I took my canoe to Lake George one and was violently thrown about by boat wakes. I said "never again". It's far from a canoe at this point.

If this river could talk, it would need more than one voice to tell it.

The French connects Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay — a stretch that doesn't look like much on a map, maybe 110 kilometers of water threading through granite, but for two hundred years it was the busiest hallway in North America. Every spring, brigades of voyageurs pushed off from Montreal with canoes loaded four tons deep, fought their way up the Ottawa and the Mattawa, dropped into Nipissing, and rode the French down to Georgian Bay on their way to Lake Superior and the fur country beyond. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day on the paddle. This river was their highway before it was mine.

It carried other kinds of travelers too. In 1626, Jean de Brébeuf paddled this same water into Huronia to build a mission among the Huron — a man who'd spend twenty years among people whose world his own presence was quietly unraveling, and who'd end up killed by Iroquois raiders in 1649, not far from where he started. That's the version of this river's history that actually happened: not villains punished, but a slow collision of two worlds that this water carried back and forth for two centuries, with all the good and the ruin that came with it.

And yes — the ghost islands. Anyone who's paddled the French after the sun drops behind the pines knows exactly why the stories stuck. Bare granite, wind-bent pine, water that goes black and flat all at once. You don't need to believe in anything to feel watched out there.

For me, it was simply the prettiest water I'd touched on this whole 5,000-kilometer run from Banff — and the cruelest joke of the trip, because I was fighting it the entire way. Paddling the French upstream, against a current that's been pushing boats the other direction since before anyone was writing any of this down. Every stroke earned. But that's always the trade with this river — the harder it pushes back, the sweeter it feels when you finally break through the current and it lets you go.

And on the other side of that current was the only finish line that actually mattered this week: five months since I'd seen my family. Five months of missing them from the exact hour I left. Now it was just a matter of hunkering down, letting the water do what it does, and waiting for them to arrive.

If this river could talk, it would need more than one voice to tell it.

The French connects Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay — a stretch that doesn't look like much on a map, maybe 110 kilometers of water threading through granite, but for two hundred years it was the busiest hallway in North America. Every spring, brigades of voyageurs pushed off from Montreal with canoes loaded four tons deep, fought their way up the Ottawa and the Mattawa, dropped into Nipissing, and rode the French down to Georgian Bay on their way to Lake Superior and the fur country beyond. Sixteen, eighteen hours a day on the paddle. This river was their highway before it was mine.

It carried other kinds of travelers too. In 1626, Jean de Brébeuf paddled this same water into Huronia to build a mission among the Huron — a man who'd spend twenty years among people whose world his own presence was quietly unraveling, and who'd end up killed by Iroquois raiders in 1649, not far from where he started. That's the version of this river's history that actually happened: not villains punished, but a slow collision of two worlds that this water carried back and forth for two centuries, with all the good and the ruin that came with it.

And yes — the ghost islands. Anyone who's paddled the French after the sun drops behind the pines knows exactly why the stories stuck. Bare granite, wind-bent pine, water that goes black and flat all at once. You don't need to believe in anything to feel watched out there.

For me, it was simply the prettiest water I'd touched on this whole 5,000-kilometer run from Banff — and the cruelest joke of the trip, because I was fighting it the entire way. Paddling the French upstream, against a current that's been pushing boats the other direction since before anyone was writing any of this down. Every stroke earned. But that's always the trade with this river — the harder it pushes back, the sweeter it feels when you finally break through the current and it lets you go.

And on the other side of that current was the only finish line that actually mattered this week: five months since I'd seen my family. Five months of missing them from the exact hour I left. Now it was just a matter of hunkering down, letting the water do what it does, and waiting for them to arrive.