This past Summer I picked up a self-published booklet entitled “Tumpline and Paddle — Five Weeks in Quebec” at a church-run thrift shop in southern NJ.
Written and printed in 1970 by John Rotch (at The Cabinet Press, Milford, N.H.) it documents a “wilderness canoe trip” and was apparently published as part of a school assignment.
Initially, I bought the booklet because I liked these photographs of the author using a vintage Cutty Sark Whisky carton to demonstrate the proper use of the “tumpline.”
One of the most important pieces of equipment on our trip was the tumpline...
Webster’s New International Dictionary says that “tumpline” is “of Algonquin; origin; Massachuset tempan, a pack strap, Abenaki madumbi. A kind of sling formed by a strap slung over the forehead or chest and used by one carrying a pack on his back...”
John Rotch, Tumpline and Paddle
But aside from worldly product placement of a name-brand Scotch whisky box serving as proxy for the traditional wooden “wanigan” — there’s also something poetically fitting about Rotch’s carefully roped rigging around a box that features Cutty Sark’s full-rigged sailing ship logo.
(Rotch demonstrates the tumpline in use, after the fold...)
(Note how the tumpline’s burden is primarily borne by the head.)
I had a really great trip with a great bunch of guys. The trip meant living away from civilization in the Canadian wilderness. We had to depend upon one another so that the trip could be what it was. All of the thing of the trip, like sitting around a campfire, swatting black flies, shooting rapids, paddling in the rain, seeing northern lights, portaging on the rough trails, getting up at 6:30 a.m., walloping pots... all those things are what made it an unforgettable trip. The trip was one of the most meaningful events of my life.
John Rotch, Tumpline and Paddle
The print run of this publication must have been fairly small. There’s very little mention of it online, although I did figure out that its young author became Pastor John M. Rotch.
Now pastor at a church in his New Hampshire hometown, one of his sermons compares people to deceptive packaging...
You know, when you buy a microwave dinner you’re paying more for the packaging than you are for the actual food that’s on the inside... How many of you have ever had this package and it looks really nice and by the time you open up the package... whatever the product was inside was this little thing and you go, “Is that it? That’s all there is on the inside?”
Form vs Substance, “Pastor John Rotch looks at Matthew 7 and the importance of our substance over the outer package that we present to the world.”
(See also: Entenmann’s Box as Metaphor)
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
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