Stand-Up Guy

The first thought that crossed my mind when I picked up Dan Rubinstein’s Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage was to question whether pilgrimages can even be real anymore. In an age of living out loud and creating personal brands through the internet, this skepticism stayed with me as I followed the author’s four-part circuit: Ottawa to Montreal; Quebec to New York City; Albany to Toronto; and Toronto back to Ottawa.

Where religiosity is a more common way of life, a pilgrimage is a physical journey of faith — a commendable act that strengthens an individual’s relationship with a deity and hopefully leads to personal transformation. It is meant to be private in nature. Today, in a more secular society, a desire to leave behind daily life for weeks or months to embark on a fill-in-the-blank voyage is more likely to fill some of us with guilt that demands an explanation. Rubinstein admits that, as he neared fifty, his pilgrim passage was a response to a mid-life crisis, and he’s apologetic that privilege allowed him to contemplate the coming decade in a more poetic and dynamic setting than was available within the boundaries of an ordinary existence.

What was on Rubinstein’s mind? A few things, all existential to a degree. He and his wife would soon be empty nesters; the drumbeat of apocalyptic climate change was pounding louder than ever; a job in university communications had become uninspiring; and, damn, overwhelming technological change threatened the work of writers. Still, writers have to write. So what better way to take a break from it all than a good old-fashioned adventure — and write about it?

It’s admirable that Rubinstein, who lives in Ottawa, decided on a pilgrimage close to home. He might have been going through a mid-life crisis — his mother, worried about weather and other risks, would have preferred that her son just buy a sports car — but he felt no need to dodge anacondas on the Amazon or to step around dead bodies to summit Mount Everest. Relatively speaking, he was wandering his own backyard, all 1,200 miles of it (I’m perplexed that he did not use metric). But for readers who live far from this corner of North America, it’s sometimes difficult to follow along. An overview map at the beginning of the book is useful, but it would have been nice to have detailed portions included with relevant chapters.

Still, readers will recognize the rivers because they are stand‑ins for any of those rivers that made industrialists stinking, filthy rich, while leaving the public holding a disintegrating bag full of toxic chemicals and other contaminants. Pollution aside, residents across the continent are often disconnected from navigable waterways. Crumbling infrastructure has kept many in post-industrial towns and cities from accessing their rivers, and something as mundane as recreational paddling has become practically impossible. Yet these waterways were once vibrant with people in all manner of non-motorized craft. On his inflatable stand‑up paddleboard — or SUP — Rubinstein contended with locks, with barges, with oil tankers.

He takes readers along his route through recent and less recent history, always acknowledging the Indigenous communities forced to make way for “progress.” Paddling from Ottawa to Montreal, he revisited the Oka Crisis of 1990, a high-profile seventy-eight-day standoff between Mohawks and the Canadian government over the expansion of a golf course that threatened a sacred burial ground. Along the second leg of his tour, on the Hudson River in New York, he met the people who worked with Pete Seeger and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to clean the waters so folks could once again fish and swim. The third leg was mostly on the Erie Canal, and Rubinstein shares its origin stories: both the old one told by captains of industry and the true one about what was lost. And as with any excursion on water, eventually he met older white men who have spent time building model boats, including “a full-sized replica of the Seneca Chief, the first vessel to transit the Erie Canal in 1825.”

Generally, adventure travel tales — especially those on water — are meant to be, in the language of blurbs, “gripping true stories of determination and danger” or “meditations on solitude, nature, and the limits of endurance.” Rubinstein’s book is more “entertaining mix of science, history, urban adventure, and human connections.” And even though I’m a science journalist, as a reader I could have done with less science. The “entertainment” part of the mix is those human connections, Rubinstein’s interactions with his mother, who followed his digital dot, and the absurdity of travelling industrial waters on an inflatable paddleboard with a tent and dry bags lashed to it.

One of the scientific threads in the book is that waterways link humanity more than other environments do. Rubinstein chatted with kayakers who healed grief through long trips. He interviewed psychologists who believe we are hard-wired to connect with water. He talked to those who have used waterways to reach troubled youth. But after ten years as editor-in-chief of Hakai Magazine, a now defunct publication that focused on the marine environment — and as someone who has camped and canoed the Fraser River and paddleboarded and camped Scotland’s west coast — I cannot be convinced that waterways foster more connection than other environments where we use human power to get from point A to B to C and so on.

Over the years, I’ve cycle-camped and thru-hiked near and far from home, and the experiences are similar. Each trip is accompanied by trepidation and excitement; each trip takes a certain amount of chutzpah and grit; each trip turns into a festival of connections that become lifelong memories and stories to share. Remember drinking too much scotch on the beach with that young German couple? Or gobbling fistfuls of candy for dinner with friends on the West Coast Trail? Or that kind bartender who let us park our bicycles on the pub’s stage and ran out to buy nacho fixings for us?

And this is where Rubinstein shines — with people. While meeting up with environmental organizations in Canada and the United States and relaying their stories of transformation and hope to readers was heroic, it seems unnecessary. The logistics must have been on par with being a location coordinator for a big film crew. More than once, Rubinstein was exhausted, broiling, or soaking wet, the sky threatening to fry him with one well-placed bolt of lightning — but he had to get somewhere by a certain hour. A polite Canadian, he was not going to let anyone down by being a no‑show. To make it to a destination in good time, should he roll up his SUP and grab an Uber? Sure!

Few people need convincing that connecting communities to their waterfronts creates stronger collective ties, engages the citizenry, and allows marginalized people easier access to nature. But nature alone cannot save anyone. It’s nature plus the person-to-person encounters — on the water, between the trees, or at a picnic table in a park. A beautiful moment of generosity that turned out just silly sticks in my mind: Rubinstein got set to push off, but a moment of inattention sent his sunglasses to the bottom of Lake Champlain. A guy on shore spontaneously handed him the frames off his face. As Rubinstein stroked downstream, he realized the kind gesture did neither party any good — he was gazing through someone else’s prescription pair.

It’s these serendipitous meetings that loudly proclaim, “Humanity will never be over!” On the Erie, post-storm-weary Rubinstein was beckoned by a group in a boat to take a break, have a drink. He did. They were happy for the paddleboarder: “That somebody is doing something for no tangible reason other than really wanting to. There is high-fiving and rib-digging, teasing and laughing. Their joy makes me joyous. When it’s my turn to ask questions, I learn that Matt and his wife grew up in Weedsport, a small village just south of the canal, a turning basin on the original Erie that was bypassed by the rerouted barge canal.” It began to gently rain again. Matt “hands me another cold beer for the road and we hug. Not an awkward, one-armed back-patting. A real hug.” Which made Rubinstein ponder as he paddled away: When do two middle-aged men who have just met hug like that?

Because he’s a writer, and because writers need an audience, and because it’s the 2020s, Rubinstein dutifully posted to social media and published a newsletter en route. But otherwise he was consistently on the “outernet,” a term his wife coined, meaning he was out in the real world, engaging with others in real life. He was vulnerable, but he opened his arms and welcomed in humanity. That’s a pilgrimage.