It used to be around this time when I’d write a list of 15 new rivers I wanted to paddle that year. I’m not sure why the number 15. Maybe I’d read someone else’s list and 15 seemed right, or maybe we were stumbling home from the pub one-upping each other.
For 10 years, on my days off I’d drive off in all directions looking for new blue lines I had only seen on topo maps and in guidebooks. Then it was back to bouncing between guiding rafts on the Ottawa River and teaching paddling on the Madawaska River.
Looking back at my river logbook, I described each new river as my most favorite ever. Yet, I’ve returned to very few. Instead I’ve logged hundreds more days on the rivers I already knew.
Walking down the now-worn portage trail through the pines that borders the Lorne Rapids on the Ottawa River, the site of the recent World Freestyle Kayak Championships, my friend and Rapid contributing photographer, Robert Faubert, said to me, “You know, everything good that’s happened in my life has happened to me because of this river.”
Twenty-five years earlier, Rob and I were young, goofy and single. We’d met jogging up this trail to run another load of paying clients.
“I met my wife on this river. The friends that mean the most to me are people I met right here,” Rob said. “Look at us. Who’d have thought back then that we’d be bringing our kids here?”
It must have been a slow transition because I don’t remember it happening. My wife, Tanya, hates it when I use the word settle. She thinks it means that I stopped looking for something really good and just settled. That’s not what I mean when I talk about settling in the Ottawa Valley.
To me, settling is contentment. It’s being happy with how things are. Settling is a shift from searching to learning—learning to love more of the things I already have.
Understanding the scale of a watershed or the lives of those who have traveled here hundreds of years before is more than fodder to share with clients between knock-knock jokes on lazy flat stretches.
SETTLING IN A SENSE OF PLACE
When you spend enough time on a river you get to know it well. It gets inside you. This feeling in the stuffy world of academia is known as a sense of place. This sense of place is what drives advocates to fight hydroelectric projects, write guidebooks and return season after season, taking vacation days from jobs with salaries only to push rubber for a measly stipend of $75 per day.
Famed conservationist Martin Litton knew that to protect the Grand Canyon from being dammed he had to bring Americans down the river. The longer the trip the better, because the longer you spend on a river, the more it becomes a part of you. Once it’s a part of you, Litton knew he could count on you to protect it.
If I hadn’t stopped making lists of new rivers, if I hadn’t found a sense of place and settled here in the Ottawa Valley, I probably would not have started Rapid, I may not have proposed to Tanya, and I certainly wouldn’t be walking the Lorne trail with Rob and our kids. My sense of place overcome my urge to keep looking for bigger and better. Like Rob, everything good in my life has happened to me right here.
This spring we created a different kind of list. It’s not a list of new rivers we’d love to go paddle but a list of 15 things—some of them rivers—we love about our home right here in the Ottawa Valley. We hope a couple will make you want to come and play here. If you stick around long enough, maybe you’ll stay.
We did.
Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Rapid.
This article originally appeared in Rapid Spring 2016 issue.
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