A paddler’s healing journey captured in ‘Borne by the River’

A Virginia professor of English has published a book about his 200-mile paddle along the Delaware River that captures his healing journey after a near-fatal stroke, the Covid pandemic and a separation from his wife upended his life.

The book, “Borne by the River: Canoeing the Delaware from Headwaters to Home,” by Rick Van Noy, is part meditation, part travelogue and part memoir that treats the river as a metaphor for life: You have to find ways to navigate around rocks, islands and other obstacles but also take it as it comes.

The origins of his nine-day trip from Hancock, N.Y., to Trenton, N.J., that is the subject of the book dates to August 2019.  

Van Noy was 52 and experiencing pain in his jaw and neck. He thought he either had a stiff neck or the beginnings of a toothache but suddenly collapsed at home and could not feel his left leg and arm.

He was taken by a medivac helicopter and hospitalized for a couple of months for treatment of a stroke.

What triggered the stroke is not precisely clear. Van Noy surmised that he sustained whiplash in a crash while riding a mountain bike, which caused a dissection in his internal carotid artery, which in turn caused a clot.

Two years later, amid the pandemic and a separation from his wife, he sought solace in the river.

Getting outdoors

For Van Noy, a professor of English at Radford University in Radford, Va., who grew up in Titusville, N.J., near Washington Crossing State Park, north of Trenton, “the Delaware was home,” he said. “It’s where I grew up.”

In “Borne by the River,” he documents his adventures and highlights the history, sites and geography of the Delaware along his 2021 trip.

He had Sully, a Catahoula leopard dog he described as a people-pleasing “watchdog,” as his sole companion. Except for one night, he found a place to pitch his tent in an isolated patch on shore or on an island.

Meeting strangers with whom he shared food, beers and company was a source of great joy, he said. “Hey, what’s your story? Why are you on the river?” was a frequent refrain Van Noy said he heard.

Though his professional career is in rooted in teaching English at a college, he’s had a track record of writing books with strong environmental themes, such as “Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South.”

He explored reconnecting with nature in “A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature Through the Seasons.”

Our collective mania about smartphones and fears fueled by news and social media — he described myths about “toe-eating fish” in swimming holes, for example — have discouraged people from being outside, he said.

In nature, a form of “Type 2 fun” can be had, the kind of fun you experience when you look back at it but not in the moment, he said.

As he grew as an author, Van Noy came to be more intrigued by a community’s sense of place.

He said there’s a collective mindset that when someone shares that they live in New Jersey, it provokes a response of, “What exit?” But that outlook undervalues the natural beauty that the state affords, particularly along the Delaware, he said.

Affinity for nature

Van Noy recalled having an affinity for nature and the outdoors from a young age.

Too few people appreciate the Delaware, which he described as “a treasure,” adding that he is old enough to recall seeing marked improvements in the health of the river over time.

“What happens upstream affects you downstream,” he said. He described, for example, as a youngster being with friends who tossed their empty cans into the river.

“We shouldn’t be doing that,” he recalled thinking at the time. “We shouldn’t be a problem for somebody else.”