21-07-2025
Summer reading: The healing power of 'blue space' infuses Water Borne
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Welcome to the Ottawa Citizen's summer reading file, where we'll feature new work by a local author once a week.
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Dan Rubinstein is an Ottawa-based writer, editor and stand-up paddleboarder (not necessarily in that order). His first book, Born To Walk, was a finalist at the City of Ottawa Book Awards and Kobo Emerging Writer prize. This piece was excerpted from Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage, published in June by ECW Press.
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In 2023, Ottawa writer Dan Rubinstein completed a round-trip journey, via stand-up paddleboard, from Ottawa to Montreal, New York, Toronto and back to Ottawa. The 10-week expedition allowed him to explore and appreciate the aquatic environment around us. Here's an excerpt from chapter One of Water Borne:
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Petrie Island, about a dozen miles east of downtown, is one of my regular destinations when I paddle on the Ottawa (River). A park that's connected to the shore by a causeway, it's the farthest I can go on a one-way inflatable SUP excursion and still catch a bus home (or, rather, two buses and an LRT train — an ordeal that can take longer than the downriver run). But I'm not riding public transportation this Monday morning in early June. Lisa, my wife, is driving me to Petrie so I can start paddling east.
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'We'll be going against rush-hour traffic,' I tell her, smiling sheepishly as I load my deflated board into the car. 'You'll make it home in time to bike to the office like usual.'
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I don't point out, mind you, that she'll be bogged down in stop-and-go highway traffic on the way back. And I look the other way when we pass through a construction zone that'll delay her even more.
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Considering my impending absence for most of the next four months, and the parenting and domestic load that she'll be shouldering solo all summer, this morning's drop-off is a minor inconvenience. Yet Lisa instantly and enthusiastically said 'go for it' when I first mentioned my embryonic idea. Throughout two decades of parenthood together, we've taken turns springing one another for projects away from home. She's a writer, too, and, possessing an emotional intelligence far superior to mine, understands that without a creative and/or physical relief valve, my complaints, about the ennui of nine-to-five work and workaday life in general, will inevitably reach an insufferable crescendo.
