In the old days, he said, the mess hall was crowded 24 hours a day. Sailors played cards, gambled, got drunk and got into knife fights. Ex-cons, Hells Angels, mental patients and gang members hiding from the law worked there. Every now and then one would disappear over the rail in the middle of the night. There was such a demand for labor that if someone was fired, he’d be hired the next day by a competitor. When Mike reached 25 years of service, the company gave him a clock mounted on a brass helm. Mike responded, “You should have given me a Congressional Medal of Honor for surviving!”

Mike was still talking an hour later when I slipped out of the mess hall to catch the sunset. Captain Ross gave me permission to roam the ship, as long as I wore a hard hat outside. And didn’t fall overboard. The sun was still above the treetops, and silhouetted skyscrapers in downtown Montreal 10 miles northeast looked like penciled-in shadows. The 9,400-horsepower engine vibrated the deck and every surface as the ship motored toward Lac St.-Louis.

A rain shower hit, carried by a ferocious wind. Five minutes later it passed, and the evening sun hammered the deck. I had never moved this slowly as a passenger and wondered if I would lose my mind with boredom in the next six days. But the pace was meditative, too. From the 75-foot-tall wheelhouse, you notice things onshore you would typically miss in a car, train or plane. Like kids playing lacrosse in a dried-up hockey rink, a teenager peeking into his neighbors’ windows with a drone, and a red fox hunching his back and relieving himself on a beautifully manicured lawn.

The canal opened into Lac St.-Louis where it was nearly four miles wide, then narrowed again near Île Perrot. We were 300 miles due north of New York City and on the same latitude as Portland, Ore. Elms and cottonwood bent in the breeze, casting shadowy fingers onto the water. White cedar and ash grew close to the river where 350,000 cubic feet of water passed every second. Moraines and gentle drumlins rose and fell along the riverside, creating miniature highlands shrouded in red oak and sugar maple. In between, peat bogs were laced with the skeletons of fallen trees.

Two riders on a bike path lining the dike left us in the dust. I found it hard to believe that we would be in Minnesota in six days. In my mind, it was difficult to connect Montreal and Minnesota by water at all. I was so used to driving and flying, the shape of the continent had been distorted. You get on a plane or Interstate in New York and get off in Minneapolis. Or Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Most people don’t travel anymore. They arrive. Unless you are riding the slow boat. Then you see every mile.