By my estimation, ninety percent of vanity plates are corny and lame, but recently in my city I saw the license plate RIVRGRL and it made me smile. I guess that’s because I’m a river girl myself, although I never really thought about it much before.

I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin along the Oconto River—called “The Pond” in the town where I was raised—which gives way to the Machickanee Flowage before it slims out again and makes its way to Lake Michigan. Near my grandparents’ home I explored the Pensaukee, a scrawny little river that splits off in every direction and winds all around the county.

In my hometown my friends and I rode bikes to spend summers at the east side beach. The west side beach was more secluded, but was a much longer bike ride, had less beach, and was better suited as a boat landing. We heard stories about how high schoolers around my big sister’s age used to jump from tree swings into the shallow water over there on the west side and shuddered at the rumored resulting injuries. Allegedly the rope had been taken down to avoid further injury, but if you took a boat out onto the river you could spot at least one along the shore, hanging from a tall tree.

When I was in high school, we’d clamber into the river with inner tubes and float along, baking in the sun, a time-honored tradition among both teenagers and adults.

People from surrounding towns came to the east side beach frequently, which elicited a territorial response from us locals, although we never did anything to make our discomfort known. I think it was mostly a performance among ourselves, the notion that our beach was something of a local attraction, which was about as exciting as things got in a town of two thousand.

On Labor Day weekend the docks at the beach were pulled up onto shore to signal the end of summer. Then when the river froze, it was dotted with ice fishing shanties way before the ice was thick enough and, into the spring, long after fisherman were advised to remove their gear.

I grew up in a paper mill town, which meant the mill’s history was inextricably linked with the river. I heard a story once about a (presumably southern) semi-truck driver picking up or dropping off at the mill who saw all the ice shanties on the frozen river and said, “It’s so sad about all those homeless people!” Of course, we thought it was hilarious. Looking back, I can’t list on one hand all the things that assumption and our response reveals about cultural divide. But that’s a story for another time.

In middle school, on Earth Day, my class visited the hydroelectric dam to learn about renewable energy. We wore hard hats as one of the workers shouted over the machinery to tell us how there was once a waterfall in the middle of our river but now it was a dam and provided energy for the city. I guess I have always been mystified by dams, and seeing one up close only made me more dumbfounded.

At the top of the dam was a boat landing and a few fishing docks set apart from a flat-rock and gravel walkway that led to the framework at the top of the dam. My friends and I liked to sit on those big rocks when the beach was too crowded or in the spring and fall when we couldn’t swim. We’d skip rocks and ignore the smell of dead fish and bristle whenever someone came near to fish. I sometimes stopped there with my dog to take a rest on our walks. It was maybe the best spot in town to catch the sunset.

As you’d expect, sometimes the dam was open fully and the water rushed through with a roar that seemed completely mismatched to the river we swam in just a mile to the west. Other days, it merely trickled.

In the winter, great gushes of river water froze at the top of the dam, impossibly, and stood suspended in motion. Knowing what little I know about dams and hydroelectric power, this phenomenon seems…wrong? But I saw it every winter and was and still am flabbergasted by its beauty and surrealism.

I live in the St. Croix River Valley now, which creates the border between western Wisconsin and Minnesota. From my side of the river I can see clear across to Minnesota, Sarah Palin style. The St. Croix is gorgeous, so much so that it’s protected by the National Park Service.

On the day my partner and I moved into our apartment here, I had taken a detour to our college town to meet with a professor about a project, adding an hour and a half to what is ordinarily a three and a half hour trip. By the time I got into town, I was exhausted. It was a hot day, and when I went to my meeting with my professor it was raining and took me twenty minutes to find a parking spot because the roads on campus were being patched.

But the first thing I saw when I got into town, just off Wisconsin exit 1, was the St. Croix sparkling beyond the off ramp in the early evening sun. I felt myself relax, and I smiled with the relief of having finally arrived.

Our city is a sort-of suburb of the Twin Cities, and as such, is home to a fair few wealthy businesspeople who commute to work in the Cities while enjoying residences in a quieter area. There are marinas along the river full of these business peoples’ sailboats and yachts. It reminds me of the touristy, wealthy communities along Lake Michigan where the endless watery horizon can trick the brain into thinking you’re on the ocean.

Currently, the St. Croix has flooded so significantly so as to submerge about 60% of our riverside park and much of First Street. About ten miles south of our city the St. Croix feeds into the mighty Mississippi, which has also risen menacingly this spring.

Before my first interview properly in the Twin Cities, I got to sit by the Mississippi and feel small. It was fall, and I got to St. Paul an hour early in an overabundance of caution, and I found Harriet Island Park nearly empty. I was underdressed for the breeze in my interview outfit, but sitting on a bench and watching the Mississippi flow with downtown St. Paul set just behind it was surreal. River boats along the banks made it look strange, like I was on a movie set before any of the cast or crew appeared. It was the first moment in my new surroundings that I felt small-town-me easing into what may eventually become big-city-me. And it reminded me of the passage about rivers that, in many ways, brought me to the Twin Cities in the first place.

As a senior at UW – Stevens Point (Stevens Point is on the Wisconsin River) I took one of the classes that set me on course to be a big book nerd forever. In that class I was elected copy editor, which meant I got to spend hours poring over the manuscript of the very first book I would ever edit. The abstract idea of it was as intoxicating as the physical act of it. The book, The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis, was and is my baby. If I haven’t bullied you into buying a copy yet, consider it done now.

The passage goes like this:

“In the southeast corner of Connecticut, three rivers flow and meet. First, the Shetucket makes a semicircular sweep and receives the Quinebaug and then together they join the Thames, flushing water into this once wild tract of land nine miles square. Of the three, I love the Quinebaug River most, coming as it does with a rapid current through a hilly country, channeling its way around ledges, spraying foam and diving headlong over the parapet of rock, free for a moment, then caught, a reminder to me that even nature faces encumbrances.”

Perfect.

It may be hard to believe, but Netflix was new at one point, and I remember my first experiences with it like I do my first experiences with the internet. (Hang in there—I promise I’ll get back to the river stuff.) Like most people, we just had the DVD-in-the-mail service at first, but eventually added the streaming service as well. In those early days, Netflix’s streaming options were 30% obscure indie films nobody has ever heard of, 50% Korean dramas, and 20% anime. It was slim pickings as far as my interests were concerned, but giving all those strange indie movies a try is cemented in my memory. The first movie I remember watching was called Dandelion, and years later, when Orange is the New Black came out, I’d see one of the main actresses from Dandelion in a much bigger production. Wild!

Anyway, another of the first movies I streamed was called Sixteen to Life, about a teenage girl living on the Mississippi River, reading about Mao and working at an ice cream stand inundated by tourists. The plot deals as much with her teenager-hood—it takes place on her sixteenth birthday, and everyone is giving her shit about being “sweet sixteen and never been kissed”—as it does with the transient nature of tourist towns. The wealthy kids who spend summers at their river houses are rude to her when she serves them at the ice cream stand, and the eventual love-interest is a tourist she may never see again. And so on.

What I’m saying is that, for me, Sixteen to Life was the original RIVRGRL! Here was a girl around my age, kind of weird but well-meaning and trying to figure it all out, who was growing up influenced by the existence of a river. She was fictional, but surely me and all the other RIVRGRLS in the world were having much the same experience and looking longingly to our rivers expectantly. But typically only the ocean gets the grand ennui representation in movies and songs and poems. So here was this movie about something less grand and, I guess, more universal.

I loved that movie. I found it again recently to watch it again—it’s on Amazon, and you should watch it, too—and I still love it. It still means everything to me it did when I was twelve or whatever and combing through mostly crappy options for wasting my time. Maybe it’s cringe-inducingly-millennial that a freaking Netflix movie helped my identity take shape, but that’s where we’re at in the grand scheme of things, so get over it. What Sixteen to Life gave me was assurance that my very ordinary life in a little river town could be special even if it wasn’t terribly interesting to anyone else.

When I think of the rivers that have raised me and nudged me along into the defining moments of my life so far I wonder what it is that makes them special to me. If I wanted to write something beautiful I’d say it has something to do with how they carry on despite those encumbrances. But I want to write something true, and if it’s beautiful that’s just incidental.

I think I love rivers because they are old and sometimes smelly and they are landmarks in my memory. They don’t care if you’re a local or slightly less local from a neighboring town and they don’t care if you pee in them. Rivers are like the oceans without all the mystical majesty. They are humble and accessible and were there long before you or me and will be there long after we die. They dictate how cities are built because they can’t be moved, and when you drive on the windy streets of a river city you can’t help but notice the way humans have catered in a small way to their existence. I suppose they’re poetic in a kind of dirty, diamond-in-the-rough way. They are the working class of bodies of water, maybe.

Then again, the Great Lakes have informed much of my character and Midwestern-ness, but that’s a post for another time.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about RIVRGRL”:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

The Appointed Hour by Susanne Davis

The Flatness and Other Landscapes by Michael Martone