There is a parcel of lake, visible from my front yard, that my paddle has never touched. This week I went there, and the experience gelled for me all the reasons why we’re focusing this issue on kayaking locally and reclaiming urban waters.
These days, kayak trips are getting shorter and shorter. Everybody who’s heard of speed dating or bought pre-washed salad mix knows that we have less free time than our grandparents’ generation. A big part of the reason is that we’ve spread ourselves thin; we spend too many hours on the move.
In her history of walking, Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit explains: “Just as the increased speed of factory production did not decrease working hours, so the increased speed of transportation binds people to more diffuse locales rather than liberating them from travel time (many Californians, for example, now spend three or four hours driving to and from work each day).”
LESS TIME ON THE ROAD, MORE TIME ON THE WATER
For us kayakers, speeding long distances to get to postcard places not only discounts and dissolves the space in between them, it also kills time that we could be spending on the water. Our precious, endangered leisure time becomes road kill.
The good news is, we can slide up that slope. Take it from Dubside, the monomial paddler profiled by Nigel Foster in the Summer issue’s “Going Commando”. What may sound like a recipe for a landlocked life—owning no wheels besides the rollers on the kayak cart he totes on public transit—means less time working for The Man, and more time afloat on the backwaters of his hometown. Dubside is an alchemist, teaching us how to trans- form water into time.
Exploring locally is nothing new. Back when kayaks were still just for hunting, henry David Thoreau was curmudgeoning away about the same stuff in his bean patch in Massachusetts. “I have travelled a good deal in concord,” the thinker famously said, warming up to a Walden chapter of blabbity blah about inner journeys. Taken with a drop of saltwater, the man has a point. You don’t have to navel gaze; just turn your attention infield a bit.
DIP INTO FAMILIAR WATERS
Here at the editor’s desk, with digital dreams emailing in from everyplace, it’s too easy to fall for the long-distance outlook. Last year we got a chiding missive from one of our loyal subscribers, Eric Hockaday, who wrote, “I wish you wouldn’t send me articles or flyers advertising far away exotic places to kayak. It upsets me because I can’t begin to afford trips and vacations like that. I wish you would send me information about kayak trips here at home, here in Canada, especially British Columbia.” Eric will be happy to see this issue’s article about Kootenay Lake (“hippies, huckleberries and Beer”)—true backyard paddling for B.C. types, and stoke for the rest of you to find a local trip of your own.
If you think you’ve seen and done it all, try dipping into familiar waters by night, in the off-season, or some other creative way to gain a new perspective. After growing up restless in the middle of Toronto, I thought I knew the place and every way out of it. I’d left town a thousand times in every direction you can take a highway, but there was one angle I hadn’t tried: due south. I slipped off the beach one sunset, took a bearing for New York state or bust, and paddled straight out into the pure vertigo of Lake Ontario and sky. That shining smog-anchor they call the Golden horseshoe spread out behind me in the dark like the Milky Way, and when I turned around to paddle back, there was a side of my home I’d never seen.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
