagami Forest on many routes. On a Temagami trip, he drew his first canoe route map of the Makobe River in 1960. This effort began a career of sketching and route documentation that led, in 2007, to the publication of The Canoe Atlas of The Little North. Maps of Dreams and Dreams of Maps is his story of voyaging, drawing, mapping, writing, and contemplation about love, landscape, and canoe travel.