Stacked up 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 since dawn, 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 study the shoreline, where a creek spills into the canal I am travelling along. A crumbling concrete wall and jagged sheet of rusty metal edge the far side of the drop. My exit.
Glancing down at the map on my phone, which glows in the smoggy twilight of Utica, New York, on a humid July night, I see that my target is close. Very close. It is time once more to summon 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 fifty miles to the east. A desperate measure at a desperate time. Channelling my inner bog.
It had been day three of my voyage along the length of the Erie Canal and day thirty-four of a larger circuit from Ottawa back home to Ottawa, via Montreal, New York City, and Toronto. My vessel was a fourteen-foot-long, thirty-inch-wide inflatable stand-up paddleboard—a.k.a. a SUP. Fastened under tie-down straps on the deck, I carried three dry bags containing sixty 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 splash of ocean, with a few stretches over land or aboard other means of nautical conveyance.
It had seemed like a fine idea when I schemed 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 might hold 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 thirteen people about their relationships 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 the upstate 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 twenty-five to thirty miles a day for weeks on end. So when I spotted one of those towering, 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 that tethered 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 the automatic doors and bought a family-sized selection of breakfast sandwiches, eschewing the orange vinyl banquettes and skulking back to my SUP to feast.
Swamp Thing had arisen.
It became my alter ego. A manifestation of the sun-baked electrical pulses cascading inside my cranium (although not an entirely novel companion, 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 twenty-four hours, or the twenty-four 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 the metronomic, 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 hundred strokes in five minutes, 500 in twenty-five. 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, invokes 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 thirty 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 a 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 fresh-water researchers who were expecting me at their field station two days hence.
That arduous half-hour portage, the final lock before the rust-belt city of Utica, fed me into five miles of lonesome straightaways pinched between factories and freeways, testament to the Erie Canal’s commercial legacy. I knew before leaving home that my surroundings wouldn’t always be pretty. Still, the cumulative toll of more than twelve 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, I detach 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.
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 neighbouring Rest Inn motel. An hour later, in a perfectly comfortable $72 room, the board stashed 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.
Some might call SUP an awkward, inefficient manner of transportation. You know what? They’d be right. The physics of a paddleboarder in motion may be elegant on paper—gravity, buoyancy, Newton’s third law, torque—but combine these actions IRL and it’s kind of ridiculous.
You don’t go fast on a SUP (not very often, anyway), and you can’t carry many supplies, even if it’s more labour saving than hefting them on your back. This means you must frequently forage and are forced to rely on any amenity—or anybody—within reach. Also, as may seem obvious, unlike canoeing and kayaking, you’re standing all day. Isn’t that tiring?
Well, not really. Paddleboarding is like walking on water. Jesus allusion aside, it’s a slow and eminently sustainable way to move. One step at a time, one stroke at a time. If you build up the muscle strength and a stubborn tolerance for repetition, you can do it pretty much all day. And unlike canoers and kayakers, you can shift around and stretch freely while paddling. Your hands and fingers may blister, but your knees don’t lock and your back doesn’t tighten.
When confronted with a headwind, however—which, per my unverified assessment, is 93 percent of the time—your body acts like a sail, slowing progress and forcing you to work harder. Because the prevailing winds on the Erie Canal blow from the west, and because the current mostly flows from the west, and because I was paddling toward the west on this third leg of my journey, a succession of people on the shore each day cheerfully informed me that I was going the wrong way.
These cyclists, walkers, fishers, picnickers, lock operators, canoodling couples, boaters, and boat watchers meant well, frequently providing support, assistance, and, just as indispensable, friendly conversation. Pretty much everybody I encountered, in fact, regardless of who or where or when, buoyed me onward, a kaleidoscopic slice of life into whose watery domain I had been granted access. Which made me wonder, after hours and hours of paddling, every single interaction mediated by water, what if the slow, hard way is not the wrong way? What if it’s an essential embrace?
Since I started paddleboarding a decade ago, it has become my go-to method of moving my body and sorting out my thoughts in the natural world. I had recently finished writing a book about the transformative properties of walking, and the standard fix for a bout of writer’s block or doubt, going for a walk, had become a reflexive prison. Clearly, I needed another kind of kinesis. Despite living in a succession of cities on rivers, a Great Lake, and an ocean, I had never owned a watercraft of any kind. I rented a SUP at a campground one summer day, then borrowed a board, then bought one, then bought another and another.
Balancing on a paddleboard, whether on glassy flats or rapids or waves, means being dialled into the moment while submitting to elemental forces. It’s an intimate way to engage with water. You can carry a SUP to the shore under one arm or deflate it and tote it around on your shoulders; once aboard, you feel and need to roll with every undulation; you can jump off for a swim and climb back aboard easily, blurring the very permeable barrier between being on and in the water. You can see well, both around you and into the water, because your eyes are five or six feet above the surface, providing a broader perspective than one has while sitting in a boat. You see the shoreline and horizon, and when looking down, you see fish and plants and other aquatic life, the primordial soup we clambered out of on our way to becoming bipedal.
What’s more, when you enter a community by water, you pull up alongside its past: harbours, piers, warehouses, and gathering halls, some of which still serve their original purposes, others reimagined or abandoned. You get a sense of a place’s bygone lives, its temporal trajectory, its conceivable futures. How its intertwined ecosystems—human, natural, cultural—merge and diverge. When you arrive somewhere with a paddle in your hands, you might catch the pulse of a community and see the gears of change in action (also: where the cheap motels are).
In other words, SUP was a perfect tool for this particular, peculiar journalistic inquisition. And despite outward appearances and the requisite exertion, it can be hella fun.
Under the tutelage of several top-notch paddleboarders, I progressed season by season from the calm water in and around Ottawa to running spring freshet whitewater on the city’s Rideau River, SUP-surfing the standing waves that rise on the Ottawa River when the upstream snows melt, surfing wind-driven swells on Lake Ontario, and surfing ocean waves as often as possible. I paddled every place I went and went places to paddle: Tennessee, Newfoundland, Chicago, British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, Belize. Whether down the hill from my house or in another country attempting salt-water circumnavigations, every outing parachuted me into a shimmering parallel world.
My SUP mentors shaped my paddling philosophy. I absorbed ideas from Karl Kruger, who lives on his sailboat in Washington state’s San Juan Islands and is one of the most proficient long-distance paddlers on the planet. Karl is the only person to complete the unsupported, 750-mile Race to Alaska on a SUP (bolting up British Columbia’s Inside Passage in an astonishing fourteen days) and, as of this writing, is in the midst of a multi-year solo paddle through the Northwest Passage. But to him, that expedition is not a macho feat of strength and endurance. Rather, it is an act of submission, of humbling oneself in the face of powerful phenomena. An escape from clocks and computers and cubicles and the confines of our landlocked, rectilinear lives. “To me, the sight and sounds of waves breaking over the bow of my board feels elemental,” Karl says, “like looking at fire.”
I learned as well during a few trips with Simon Whitfield, who won a gold medal in triathlon for Canada at the 2000 Summer Olympics and is now a Vancouver Island SUP guide. “Paddleboarding is defiant,” he says. “It’s like dancing on water.” Simon fell in love with the sport after retiring from triathlon. At first, he joined the West Coast racing scene but soon found himself driving several hours to events when he would rather have been by himself on the ocean. “For me, paddleboarding is a way to figure out how I relate to the space around me,” he says, explaining how SUP helped him navigate the transition away from elite competition. “When you’re in wind or waves, paddleboarding is dynamic. On a calm day, it’s absolute awe and magnificence.”
The more I paddled, the more I experienced this splendour and the therapeutic promise of blue space. Makes sense. In utero, we gestate in a watery fluid, and after birth, we’re largely comprised of water. Almost all of our communities are where they are and what they are because of water. Without it, every living thing would die. Physiologically, psychologically, and ecologically, there are countless ways in which blue space is healthy for humans. Researchers believe it’s better for us than green space and are compiling the evidence to prove it.
Mat White, an environmental psychologist at the University of Vienna, is arguably the world’s leading authority on the subject. He studies what happens when we do anything (paddle, swim, surf, walk, sit) in, on, or near just about any type of water, from vast oceans to urban fountains. After leading several research projects and crunching some big numbers over the past decade, Mat believes that blue space has a mostly positive and, compared to other outdoor environments, a more pronounced impact on our bodies and brains.
Water is a double-edged sword, he cautions. Drowning is the third leading cause of unintentional injury death around the world. Around 2 billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water. Rising seas, intensifying storms, widespread flooding, and waterborne diseases are among the deadliest consequences of global warming, and they tend to displace and kill those with the least capacity to escape or adapt.
These realities notwithstanding, in Blue Mind, marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols explains the myriad processes through which our brains get a boost from the aquatic world. Drawing on the work and experiences of neuroscientists, psychologists, artists, and athletes, he details our emotional and cognitive responses to water. “Every year more experts are connecting the dots between brain science and our watery world,” Nichols writes. “This isn’t touchy-feely ‘let’s save the dolphins’ conservation: we’re talking prefrontal cortex, amygdala, evolutionary biology, neuroimaging, and neuron functioning that shows exactly why humans seem to value being near, in, on, or under the water.” This research has implications for everything from health care and public policy to education and business, he avows, on top of our happiness and general well-being.
But I didn’t need data or theories. Anxious about apocalyptical climate change, frightened by rampaging technology and the social media vortex, uninspired at work, on the cusp of fifty and wrestling with my identity as my twin teenaged daughters leave the nest, I needed to go for a good long paddle. Exotic, distant places have a strong appeal, yet I’ve always been drawn to journeys undertaken close to home, under my own steam. To stepping out the front door with everything I might need and completing a circle. To decelerating and reminding myself about the manna of simple things. Or swampy things.
Excerpted, with permission, from Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage by Dan Rubinstein, published by ECW Press, 2025. All rights reserved.
Dan Rubinstein is an Ottawa-based writer, editor, and stand-up paddleboarder. His first book, Born to Walk, was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Awards and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. He’s also a National Magazine Award–winning journalist.
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