Rivers may be made for swimming, but Americans haven’t done much of that in a long time -- too dirty, too scary.
Akiko Busch was facing milestones and loss and change. She walked down to the nearest river, jumped in and swam across. And just kept swimming -- across the Hudson, the Delaware, the Monongahela, the Susquehanna, the Mississippi, and more.
She just keeps swimming, for herself, her peace of mind, and for the rivers. If we don't swim them, she says in her new book "Nine Ways to Cross A River: Midstream Reflectons on Swimming and Getting There From Here," we don't know them, and if we don't know them, we won't save them or ourselves.
Listen to an On Point conversation with Busch about nine ways to cross a river.
Are you drawn to the riverbank? To our river waters? Are there times in life when we just need to dive in and swim? Do you dare?
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Comments: 1
While the rivers where I grew up were never quite as badly polluted as the Cuyahoga (iirc, we never needed a fire watch on the Naugatuck), there were local bodies of water that were so badly polluted that jumping in would result in chemical burns.