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Paddling South Winnipeg to New Orleans by Canoe In the Fall of 1969, Rick Ranson and John Van Landeghem, both barely out of high school, took on the might of the Red and Mississippi Rivers to paddle a canoe from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Combining high drama with hilarity, Ranson  tells how the duo ducked bullets in St. Louis, avoided a whirlpool, worked on a Mississippi tow boat, sailed a yacht through a barge-congested Cairo, IL, and spent a few days in the Fargo City Jail, all while meeting an eclectic array of unforgettable characters. Paddling South tells the incredible tale of how they survived the three month trip on the often treacherous rivers, beset by snow storms, hurricanes, monstrous waves, and unseen dams. Working North From DEW Line to Drill Ship Ranson conveys a strong sense of the Arctic’s icy cold and its unforgiving pristine beauty. He focuses on the working conditions he experienced: the basic but plentiful food in the DEW Line camps; the pay that left some well off but which others somehow squandered; the stagnant air of tightly enclosed living quarters; and above all the jokes and stories that relieved the mind-numbing “cancer of tedium that spread over and suffocated the unwary.”