I don’t know who’s more perplexed: me or the deer? It’s dawn on the Fourth of July and I’m lugging my 14-foot inflatable SUP and three dry bags across River Street in Troy, New York, burping bacon from the breakfast buffet. Downtown is drizzly and deserted, just me and the ungulate locking eyes across a hotel parking lot, two fish out of water.
Within minutes, I’m launching onto the Hudson River, an early start to catch the ebb that’ll ease my passage along this 153-mile estuary to the Atlantic. Also, with the temperature and humidity rising, to beat the heat. My usual hack for cooling off—two swims an hour, repeat—isn’t recommended today on this stretch of river. Too much rain for the sewage system. “Watch out for floaters,” a local had advised.
I’m celebrating America’s birthday nearly three weeks into a clockwise 1,200-mile circumnavigation from Ottawa, where I live, back home via Montreal, New York City, Buffalo, and Toronto. Distraught about apocalyptic climate change and toxic tech bros, on the cusp of 50 and uninspired by office work, I sought deliverance by dipping a blade. As an obsessive paddleboarder, I knew how good I felt while on the water. I’d also poked around the curative properties of “blue space” as a journalist, talking to researchers who study the psychological and physiological spinoffs from spending time in aquatic environments. Why not test these theories on myself?
Which sounded like a good excuse to spend a couple months paddling, camping, and hanging out with other folks drawn to the water. Except it’s shaping up to be one of the hottest summers ever. And now, past Albany, the clouds and wildfire smoke have parted, the sun is blazing and the E. coli-flecked tidal current has turned against me.
Water can instill a sense of being away and boundless possibilities, yet also a feeling of compatibility with our location, of comfort and belonging.
Feeling dizzy, I guzzle lukewarm electrolytes and conveyor-belt energy bars, trying to make it 41 miles to a marina whose owner has given me permission to tent. Jet-skiers wave, families picnic on the shore, eagles glide above green hillsides. At dusk, fireworks burst overhead—followed by streaks of lightning, sphincter-clenching cracks of thunder and a swirling wind, a sudden thunderstorm bearing down from the north. I swing starboard onto Catskill Creek and sprint toward a cluster of boats.
Cinching my leash to a dock, I dash into a building. Turns out it’s the bar.
“We’re closed,” a woman counting cash says without looking up.
I eye three men sitting on stools, half-full drinks in front of them.
“Can I just get a beer and wait out the storm?”
“Whadya want?”
Pint in hand, I answer a barrage of questions from the regulars. Then: backslaps and high fives. One of the bonuses of blue space, I’m discovering, is camaraderie. Which may be my most corporeal craving.
The science is clear that being in nature rejuvenates our bodies and brains. Boiled down: we’re more active, less anxious. And though it’s difficult to differentiate between green and blue spaces, water seems to uncork a multiplier effect.
People are happiest in marine and coastal margins, a pair of British environmental economists determined, gathering more than a million pings on their “Mappiness” app. Blue neighborhoods are “associated with lower psychological distress,” reports a paper out of New Zealand. Taking the sea air—breathing in “bioactive compounds that may originate from marine algae,” in the parlance of Belgian biologist Jana Asselman—appears to give our immune systems a boost. Oceans, rivers, and even urban fountains also offer opportunities for social interaction, suggests a Scottish literature review, kindling “a sense of community [and] mutual support between people.” The kicker to all this is that time on the water, especially among children, promotes “pro-environmental behavior.” In other words, taking better care of the planet.
Blue space triggers our parasympathetic nervous system, University of Virginia environmental psychologist Jenny Roe said to me before I left home, which basically tells the brain what our bodies are doing and then acts like a brake, dampening the stress response. Water can instill a sense of being away and boundless possibilities, yet also a feeling of compatibility with our location, of comfort and belonging.
“A sense of place is easy to ignore, unless you’re on the water. Water slows us down.”
Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Even looking at a creek or pool is enough to lower blood pressure and heart rates, a pair of University of California, Davis, psychology researchers concluded.They attribute the link, in part, to our forebears successfully detecting drinking water in arid environments. The caveat, of course, is that amid all this restoration, water can be perilous (floods, storms, drowning, disease). And that exposure—to both the pros and cons—is far from equitable. We can’t all afford to spend the summer on a SUP.
Catskill Creek is socked in by fog when I shove off from the dock in the morning, but within minutes, the rising sun starts to burn through, and I can make out the spindly legs of herons peering into the water for their breakfast. Songbirds coo and chirp from the marshy fringe; tall grasses rustle in the breeze. Nature’s daily ablutions, biomass breathing.
My own breathing falls into flow and distance comes easily and in two hours I stop for a swim beside a historic lighthouse where a signpost with arrows pointing toward various landmarks informs me that the Statue of Liberty is 103 miles away. The rest of my day follows a familiar, primordial pattern: paddle, swim, birdsong, eat, drink, sunscreen, paddle, swim, sunscreen, birds, drink, eat, paddle, swim, paddle. I’m focused on basic, immediate tasks, and none of the stresses that sent me down this river seem to matter. Blue space may not have eradicated my existential angst, but it’s teaching me a few things about balance and perspective. About focusing on the people and places where I am right now.
By early evening, I’m tying up outside the Hudson River Maritime Museum in Kingston, New York. Established to preserve the region’s history, the museum now strives to connect visitors to this revitalized watershed and nurture sustainable communities. “A sense of place is easy to ignore, unless you’re on the water,” executive director Lisa Cline says while showing me to the boat building school, where I’ll be bunking. “Water slows us down.”
Her words resonate. The stream of cold drinks and homemade snacks and hugs and encouragement and teasing and safeguarding and open-hearted curiosity and care I’m receiving on this trip, from a kaleidoscopic cross-section of strangers, would not seem possible on land. Perhaps it’s the decelerated pace, or ancestral memories of its hazards, but we tend to watch out for one another around water. And to me, that’s reason enough to keep paddling.
Dan Rubinstein is the author of Water Borne: A 1,200 Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage, forthcoming in June 2025.
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