Dan Rubinstein

To attempt to surf Dessert, a standing wave in the middle of the Ottawa River, I must first drive from my home on the south side of Ottawa through downtown and across a bridge to Gatineau, Quebec. The trip can take more than an hour if I get snagged by traffic or construction. I say “must” because often — unable to think about anything…

Many years ago, while guest hosting a CBC Radio show, the comedian Lara Rae made a joke about long-distance travel that stuck in my mind. Maybe she called it a poem or a very short story; my recollection has been dulled by the decades. In any case, it went something like this: “I took a Greyhound from Calgary to Toronto…

Robert Macfarlane believes that “there are few things as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” He is referring, in this context, to the rights-of-nature movement, a global, grassroots campaign, driven largely by Indigenous communities, to grant legal personhood to rivers, forests, mountains, and their multitudinous kin. If a corporation can be considered a person in the eyes of the…

Around the corner from where I grew up in the middle of Toronto, a cedar-lined path between a pair of lawns leads down to a small ravine. At the bottom, pinched between steep hillsides, shrouded in summer by a high, leafy canopy, there is often flowing water. If you cross a couple of busy streets and cut through a condo…

As I paddled into Kingston last September, after a six-day traverse along the north shore of Lake Ontario, I spotted a pair of neoprene-covered heads bobbing in the harbour. Val Hamilton and Mary Ann Higgs, septuagenarian best friends, were testing their brand new wetsuits. They wanted to continue swimming as the weather turned cold. Hamilton was in the midst of radiation therapy for…