North Minneapolis resident Catherine Fleming explains her relation to the Mississippi River and her hopes for the Upper Harbor Terminal redevelopment project to reconnect communities of color to the river.
Disconnected From The River
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Not a Border, But a Path: Swimming Across the Rio Grande
On a cool November day, I floated in the middle of Amistad Reservoir, a lake formed by a dam on the Rio Grande. I was swimming from the United States to Mexico and back, a ten-mile round trip. From the middle, I could see two of the widely spaced buoys that mark the path of the river under the reservoir, one on either side of me; up on the dam, I could see two flags waving in the wind, one for each country. But in the water itself, there was no way to tell if I was in the United States or Mexico, no line to mark the boundary between the two nations. My body floated in both countries and in neither. There was no border; there were only the water and the sky.