Guest Blog - Dan Rubinstein

Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage

In June 2023, Canadian writer and obsessive stand-up paddleboarder Dan Rubinstein lashed camping gear to his SUPand embarked on an improbable solo voyage from his home in Ottawa back to Ottawa via Montreal, New York City, Buffalo and Toronto along the rivers, lakes and canals of a landlocked region. Over 1,200 miles and 10 weeks, he explored the healing potential of “blue space” — the aquatic equivalent of green space — and sought out others drawn to their local waters. But the farther Rubinstein paddled, the more he realized that being in, on, or around water does more than boost our mental and physical health and prompt stewardship toward the natural world. He discovered that blue spaces are also a way to connect with the kaleidoscopic cross-section of people he met and the diverse geographies and communities he passed throughWeaving together research, interviews and an unmacho, malodorous, anticolonial adventure tale, Water Borne shows us that we don’t need an epic journey to find solutions to so many modern challenges. Repair and renewal may be close at hand: just add water.

The following excerpt is from the introduction to the book, which was published on June 10 in North America and July 10 in the U.K.

Measured against the chronicles of mariners who found themselves navigating inhospitable waters, my predicament isn’t all that perilous. But it’s getting dark, I’ve been on the go sincedawn, a severe storm is expected overnight — and I seriously doubt that anybody has ever done, or was foolish enough to consider doing, what I am about to attempt.

Hot, hungry and exhausted, calves and fingers cramping, I studythe shoreline, where a creek spills into the canal I am traveling along. A crumbling concrete wall and jagged sheet of rustymetal edge the far side of the drop. My exit.

Glancing down at the map on my phone, which glows in thesmoggy twilight of Utica, New York, on a humid July night, I see that my target is close. Very close. It is time once more tosummon Swamp Thing.

Let me back up for a minute. You might insist that I do.

Swamp Thing — or at least a middle-aged, five-foot-four, scruffy bearded, sweaty and sour smelling incarnation of it — had emerged for the first time the previous morning, about 50 miles to the east. A desperate measure at a desperate time. Channeling my inner bog.

It had been day three of my voyage along the length of the ErieCanal and day 34 of a larger circuit from Ottawa back home toOttawa, via Montreal, New York City and Toronto. My vesselwas a 14-foot-long, 30-inch-wide inflatable stand-up paddleboard — aka a SUP. Fastened under tie-down straps on the deck I carried three dry bags containing 60 pounds of camping gear, food, clothing, a first aid kit and other essentials, as well as an oversized backpack for lugging around the deflated SUP, its pump and a three-piece backup paddle.

My route traversed a string of rivers, lakes, canals and a splashof ocean, with a few stretches over land or aboard other means of nautical conveyance. It had seemed like a fine idea when Ischemed it up: intrepid paddleboarder embarks on improbable journey in his own backyard, testing the premise that “blue space” — being in or around aquatic environments — just mighthold a key to human and ecological health. An absurd response, during a year of record heat, fires and floods, to absurd times. Plus, because I planned to interview people about theirrelationships with water and then write a few things about said relationships, I could even justify to my wife and daughters a few months of paddling as “work.”

Yet on the muggy morning in question — passing through theUpstate New York village of Fultonville, named after the inventor of the steamboat but not really watercraft friendly anymore — the logistics were proving tricky. Finding places to sleep on a waterscape hemmed in by private land had been taxing throughout my trip. As was preventing my body from roasting.

Equally problematic was getting my hands (and mouth) on enough food when I was propelling myself an average of 25 to 30 miles a day for weeks on end. So when I spotted one of thosetowering, ostrich-like highway signs advertising a fast-food restaurant, the Golden Arches called to me: calories and cold drinks were near.

I paddled to the side of the canal, removed the ankle leash thattethers me to the board and cinched its Velcro loop around a fallen log on a muddy, overgrown embankment. Then I splashed ashore, plunged into the tangle of shrubs and trees and scrambled up a steep slope on all fours.

Bursting through the head-high marsh grasses at the top, a swashbuckling explorer in search of Shangri-la, or perchance an Egg McMuffin, I stumbled into the back of a Dunkin’ Donuts drive thru.

Brushing myself off as best I could, I slipped inside through theautomatic doors and bought a family-sized selection of breakfastsandwiches, eschewing the orange vinyl banquettes and skulkingback to my SUP to feast.

Swamp Thing had arisen.

It — he? they? do quag creatures have a gender? — became myalter ego. A manifestation of the sunbaked electrical pulses cascading inside my cranium. (Although not an entirely novelcompanion, my wife and daughters might say.)

Paddling all day, you have a lot of time to think. Too much time,perhaps. Sometimes I ruminate on the previous 24 hours or the 24 hours ahead or reflect on family and friends. Oftentimes I sink into the sights and sounds of my surroundings: birds and bugs, trees and train whistles, hills and valleys, skyscrapers and alleys, eddies and ripples in the water, turtles and trout drifting into view below the surface, clouds and the firmament above.

Periodically, I zoom in on the mechanics of each stroke — reach, hinge at the waist, plant the blade, pull yourself past the board, feather the paddle back, repeat — and lose myself in themetronomic, meditative cadence, zoning out and not thinking about anything at all. Paddle slips into the catch without a splash, slices through the water effortlessly. Hit it right and you feel airborne. Wavelets disperse off the nose of the board, prisms of dancing light radiating shoreward.

Sometimes, especially when tired, I distract myself with math.Three seconds a stroke. Twenty strokes a minute. One hundredstrokes in five minutes, 500 in 25. Twelve hundred an hour. Three miles an hour. Four hundred strokes a mile. But you can only count paddle strokes and calculate distances for so long. Projecting my selfhood onto another entity, one better suited to this soggy terrain than an urban laptop whisperer, invoked a harmony. Not that I consciously willed Swamp Thing into existence. The epithet arose in my overheated noggin and, like it or not, we were a team. Two sides of the same coin. And really, there’s a little Swamp Thing within each of us, n’est-ce pas?

Now, entering the underbelly of Utica, it’s a Thursday night —maybe, I think, those details are kind of murky — and the Fultonville smorgasbord is behind me. I’d paddled more than 30 miles on another sweltering day, spotting plenty of places (a marina here, a public dock there) where I could have camped. I could also have camped at one of the three lock stations whose chambers I had transited while kneeling on my board to make like a kayak. And even at a fourth, which I arrived at after operating hours and portaged around, hauling my SUP and cumbersome gear up an eight-foot ladder and schlepping through a construction site and maintenance yard to reach an improvised upstream put-in (thankfully, a gangplank down to floating barge, not another ladder). Yet I didn’t want to tent in another thunderstorm and was determined to cover some distance, pressing onward to keep a date with a group of freshwater researchers who were expecting me at their field station two days hence.

That arduous half-hour portage, the final lock before the rustbeltcity of Utica, fed me into five miles of lonesome straightawayspinched between factories and freeways, testament to the ErieCanal’s commercial legacy. I knew before leaving home that my surroundings wouldn’t always be pretty. Still, the cumulative toll of more than 12 hours of paddling in the sun and humidity on an increasingly industrial transect had rendered me drained and defeated. Beyond tired, I am doubting my rationale for embarking on this trip. The healing power of water? A tonic for nearly every modern ailment? A legit reason for leaving home? Whatever. My body and brain are bowed, breaking. All I want is a shower and some food, a beer and a bed. And that requires Swamp Thing.

Snugging my board up to the concrete beside Reall Creek, Idetach the dry bags and swing them one by one onto the retaining wall. Then I carefully step over the jagged metal cap where wall meets canal and, more carefully, use the leash to pull the board up behind me. (Though they can puncture, inflatable SUPs can handle being dragged against or bashed into concrete and rocks. Or falling off roof racks on the highway . . . a story for later.)

A short uphill dirt path through some bushes leads from the creek to the back of a dental clinic. Carrying and dragging my SUP and dunnage, I shuttle to the parking lot behind the neighboring Rest Inn motel.

The bald, muscle-bound clerk, who speaks with a strong Russianaccent, doesn’t seem perturbed about the sight or smell of me,although he raises a Slavic eyebrow from behind the glass shield when I preemptively try to explain.

“I no undeerstend,” he says as I mime a paddling motion. “Vat is peedelboard?”

An hour later, in a perfectly comfortable $72 room, the boardstashed behind some garbage bins, I am clean and cool, watching bad TV, eating a turkey sub and drinking a can of cheap lager from a gas station beside the nearby interstate offramp. And I know both me and Swamp Thing will be ready to go again in the morning.

Excerpted from Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage, published in June 2025 by ECW Press. To learn more about or purchase the book, please go here or here.