When I was about 12 years old, my friend Dorothy and I decided to float down the Mississippi River together on inner tubes. It was a windy day. My mom (through adoption) drove us to the boat landing, about five miles up the river. We expected the current to carry us down to our house in just an hour or two, since normally the river had a fast current. Dorothy lived next door to me on the river as well. 

The trip did not go as we had planned. A strong wind was blowing the opposite direction of the current, and it kept catching our innertubes and blowing us backward. It took one hour, then two hours. I kept losing Dorothy, and we had to paddle back to find one another. 

We didn’t know what to do. We had life jackets on, but there were hardly any other boaters or swimmers out on that windy day. We made so little progress floating along. The big inner tubes would go a few feet with the current, and then a big wind gust would push us back another few feet. It was extremely frustrating to be two feet forward and then three feet back, over and over again.

I grew up in a family that thrived on water. The first house I lived in with my adoptive mother and father was in South Minneapolis, The City of Lakes. My first swimming lesson as a three-year-old was to put my face in the brown water of the lake, then named Lake Calhoun, which later became Bde Mka Ska, the Ojibway name. The lake was fishy-smelling, and I got water in my nose that burned my sinuses. 

I went to swimming lessons once a week in the summer. It was so hot that I welcomed the cool water, but I easily got cold. I was a very skinny little girl, and when I was chilled, I would shiver and shake, and my teeth would chatter. My mother said that my lips turned blue. 

What I did not know was the woman who had given birth to me, Kathy, was living at that time on a nearby lake in her parents’ home. She was 19 years older than me, and lived on Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis, less than a mile away from where I was. Strange to think that when I was shivering near Lake Calhoun, she could have been walking or swimming just nearby and we would have never known.

When I was five-and-a-half, my parents moved our family of my adopted younger brother and me to a new home they had built for us on a lot on the Mississippi River, outside of Minneapolis. I felt like such a rich girl when we moved to that dream house. (It looked similar to the Barbie Dream House that my parents gave me for Christmas.) They had saved up a lot of money to build a midcentury-modern type of house, with big picture windows overlooking the Mississippi River. 

After we moved in, my brother, Billy, and I were joined by my baby sister, Sue. We were all adopted from the Children’s Home Society of Minnesota. Sue was darker skinned than the rest of us. I had blue eyes; Billy’s were hazel; and Sue’s were brown.

We had strict rules about The River; no kid could go down the steep stairs that led to the dock by themselves. But I used to sneak down there as a teenager just to watch the river go by. It was hypnotic to watch feathers or branches float with the current, never stopping. The Mississippi smelled different from a lake. It was more clammy-smelling, and sometimes dead fish were strewn upon the rocks. My dad would have us all go down to the river as a family and dive down and pull rocks up from the bottom and put them on the riverbank to build our bank wall. As a kid, we spent long days splashing off the dock and diving for rocks and then putting them on the riverbank.

When Dorothy and I were frantically blowing backwards, it was in 1973, and no one had a cell phone. Thinking back, I can hardly believe my mother let me do this at 12 years old, and did not think to come and check on me. We were getting more and more afraid, and I could tell that Dorothy didn’t want to keep doing this. We started to get cold and my teeth were chattering. I felt lost and alone, worried about my friend and feeling she was mad at me for even coming up with this idea. I finally told Dorothy that I wanted to get help. We were lost in the middle of suburban Champlin, a bedroom community north of Minneapolis. Luckily, we soon found a low riverbank with stairs leading up to a house at the top of the hill. It was a weekday in the summer, back when many women were home with their kids.

I climbed up the steep bank, carrying my large inner tube, clad only in a one-piece bathing suit. I was so glad to ring the doorbell of the house. A woman answered and then carried the phone with the cord out to the front step. She did not want me to get water in her house. I knew my home number by heart, so I called my mom.

I still get a sad, scared feeling, even now thinking of this memory, wondering, “What kind of trouble am I in? Does anyone really care enough to come and pull me out of the river?”

The little abandoned baby in me remembers, “You got left. You got left alone.”

My mom came in the car soon after I gave her the address. She wasn’t mad. She was a little concerned, but when she saw my crying face, she said, “You are okay.”

Dorothy looked a little embarrassed regarding the whole thing. She was glad we didn’t have to call her parents.

It was nice to get back home, take a long shower, warm up, get into jammies, and go to sleep. The river and the lakes are still there, holding the ever-moving water. Names change, and the people around them change, but the water is ever-present.