On Being a River

Humanity has always existed by the river. The Nile gave Egyptian civilization life, annual flooding depositing rich black silt across the delta as a calendar of abundance. Mesopotamia translates to the land between rivers in Greek, rising from the Tigris and Euphrates, two bodies of water running parallel through the heart of what would become Iraq and Syria and Turkey, feeding the civilization that gave us writing and the wheel and the city. The Indus River Valley nourished people in what is now modern-day Pakistan and India. Grid-planned cities with sewer systems and running water thousands of years ago, more sophisticated than anything in Europe for millennia. The Yellow River, the Huang He, turned the plains of northern China gold. Humanity has always been something the river built around us. Fresh, running water gives us life. Drinking, fishing, irrigation, the turning of grain mills, hydroelectric power, trade routes before roads. It gives us borders and it gives us bridges.…