Water Borne: a 1200 Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage

Are you known as, "that ______ guy" or "that ______ lady? If so, you have surely been gifted a book, or ten, about that ______ thing, for better or worse. As a standup paddleboarding (SUP) dabbler since 2007 and SUP race enthusiast since 2014 I'm actually surprised that I wasn't given a SUP book until recently. Library and bookstore shelves aren't exactly overflowing with SUP offerings- maybe that's why it took a while. You see, SUP is like tofu- it's very wholesome but (I assume) most people would rather die than read a book about it. I did a cursory search just now and there are literally more books about tofu than there are about SUP. (How to know your ______ is boring AF: there are more books about tofu than ______.)

I'm not a professional writer (my wife is) but I gather that there a few tricks for turning a boring topic into something more palatable, much as a gifted chef can make tofu nearly edible. 1. Combine it with something totally unrelated and much more interesting. The small town bookstore owner also solves murders. 2. Raise the stakes. It not just a long paddle; it's a very dangerous solo ocean crossing. 3. Twine it into deeply personal or philosophical musings. 4. Use it as a vehicle to explore and opine on interesting aspects of culture, history, science, etc.

Dan Rubenstein's "Water Borne: a 1200 Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage," which my mom gave me for Christmas, uses a bit of techniques 2 and 3, but mostly technique 4. Rubenstein is a Canadian journalist who seems to be a thoughtful, responsible, good-hearted, person very concerned with environmental conservation, social and economic justice, and other important things now subject to anti-woke backlash in the US. Dan's long, inland paddleboard journey; a circuit on rivers, lakes, and canals from the Great Lakes region to New York City and back is an impressive logistical and endurance feat. He often paddled ~50 km (30 miles) per day day on a 14' inflatable BadFish sup loaded with camping gear, and he had to deal with strong headwinds, wrong-way river currents, ocean-type waves on the Great Lakes, and "Deliverance" type peril in some run-down urban and rural areas. But he never frames the story in a macho, proving-his-greatness kind of way. He's humble and self-deprecating with dorky dad energy that I resemble and appreciate as a sane antidote to the toxic energy of the egomaniac males like Hegseth and Musk who dominate the news these days.

Picture from a nice TotalSUP article about Dan's Journey

Part of Rubenstein's responsibility is that he's working his ass off doing journalist stuff the entire time he's paddling. Almost every day he has a meeting arranged with some local-to-that-part-of-the-waterway environmental activist, scientist, historian, barge operator, quaint inn proprietor, urban youth outreacher, or other person who is deeply involved in honoring and improving their part of the world. It's inspiring to get a view of all these people in all these places rallying around green and "blue spaces" for ecological restoration, economic revitalization, equitable access, etc. We need that kind of water stewardship everywhere to reverse the harmful effects of pollution, privatization, shoreline "hardening," etc. At the same time, it's exhausting to read through so many sequential accounts of those do-gooders and the similar challenges they're facing, so I found myself reading the book in kind of small doses at a time. Dan also has random encounters with kind, quirky, and occasionally creepy people along the way, which adds some fun and keeps things down to earth.

The most awkward, painful-reflection aspect of reading this book was Rubenstein's constant, critical interrogation of his own privilege as an educated, middle-class, straight white male in a nation that (like the US) gained its riches through exploitation of nature, indigenous people, poor workers, etc. But as awkward as attempts of privileged people to be politically correct / woke always seem to be, I think it's still important that we keep awkwardly working to be better, more humble, more real human beings. The alternative is deepening the harmful divisions in society that prevent human progress and could lead to our destruction, and that's no good.

Anyway, cheers to Dan. Water Borne isn't going to sell like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, but it's an honest and intelligent book about the hope and challenge of healing our waterways and healing the social-environmental fabric of our world. Two thumbs up from this _______ guy.