The first time I met Bill Miller

For me, this is more than a drive into a wild and rugged landscape; it’s a journey into the wilderness of my imagination. All my life, I’ve heard stories about the Tobique River. Elwood Wright, my uncle, a well-known and highly respected guide on the river in the 1940s, filled my head with stories about the Tobique when he took me trout fishing as a boy. No wonder I’m excited.

As I drive, I absorb the subtle beauty of this seductive landscape. Pulling my car into Bill Miller’s yard in Nictau, I notice a large rack of moose antlers on a shed near his house. Opening the car door, I see half a dozen canoes lined up outside a small building. This must be the home of Miller Canoes. Stepping out his front door to greet me, his hand outstretched is the canoe builder himself.

“My grandfather, Victor, built his first canoe in 1925 strictly for his own personal use,” Miller tells me after introductions and a ceremonial glass of scotch that includes a toast to the Tobique River. “At the time, he was running an outfitting camp on the Serpentine River, a small river nearby that was hard on canoes. Since he couldn’t find a canoe to suit his needs, he decided to make his own right here on the Tobique.”

As we talk more about the local history, Bill explains that the water that feeds the Tobique tumbles down from the highlands of the New Brunswick portion of the Appalachian Mountains. Mount Carleton, the highest point in the Maritimes, is nearby.

“In the 1890s,” he continues as we tour his canoe shop, “fishing clubs, like the Tobique Salmon Club and the Nictau Fish and Game Club, attracted the rich and famous. The Rockefellers came here, and in 1941, Babe Ruth himself told baseball stories at the Miller Hotel right here in Nictau. Even L. L. Bean canoed and fished the Tobique,” Bill says excitedly.

In the 33 years since our first meeting in 1989, Bill Miller always got excited when he talked about the Tobique, especially when he spoke about how blessed he was to live in ‘beautiful downtown Nictau’ and to be able to make some of the finest canoes in the world.

Bill died of a stroke on October 3, and like many New Brunswickers who knew and loved him, I find it hard to believe he’s gone. As Nick Guitard, author of Waterfalls of New Brunswick, and I drove along the Tobique to the funeral home in Plaster Rock to pay our respects a few days after his passing, we laughed about the stories and all the laughter the three of us had shared over the years.

Like when a squirrel pissed in the can where Bill kept his brass tacks. Bill had become so adept at building canoes that he could fill his mouth with tacks and then spit them into his hand and hammer them into the canoe in one smooth movement. Only after he’d put the tacks in his mouth did he realize what had happened. Bill hated squirrels after that.

It’s the fall of 1989, and as I drive back down the Tobique River towards Riley Brook after spending the afternoon with my new friend, Bill, I am thinking about his love for the landscape and all the stories that go with it. The two of us connected on that level.

Steering my car around a bend in the road, I see smoke rising from a campfire on the far side of the river. From somewhere deep in the wilderness of my imagination, I see L. L. Bean and one of the Rockefellers standing on the gravelly shore. And that’s Victor Miller quietly unloading the canoe.

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