It was a long walk through the woods to the place I have loved more than any other—our grandparents' log cottage on Lake of Two Rivers in the heart of Ontario's vast Algonquin Park. My mother took me there from the little Red Cross outpost at Whitney when I was all of four days old, so this would have been the first of many, many trails.

Lake of Two Rivers had to be the place, with the Madawaska River entering the lake on the west end and leaving at the east end, that led to a lifelong love of canoeing. Like the hand-carved Indigenous-boy doll in Bill Mason's wonderful 1966 film Paddle to the Sea, I could theoretically paddle all the way to the ocean—down the Madawaska, through the Ottawa Valley to the Ottawa River, down the Ottawa to the St. Lawrence River—paddling east until I reached the Atlantic. Theoretically, of course. Not something a four-day-old, let alone a seventy-four-year-old—the age at which I am typing this—would do. But you can dream of the possibility.

Canoe tripping involves a lot of trails, some portages so long and difficult you wonder how the hell you ever came up with such a "vacation" plan. But I have always loved the bush and the Far North. The more off the beaten path the better.

The other trails are all paper, whether newspapers, magazines, scripts or books. Millions upon millions of words, almost exclusively about this amazing country, Canada, and the people who live in it and love it. I like to say I have written more books than I have read, which is hopefully an exaggeration, but looking back over all those books, all those journalism jobs at various newspapers and magazines, it almost seems possible. The places those trails have taken me to . . . the people I have encountered along the way.

A favourite editor has a term that she claims essentially sums up my career: "MacGregor luck." She says it sarcastically; she says it laughing; she says it often. Sometimes she captures the sentiment in just one word— "horseshoes."

I am forced to admit that there is some merit to what she says. I was lucky enough to spend every summer of a happy childhood in Algonquin Park, where my father, Duncan, worked at his brother-in-law’s hardwood lumber mill, where my grandfather, Tom McCormick, served as chief ranger, and where my mother, Helen, was born in a tent on the shores of Brule Lake. Her mother, Bea McCormick, had gone into labor on a steaming-hot early August day, and to keep her cool the nurse at the tiny village in the heart of the park had village loggers setup a tent on the beach, soak blankets in the cool lake water and string the wet blankets on poles set up around the birthing mattress.

Growing up in Huntsville, a pretty, small town in Ontario's cottage country, was another lucky break. Here, I forged lifelong friendships and played competitive hockey, lacrosse and baseball in a sports-mad community. A Huntsville High School English teacher saved me from being booted out of school and started me on the path to journalism. I fell in love with a beautiful young woman in grade eleven and, halfa dozen years later, we married. Ellen and I soon had four healthy babies, three girls and a boy, who grew up to be four accomplished adults. Six grandchildren would follow, all healthy, all unique. Horseshoes, indeed.

I should have been fired after publishing my first piece in a national publication. The story that ended up in print had a mistake that was the equivalent to, say, claiming Winnipeg's Guess Who had created the famous rock opera Tommy. (Well, that actually was the mistake, but more on that later . . .) No matter. Lucky as ever, I wiggled free.

How about the time Maclean's magazine dispatched this young, wet-behind-the-ears reporter to Montreal for a cover profile on Mordecai Richler? The famous author's publisher had arranged for us to meet up at the Montreal Press Club, where Richler proceeded to order a fresh round of beer every time I hit the halfway mark of my glass. He suggested we do the formal interview at his apartment, and on our walk he stopped at a depanneur, where he bought two bottles of Rémy Martin cognac. Next thing I know I'm waking with a thundering headache in my room at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, still wearing the same clothes I had on when I walked into the press club, the bedcovers untouched . . .

MacGregor luck would save me, once again.

But more on that later.

How things have changed in this business. I wrote my first stories on a portable Viking typewriter my mother bought me at Eaton's as a Christmas present. Eventually, I moved on to electronic IBM typewriters, then, while at the Toronto Star, a Radio Shack TRS-80,which we reporters called the "Trash 80." There were other Radio Shack computers—some capable of holding more than one column!— that you hooked up to a pay phone with rubber couplings; you could watch your story go, letter by letter, off to the desk back in Toronto. You waited breathlessly for the signal that your work had arrived safely— otherwise, you did it all again.

Next came laptops, increasingly powerful, and then the internet and cell phones and Bluetooth and even watches that could count your steps, take your blood pressure, catch your incoming e-mails and call 911 if they detected that you'd fallen. When I began at the Ottawa Citizen, in 1986, the newsroom was filled with more than a hundred reporters, editors, librarians, secretaries and receptionists. Several dozen print shop workers were in the back typing the stories all over again to create lead-type blocks for the printing process. Other workers carried the heavy blocks over to the plant in another part of the building, where the paper was printed, stacked and taken to the loading ramps for the delivery trucks. The noise throughout the Baxter Road building was numbing: phones constantly ringing, copy editors shouting, doors slamming as a new non-smoking rule went into place and editors ran back and forth between the outdoor smoking area and their blue pencils.

So much change. Who needs a library when you have Google? Who needs receptionists when callers reach a menu that will either stall them or take them to the very person they need to speak to? But who talks anyway when you can send an e-mail or a text? The last time I entered the Citizen building there were seven reporters, and it was utterly silent. Today, the building has been transformed into a roller rink, the thinning paper published by a skeleton staff working mostly from home.

Such a journey this has been. Maclean's three different times . . . the weekend supplements, The Canadian and, later, Today . . . Toronto Star . . . Ottawa Citizen . . . National Post . . . then five straight years of five page 2columns a week at the Globe and Mail, followed by another dozen wonderful years at the Globe writing sports, features, opinion, the arts. A few years of post-retirement freelancing—the Globe, Cottage Life, the New York Times, Zoomer magazine, Canadian Geographic—and soon the paper trail ran a full fifty years.

The best times in journalism were elections. I covered Canadian federal and provincial elections for decades. Newspapers had money, I had a company credit card and the assignment was always simple: go wherever you want, "take the pulse of the country," file at the end of each day. There was no better feeling than when the rental car entered a community or a rural area where I knew not a single soul, but I was absolutely confident that by day's end I would file a story about someone, or something, of interest, and the following day it would magically appear in print. Never writer's block; never a missed deadline. Horseshoes across the country, east to west, south to north.

Somehow, I scraped through without ever losing a lawsuit— even one from a sitting cabinet minister. I survived the death of a magazine and a lost job at a time when Ellen was pregnant with our youngest of four children. There have, over that half-century of journalism, been blown jet engines, threatening weapons at Oka, a snowstorm on James Bay that forced us to take shelter for three days on a barren island, physical threats from unhappy athletes— and more fun than I ever could have imagined. And if the thirteen chapters to come aren't enough, each is followed by one or more "vignettes," pertinent—and sometimes not so pertinent—to the chapter just finished.

My friend the editor has it right. MacGregor luck. There have, of course, been some bad turns—life is not entirely a box of chocolates, I am also here to report. But, by and large, a life in words has been the greatest adventure I could hope for—and more.