June 20, 2025

Water Borne, by Dan Rubinstein

I became an admirer of Dan Rubinstein with his 2015 book BORN TO WALK: THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF A PEDESTRIAN ACT, which I read not long after Rebeccca Solnit’s WANDERLUST, loving how the two books were complementary, and with his latest release, WATER BORNE, I am once again struck by how beautifully his work fits into a wider literary context, specifically books about water and rivers that have also come out this spring by Robert Macfarlane and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, both of whom would likely also have underlined the following lines from Rubinstein’s book, “…borders, like the fringes of any lake, river, or ocean, are transition zones. The rough margins where change comes slowly, from the friction of daily and seasonal cycles. Or in a tremendous burst, like water breaching a dam.”

WATER BORNE is the story of Rubinstein’s journey by stand-up paddleboard (SUP) from his home in Ottawa, Ontario, to Montreal on the Ottawa River; from Montreal to New York City via the Lake Champlain and the Hudson River; and Albany, NY, to Buffalo, via the Erie Canal; and then from St. Catharines to Kingston, via Lake Ontario; and back home to Ottawa on the Rideau Canal. It’s also the story of the strangers he met along the way, the friends and relations who supported him, odd conversations at campgrounds, a chronicle of lost sunglasses., and the history of these waterways, man-made, histories that tell of the rise and fall of different industries over centuries, a progress that led to the degradation of lakes and rivers and the health of creatures who make their lives by their waters.

But it’s also the story of people who are working to change this cycle, of projects to restore life to waterways, both in terms of the natural world and actually making these waterways accessible to the people who’d most benefit from this access, people who don’t have the luxury of vacation houses or even swimming lessons. Throughout the book, Rubinstein imparts the wonders of “blue spaces,” which are like green spaces, but even better for our mental health. Considering all of this as he paddles during a season where the temperature is breaking heat records and the air is thick with smoke from wildfires. What lessons can blue spaces teach us at a moment when the stakes are oh so high.

Rubinstein’s narrative is funny and engaging, and personal as he weaves his family’s story in among the broader history. (His mother, who tracks his locations, and sends worried texts, is one of the best characters in the book.) Nimbly, he blends memoir with reportage to make a story that flows beautifully, and is both hopeful and inspiring, and a must-read for those of us who love blue spaces already.

April 17, 2025

I like the way the world waits for you

I’ve had a hard season, one whose heaviness I didn’t wholly recognize until the weight was gone. And throughout it all, my Thursday mornings with Singing Mamas have been one essential thing that kept me going, the sacredness of that space, the songs, that light. About three weeks ago, it occurred to me that this this was the first time I’d been attending the group and really felt genuinely joyous, as opposed to joy that was instead a brief respite from darkness and pain (which is not to say that such respite didn’t mean everything).

It’s curious to be showing up and know that I look the same, and that gorgeous light is just the same, and all those songs are just the same, but everything is different.

I like the way the world waits for you, that it’s possible to meet us where we’re at.

I’m very sleepy today after a later-than-usual night last night picking up my kid at her semi-formal, which happened to be her first school dance. She should have had her first school dance in 2021 as part of her Grade 6 graduation, and all such festivities were cancelled that year, along with so many other things, on account of the pandemic, and so it felt extra special that she had such a good time last night. Her younger sister is now the same age she was that year, when her class’s end of the year school trip was also cancelled (don’t worry—she’s had plenty of end-of-the-year trips since then!) and just yesterday we received the permission form for her sister’s trip, and it feels extra special to have this finally happening, the sort of thing I could possibly have been compelled to take for granted, but now I never will. We’re all so excited for her. (I feel like I’ll be tripping over pandemic losses and trauma for the rest of my forever.)

But still, I’m sleepy, and so when I went swimming today, I got in the medium lane and went so slow. Slow and easy, slow and easy, and I like this about swimming too, how it can meet you where you’re at. Just like the light in the room where we sing.

August 11, 2023

On Being Out of My Depth

It was story that started it—the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about the importance of being pushed outside our comfort zones, how we can learn and grow from a challenge. I was thinking about my work with writers on their early manuscripts and how scary it can be to open one’s self up for critique, but about how, in avoiding such a thing, we miss the chance to improve and make our work all it can be. I was thinking too about the story I was going to tell at the end of it the night, and how it would be one about triumph, fake it until you make it, about how you just never know what you’re capable of until you try.

I was thinking about how often we tend to underestimate ourselves, and the pitfalls of imposter syndrome, and how essential it is for me to override a tendency to stay small, to stay home. I was nervous, but those nerves, I supposed, were merely a sign that this was important, and that it was time to be brave. Do the hard thing. “Look,” I told my children too smugly. “I’m scared, and that I’m doing it, and *that* is the definition of brave.”

For seven years, I’ve been swimming near-daily, pandemic lockdowns aside, and I’ve come to own an identity as A Swimmer, tearing through Speedo caps, replacing goggles, usually one of the faster people in the pool (now that I no longer swim as the pool where the university swim team trains). And I’ve been curious for a while about trying something a little more difficult, about dipping a toe (ahem) into something with higher stakes, about improving my strokes and having somebody show me how to be better. So I finally signed up for the Masters Swim program at my community centre, drawn in by the suggestion that it would be an introduction to the world of competitive swimming, in which I’d hardly be a foreigner, since I essentially have gills and fins.

Oh, but Reader, it didn’t work out that way. Oh, Reader, I’ve not been so out of my depth (see what I did there!) since the time I decided to sneak a six pack of beer into a Scottish music festival where alcohol was apparently forbidden, and encountered people at the gate pushing in towers of beer cases on dollies. Sometimes, see, nerves are actually our instincts. If underdogs always eventually triumphed, as pop culture might suggest, wouldn’t there be no such things as underdogs after all?

I’d imagined Masters Swim a bit like Old Timer’s Hockey, see, me and a ragtag band of senior citizens. I really thought it would be gentle, an introduction, the name mostly ironic, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t. When the coach presented us with our “warm-up” written on a whiteboard, and I couldn’t decipher a single word. And the math! Reader, who would have imagined such math, the requirements delineated in metres, but how was I supposed to know how long the pool was, because I’ve never measured it, and even once I knew, how am I supposed to find space in my brain amidst all the SPORTSING to figure out how many lengths go into 300 metres, just say, and even if I did, how am I supposed to get track of them as I go? Plus we were supposed to be going fast! The whole time! For no discernible reason, because it wasn’t as though any of us were being chased.

I’d really been envisioning somebody holding my hand and showing me how, for once, I might do a proper whip kick. And then when we were waiting for the session to begin and I confessed to feeling like maybe this all wasn’t quite right, the other swimmers—who appeared to be in their early 20s—assuring me that they actually hadn’t swam competitively since high school really didn’t help assuage my fears.

I AM a swimmer. And THIS was the pool where I swim every day, but all the same, I might have signed up for intermediate Mongolian lessons and come up further ahead.

So I bolted. Of course, I bolted. Five minutes after the class started, I was gone, fleeing down Spadina Avenue in my bathing suit, still dripping from the pre-pool shower I’d taken in more hopeful times. Remembering a line from the picture book DOORS IN THE AIR which is one of the essential life lessons I’ve ever encountered in literature: “Remember, you don’t have to stay where you are.” The FREEDOM of that. (The best thing about being 44 is that you rarely have to feel like this ever.)

And so this story has turned out to be a story of abject failure and embarrassment (did they wonder where I’d gone, that weird lady who was only there for five minutes?), instead of triumph. A story that I’m telling because it horrifies me less when I can make it into something, and perhaps it will serve to help you feel better about yourself, because whatever else you got up to this week, at least you didn’t do that. A story about how the universe has a way, always, of keeping me humble. About how sometimes life is just challenging enough, and how comfort zones are fine, and about how I’ll stay in my lane.

June 19, 2023

Invincible

You can’t go chasing summer, is the thing I keep thinking, but instead you just have to wait, and it comes on like a wave, a wave of green overtaking the garden, and of heat, and crowds, and traffic, and too-muchness, extremes. In summer I get to head out of town and reset my equilibrium, days away from city and noise and the online world, when everything I read is printed on paper, and I’m longing for that peace right now, but not the way I was a year ago, when I felt like I’d come so far, but I still was so broken. Like I’d never be able to withstand too-muchness again. Six months of recovery after my brain broke, and I thought it would always be like that, struggle and hard. So it was especially a relief to ease into summer in 2022, to find peace and stillness after so many months (and years) of tumult. Though, of course, as an anxious person, I was worried about that, asking my therapist what she thought of the fact that I was doing so well, almost like riding a bike with no hands, like, wasn’t this reckless. “I’m not using any of my tools,” I told her. “I haven’t picked up Pema Chodran in weeks. Like, what if I forget everything that I’ve learned?”

And in response she told me the very best thing, which was just to steep myself in this moment, to close my eyes and breathe it in deep and absorb everything about it, imagine myself wholly immersed, which wasn’t so hard, because I spent so much of the summer immersed anyway, literally, which meant something really profound to me, to be deep in the water, at eye level, and a part of the world in such a fundamental way. There was something about pickles, preserves, about bottling summer, and I decided to lean in and do that. The photo accompanying this post like talisman of all that, and I had it printed as an 8’11 and framed up on the wall, and it’s my phone’s wallpaper too, summer summer, deep summer. And it worked—in the fall I was still marvelling at how I was carrying summer with me, that ease, that inner warmth—maybe this was what Camus was talking about? I was carrying it still through the winter, and then the spring, that peace, a sense of being steady, okay. Even as the seasons were shifting all around me, as seasons do, and the ground was moving too, and there were floods and fires and earthquakes and plagues, not to mention school fun fairs and silent auctions and elections and travel and my health card and drivers’ license were about to expire, and everyone kept getting pinkeye, and it lasted for weeks, I was still steady. I’ve never known anything like it.

And now here we are again on the cusp of another summer, which has arrived almost like pinkeye, “You again?”. And I keep tracing the distance from there to here, which hasn’t been an uphill climb at all, just a gorgeous, steady walk, so much easier than those first six months, which felt impossible. You can’t go chasing summer is what I mean, but you can live in it, and let it carry you and give you faith, and help you float. It is possible to float.

June 2, 2022

Swimsuits are for Swimming

I bought a bathing suit online a while back, and it probably could have been a size bigger.

But I’m very pleased to announce that after about six weeks of consistent workouts via swimming laps, it finally mostly fits me properly.

Not because my body has changed at all, but because six weeks of wearing a bathing suit (and running in through the spinner) is going to stretch a garment out.

Six years into regular swimming, my relationship to bathing suits is much less fraught that it used to be. I don’t actually remember if it ever was so fraught, but this is such a common trope, women trying on bathing suits and hating their bodies, that it’s probably embedded in my DNA.

I do remember that buying a Speedo tankini when I was in university that quickly ended up with a hole in the bum.

I took it back to the store, and the clerk informed me that it had disintegrated because I’d been wearing it to swim.

“It’s not a swimming bathing suit,” she told me. “It’s a fashion bathing suit.”

And these days, my bathing suits have no style at all, basic sporty numbers I can find in my size on clearance. For a couple of summers, for style, I’ve bought a cheap but cute suit from Joe Fresh, but these became stretched out and unwearable so quickly that I’m not sure they’re really worth it.

These days how I look in a bathing suit is an idea that just never comes up.

(Although I took heart when I saw Yumi Nu on the cover of Sports Illustrated recently. Her swimsuit didn’t really fit either, and she still looked pretty fine.)

I honestly never ever think about how I look in a bathing suit, which is bonkers because I wear a bathing suit almost every day. Because a bathing suit is a bathing suit, tight and gaping, revealing. But I never think about how I look in a bathing suit because it doesn’t matter how I look like in a bathing suit.

What matters is what I do.

That I SWIM.

The transformation from object to subject is complete.

April 22, 2022

Wild Swimming

While we lived in England, I longed to swim, so much so that I ended up purchasing a plastic pool from Woolworths, setting it up on the tiny concrete slab that constituted the back garden of our terrace house. We lived in the Midlands, and didn’t have a car, which limited my perspective, as well as my geographical range, so that I really wasn’t aware of nearby swimming opportunities available to me, though there must have been some. We were also very broke. Once in the summer of 2003, we took the train to Skegness, which I knew about from the Adrian Mole novels, and we went swimming there. Two years later, we’d take a dip in the sea on our honeymoon in Brighton. But other than these experiences, my English life took place on dry land…save for the time we were walking through the University of Nottingham’s Jubilee Campus and I spontaneously stripped down to my skivvies and went swimming in a muddy pond.

But contrary to my experiences, England has a long and storied swimming culture (which I learned much more about in Jenny Landreth’s Swell: A Waterbiography). From lidos to the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath, there are plenty of places to swim, and my own swimming obsession has certainly grown out of the passion for #WildSwimming online, among UK women in particular. And so taking a dip during our holiday there became a preoccupation of mine, even though we were travelling in mid-April. Mid-April in England, I decided, was basically Canadian June. And my husband knows me well enough to entertain the possibility that my wild-swim might indeed happen, because to do otherwise would basically cement it in stone.

But even I wasn’t sure. I’m not a cold-water creature. I liked the idea of taking a swim, but knew I’d find it difficult to wade into icy water. I am not Jessica J. Lee, breaking ice with a hammer. Before I knew about her example, I had trouble jumping into lakes in July.

Fortunately, the stars aligned, or at least the weather did. “THE HOTTEST EASTER ON RECORD” blared the overblown UK headlines while we were there, even though it was only 21 degrees and Easter is rarely in mid-April anyway. But it was warm enough that me going for a swim wasn’t completely ridiculous.

And so last Sunday morning, we drove to Crook O’ Lune for a swim in the River Lune near Lancaster. (We were actually planning to stop in St. Michael’s to swim in the River Wyre, which was en-route to our Easter lunch, but then got caught up in Lancaster’s one way system, and the matter was out of our hands.) That everyone in the family was indulging my swimming whim meant that I had no choice but to go through with it, no matter how cold the water—they’d all scrambled down a steep ridge and climbed over a stone wall to get to the river bank in the first place, and were all slightly annoyed with me. If I stayed on the bank, they might have disowned me.

Crook O’ Lune was breathtakingly gorgeous, and the perils of fitting in a swim before Easter lunch is that there is no time to linger and take in the rolling green hills, sheep grazing just beyond. It wasn’t the wildest of wild swimming spots, there being a car park, toilets, and a snack bar, and plenty of people out walking, but there were signs advising against swimming at risk of death, so a subversive element was certainly in place.

I should have brought flip flops, but what can you do? I peeled off my socks and boots, jeans and blouse, revealing the bathing suit underneath. Climbing down the muddy banks and in I went, no sign of eels. Glorying in being one small person in the enormous landscape, hills and sky. Wading in to my waist, which wasn’t so difficult, but going further was hard, and once my chest was under water, it felt too close to whatever I suppose a heart attack might feel like for me to properly let go, but I tried to. Coming out and wading in again, because it’s always easier the second time. Floating, sculling, swimming in freshwater for the first time since Thanksgiving at Woodbine Beach partway around the world.

But then Easter lunch was calling, and it was cold. Overwhelmed with the fact that this thing I’d dreamed about doing had happened, which was kind of the theme of our entire week in England. My husband taking my photo, not that I was doing it for the ‘gram, but without the ‘gram, I might not have done it, it’s true, which I can say about many of the most excellent experiences I’ve had in my life. I climbed out of the water muddy and with hives (my arm had brushed something poison growing on the bank), which I’d say makes for a pretty authentic wild swimming experience all around.

October 12, 2021

One More Time

I know that loving swimming is not a substitute for having a personality, but it’s come to constitute a large component of mine, which I sometimes think might be me hopping on a bandwagon, as I’m prone to doing, back around the time that #WildSwimming became a trending hashtag. But then I remember how much swimming has meant to be always, and all the sometimes impractical places I’ve jumped in—the Danube, the Sea of Japan, a duck pond in the middle of our Midlands town where there was nowhere else for a dip (and let me tell you I got a rash from each and every one of these)—and I think that loving swimming has been a part of me for a long time. And, since June 18, after a very long hiatus, I’ve been back to swimming on the regular. As in, I last went swimming this afternoon, and before that was yesterday, and my next swim is scheduled for tomorrow.

How can a single life contain such riches?

But it’s yesterday’s swim I want to talk about now, my last lake swim of the season, which comes two weeks after which I’d previously thought was my last lake swim of the season, though I think I really mean it this time, because today is the twelfth of October after all. I wore my bathing suit on the bus down to the beach, and brought a towel and a pair of underwear to change into, though I wasn’t making any promises. I don’t like swimming in cold water, really, am physically incapable. But the forecast was calling for 20 degrees and anything is possible. I was with my family and our friends, and I told that they were going to watch me dip my toe and then turn around again, because I’m certainly no polar bear. But then it wasn’t cold. A little bracing, yes, but getting right in was only a pleasure.

And then I was floating, the waves large and dramatic, but playful enough, and I couldn’t swim, really, with the water so rough, plus I’d left my goggles at home, and so instead I just let the lake carry me, and everything in the world was reduced to the essential, to blue, to water and sky, and me, and the odd seagull, and I could have floated forever, save for my people on the beach, and when I returned to them, I couldn’t stop smiling, what we call my “resting beach face,” a goofy grin which doesn’t even begin to equal the euphoria of the experience, how it makes me feel so small and alive and connected to a big incredible world, blood coursing through my veins like the waves onto the beach, and just the sheer power of it all, I can feel it, the way the beach and the lake feel like the edge of the world, the beginning of all possibility.

June 25, 2021

3 Things for 42

Yesterday was my birthday, and there were three things that I wanted to do.

I went to see my book in a real indie bookstore! I was lucky to see it in Indigo before the province shut down in November, but seeing it at Book City was definitely a dream come true. Even better: I got to buy books, after I’d signed mine.

I went to get my second vaccination! Stuart had his the day before. Harriet gets hers tomorrow. What a thing to have this all done before the beginning of summer. We are so profoundly grateful—for our opportunity, and also for everybody else who’s doing their part to get us to the end of all this.

And then after dinner, we went swimming! After no city pools at all in 2020 (they were open, but required lining up, and I am not big on line ups if I’m not guaranteed something at the end of one), it feels extraordinary to be back again. I’d tell you that I’ve learned not to take these ordinary things for granted…but I really never ever did.

June 23, 2021

Returning

Something that is surprising me about my feelings about the world reopening again after a very long and difficult time is that I AM SO READY FOR IT. Like ridiculously ready. There is no trepidation, or anxiety, or complicated feelings (though of course there are. But far fewer than you’d think). None of it is complicated in the slightest: I want to do all the things. Bring on the Roaring Twenties, Motherfuckers! Basically, if I’m not dead in Jay Gatsby’s pool by the end of August, what have I even done with my summer?

I have erred on the side of caution over the last year and a half. We did visit the museum and art gallery when permitted, and my children returned to school in person in September, but we haven’t socialized with other families since last summer when we’d picnic in the park. My mom came to see us at Christmas, but we sat apart with the windows wide open (and you can imagine how pleasant that was in the depths of winter). I’ve not been inside anybody else’s home, or eaten in a restaurant. We at dinner on a patio once in October, but only because we couldn’t find anywhere to get takeout from, and it definitely wouldn’t have been our first choice…

But now we’ve thrown all caution to the wind. (WITHIN REASON! I am still only gathering outdoors for the summer, keeping distance, wearing masks when I can’t. Tomorrow I receive my second vaccination shot.) I WANT TO DO ALL THE THINGS. Last Friday, Stuart and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary with a dinner on a patio. It felt like a dream. Sharing space with other people! Drinking beer out of a proper glass! Choosing to order dessert! I sat down and thought, “Delta variant!” but then put that bad thought out of my head, because I am finished with this pandemic. You know that thing that people kept saying all winter, something like, “The pandemic is not over just because you’re over it.” But you know what? It is. I am. BYE BYE BYE.

On Sunday evening, a dream came true. After a year and a half of (mostly) patient waiting, our family returned to our sacred swimming ground, the Alex Duff Pool at Christie Pits Park. Which seems much closer to our house than it did before everyone in our family became a cyclist, but now it’s just the most pleasant, swiftest journey away, up Brunswick and across on Barton. I didn’t dare to really hope that it would happen—the possibility of thunder clouds, or a pool fouling. I’ve learned over the past year and more not to think too far into the future, just to take things as they come instead, but it came. Six o clock, and we were let into the pool area (45 swim sessions reserved online, no use of change areas, but still) and there it was, the place I’d been dreaming of since Labour Day 2019, which was the last time we’d swam there. Even better? As the other swimmers began to arrive (attendance was capped) we discovered we had friends among them, and I jumped into the deep pool without testing the water, and it was like no time had passed at all.

June 7, 2021

Gone Swimming

I swam! I swam! Not in Lake Ontario on Friday after we cycled to Ward’s Island, which would have been ideal because I had actually packed a bathing suit, but I didn’t swim there because the water was so cold and so was the air, although I did make it in to my waist and it was wonderful. (Both my kids swam though. It was incredible! I don’t know how they did it.) But the next day, which was Iris’s birthday, we drove to the Kortright Conservation Centre for a picnic and a walk in the forest, with intentions to dip our feet in the creek, and then it turned out that the one spot on the creek where we stopped was a perfect swimming hole, and so naturally I skipped down to my skivvies and swam right in, and it was GLORIOUS. The most beautiful spot, and there was no one else around, except for my children, who were mortified, but there was no one else around, and not all of us can swim at sub-arctic temperatures, children. Sometimes you have wait for the creek, the wildest swim I’ve ever taken, I think, although not so wild that there wasn’t a lifesaving float secured on the bank. Clearly I’m not the first person to take a dip there. But it was indeed a joyous way to kick off the 2021 swimming season.