Ten years ago this month, I kayaked the entire 200 length of the Cape Fear River. To this day, I get about one or two emails a year from people who plan on re-creating the trip and asking for advice (Short version: If you can somehow find enough places to camp, it’s possible). The wide-brimmed REI hat that I wore to keep the sun off of my face has been my yard hat ever since. My son, who was small enough to carry in a backpack as we searched for the headwaters, is now in middle school.

Some things have stayed the same. The locks and dams are all still in place. Kemp Burdette is still the riverkeeper. Andrew Kornylak, the photographer who took more than 4,000 pictures of our trip, is still out there making images of people doing adventurous things. Of course, many other things are very different. Chris Tryon, who owned Hook, Line & Paddle in Wilmington and brought all of the kayaks and gear for our trip, closed his store in September 2024 after 16 years in operation. A few months after our trip, Hurricane Matthew hit eastern North Carolina and left devastation in the Cape Fear River basin that’s still being felt to this day. (I saw a picture after the storm of water lapping at the bottom of a railroad trestle that was far above our heads when we paddled past it). We also didn’t quite know the extent of the pollution. We knew it was there: Kemp pointed out a seep from a coal ash pond not far from Jordan Lake and the outflow pipe from an enormous Smithfield slaughterhouse, and we could smell the odor coming from a dog food factory in Fayetteville and a paper mill in Riegelwood. But in the years after our trip, the extent of DuPont’s (and later Chemours’s) pollution of the Cape Fear became known. Forever chemicals known as PFAS continue to be found in the river to this day, which affect the drinking water for a half million people in southeastern North Carolina. Kemp has been a leading voice in the fight for the cleanup.

All of that was still in the future when I sat down to write the Our State cover story about our trip, which ended up in the November 2016 issue. It’s still the longest story I’ve ever published and, itself, is a bit of a paradox. It’s certainly not the longest narrative ever written about a Cape Fear paddling trip (the late, great Philip Gerard wrote an entire book about his trip down the river). It simultaneously was good enough to win a national magazine award for multimedia storytelling (Thanks to Andrew Kornylak’s videos and images, and Andy Busam and Jordan Cauley’s hand-coding of the microsite where the story continues to live), yet the feedback from our submission for a more writerly award was that it was a bit too long and not all that exciting.

Hence, this was a trip and a story that I think holds up a decade later, and yet couldn’t possibly be written today. Back then, I was merely a year into my job as Our State’s senior writer and editor, and somehow was able to convince my pregnant wife that I should be gone for eight days. Longform online journalism, which was still in vogue at the time, is largely a luxury item for a lot of media outlets now. Plus, there’s not a big plot twist in this story (except for, maybe, the experience of paddling on the very last day). It’s just sort of a travelogue. I got into a kayak. I paddled for a week and a day. Here’s what happened.

I don’t do self-reflection exceedingly well, but I’d say if there’s any lasting legacy from this trip, it’s that it showed me that change is gradual, and that the impact can be subtle. I’d gone on the trip because, frankly, my editors and I thought it’d be a great story to anchor an issue about rivers. I’d expected some lasting change. But while I’d gotten used to the solitude and the pace of spending entire days paddling down a quiet, wide, meandering river, all of that went away when I got home and went right back into my daily routines. Years later, I think that’s the legacy. There’s no way I can put myself back into the exact headspace I was in ten years ago. But I’m happy can go back and read about it and rediscover some of the moments that I’d forgotten. I can remember what it was like to be out on the water, taking one stroke at a time, and waiting to discover what was around the next bend.