John Hildebrand - Long Way Round: Through the Heartland by River

All rivers are connected. The Nile, Euphrates, Amazon, Danube, Yangtze, Amazon, that little millstream lazying through townthey all flow to the same deep blue sea. And theres some comfort in knowing, if you live by a river, that the wide world lies just downstream.

I happen to live by the Chippewa River, which heads in small lakes and swamps in far northeastern Wisconsin not far from Lake Superior then flows in the opposite direction, diagonally across the state, and passes within a block of my house on its way to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico and so forth. A river system is one of those vague territories, like a voting district, that we belong to without having to think about it unless theres a flood or someone drowns. But I think about the Chippewa once a day, usually on my way to work, because it runs through the middle of the campus where I teach, dividing Fine Arts from Science and the Humanities the way a dark fissure separates hemispheres of the brain. A footbridge spans the divide.

When the weather turns summery, Ill stand at midspan and watch students launch themselves down the river on brightly colored air mattresses and inner tubes. Buoyed upon their own breath, they link arms and float face-up beneath the footbridge toward New Orleans. I envy their journey, the spontaneity and pointlessness of it. They are adrift between college and whatever comes nexta job, marriage, payments on their student debt. The flotilla slides slowly past the Fine Arts building, a tanning salon, and a Mexican restaurant. If the students kept going they might reach the Mississippi in a few days and the Gulf of Mexico by summers end. But they never do. A quarter-mile into the voyage, they call it quits and wade ashore at the public boat landing. Shouldering their inflatable white shark or pink flamingo, they hotfoot it up the city bike path to the footbridge, back to where they started, and re-launch while the sun still shines. For the students, the Chippewa is a Round River.

The idea of a Round River goes back at least to the Okeanos of ancient Greece, a great freshwater stream that encircled the earth and flowed back on itself. The myth was an early take on the hydrological cycle, an explanation of why rivers flow continuously to the ocean yet never run dry. All the rivers run unto the sea, says Ecclesiastes, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. The North Woods has its own version of the myth in a Paul Bunyan tall tale. One spring, the big lumberjack hops aboard a log raft and heads for the nearest sawmill. Three days later the river, high with meltwater, shoots him past a logging camp that looks suspiciously like Bunyans own. Three more days pass and another camp, identical to the first, heaves into view. He keeps going. Not until the third pass does the big galoot recognize his own red long johns flying from the flagpole and realize hes riding the Round River. Thats the whole story. Its one of those elaborate jokes that works on an order of three, repeating the same details over again until the situation becomes clear to everyone but our dimwitted hero. Theres no moral, no discernable theme except the obvious: to know where you are in the world it helps to remember where youve been.

In the 1940s, Aldo Leopold resurrected Paul Bunyans river for an essay that begins: One of the marvels of early Wisconsin was the Round River, a river that flowed into itself, and thus sped around and around in a never-ending circuit. Writers are always using rivers as metaphors for one thing or another, and Leopold was no exception. When he wrote, Wisconsin not only had a round river, Wisconsin is one, he wasnt referring to a body of water but the flow of energy from soil to plants to animals to people. Leopolds Round River is an ecological parable, a metaphor for the natural world being interconnected, a closed system, and what goes around inevitably comes around. Its a fine essay but also a bit of a letdown. The first time I read it, I was terribly disappointed when the title river dried up after page one because a Round River is a beguiling idea. Its a very Zen idea: start here, paddle there, end up where you began. Its an idea that can send you scrambling for a map.

Look at a map of Wisconsin and the first thing you notice is how much blue there is, especially around the borders, which are mostly water. A riparian boundary, formed by the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers, is all that keeps residents of western Wisconsin from waking up in Minnesota or Iowa. But rivers arent walls; they dont divide, they connect. They cut across state and county lines, city limits and reservation boundaries, regardless of political demarcations or jurisdictions. Wisconsin has eight-four thousand miles of rivers and streams, enough to circle the equator three times, and certainly enough to cobble together a circular route through the state. Cobbling rivers togetherdescending some and ascending othersis how Indians traveled from one watershed to the next. Rivers were the original blue highways, the first routes of commerce and trade, the arbitrators of great cities. Now theyre more like back roads, loopy digressions from the midwestern grid, meandering past towns that didnt grow into great cities but dwindled over time to become, for lack of a better word, backwaters.