Roy MacGregor > Quotes

“The big Ford van had been travelling non-stop since the last bathroom break and Travis had no idea how long ago that had been. He knew only that they had finally turned off that boring four-lane highway and that, far in the distance over the trees, the high green bridge over the St. Lawrence River was now visible. Beyond lay New York State and the road to Lake Placid. Finally.”
― Roy MacGregor, Mystery at Lake Placid

“What sets a canoeing expedition apart,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau wrote in an essay a quarter century before he became Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, “is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada

“Lake Placid was alive with cars and campers and people. It was still early spring yet it felt like an Ontario tourist town at the height of the season. Traffic barely moved, shoppers wove through the cars as if the street were a parking lot and the stoplights meaningless. It felt like summer to Travis after a winter of heavy boots and thick jackets and shoveling snow.”
― Roy MacGregor, Mystery at Lake Placid

“Kotcheff recalled after a northern trek with Trudeau. “He was by far the best dish-washer, fire-maker and camp organizer. He put some of us to shame.… Not only was he fit, he turned out to be one of the best canoeists and sternsmen in the group. If anyone succumbed to the elements, it wouldn’t be Pierre.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada

“Dmitri said he would be be around the 500th Russian and liked to joke that by the time he got there, Canadians would be the exceptions in the NHL and people would be complaining that they were taking jobs from Russian boys.”
― Roy MacGregor, Mystery at Lake Placid

“Travis had woken up in the van shouting and everyone on the Screech Owls had laughed and slapped at his shoulders, and the back of his head. He had refused to tell them what had scared him. Let them think whatever they wanted. It was a ridiculous dream anyway. He’d never forget his skates. Besides, he wasn’t even a center.”
― Roy MacGregor, Mystery at Lake Placid

“Howling with laughter, the team followed suit, a dozen young players out on the side of the road, yanking at their pants to free up their underwear and wiggling their rear ends at the other cars that roared by, the drivers and passengers either staring out as if the Screech Owls should be arrested or else pretending the Screech Owls were not even there, a dozen youngsters at the side of the road, bent over, with a hand on each side of their pants, pulling wedgies.”
― Roy MacGregor, Mystery at Lake Placid

“Growing was only one of two serious matters that deeply bothered Travis; the second was his fear of the dark. How many 12-year-olds still needed a night-light? But most of the time, his fear of the dark was something he could keep to himself and his family, but how could you hide your size?”
― Roy MacGregor, Mystery at Lake Placid