I can’t imagine living anywhere that is not near water. I grew up a short distance from a river—the White River, which empties into the Wabash River, which empties into the Ohio, which empties into the Mississippi, and finally, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The river represented the possibility of floating away, leaving behind everything and going someplace else. The rhythm of water, consistent, moving, and full of possibility, has offered deliverance since I was six years old.

The White River gave birth to my desire to be near water. As a teenager, I recognized it as a place to hide. I could go and be alone without anyone asking why I was there. I could distance myself from everything and imagine a life otherwise. Part of this appeal arose from its seclusion. It flowed through the countryside, tree-lined and surrounded by cornfields. 

My first memory of the White River was of spending summer evenings, dusk building across the fields, sitting on a sandbar, listening to Cincinnati Reds baseball games on a transistor radio. It was my refuge from a difficult home life. There, I could imagine I was in Cincinnati, which is across the Ohio River from my birthplace and the home of my mother’s relatives, the people with whom I wanted to be.

As I got older, I ran along the White River, which often meant making my own trails among jagged, brushy banks. It meant focusing on the immediacy of the moment and what was directly in front of me, lest I stumble. By necessity, I left behind the concerns and fears I harbored when I came off the bridge and down the scruffy grass embankment to the water’s edge.

My runs took me farther up and down the river than any road could have. I ran beside fields, along shallow gorges created over thousands of years ago, and through muddy flood plains. I moved slower than I would if I were running on the road but extended more effort because of the uneven and often soggy ground beneath me. I often had to retrace my steps or revise routes to avoid underbrush, thickets, and deep muddy patches hazardous to shoes and bare legs. These runs continued into college, on the same river but twenty miles away.

Before I started to run along the river, I trudged through its pools and currents from November to February trapping raccoons and muskrats for spending money. I rose at 4:30 in the morning and rode my bike in the darkness the half mile to the bridge. Wearing hip waders, I slipped into the cold water, its pressure converging around my legs up past my knees and thighs. Instant warmth.

I moved gingerly along the water’s edge, shining a flashlight into lairs and underbrush where my traps lay. More times than not, I found nothing. When I did, if I had done it properly, a muskrat would be submerged in the water, drowned by my trap-setting expertise. Too often, however, I found live muskrats, backs pressed against the shoreline, eyes afire in the glare of my flashlight, teeth bared.

The worse, though, was to come on a raccoon in similar pose but three to four times larger—very much alive and ready to fight. It was pandemonium, me swinging madly with a tree limb, thrashing water and landing glancing head and body blows as the raccoon moved back and forth from clawing at the grassy bank to lunging at me, only to be yanked back by the trap around its leg. 

Dead, a raccoon or any animal looks smaller than it did alive, the life literally knocked out of it. Many times, I stood over a dead animal, my body soaked in sweat and covered with water, gasping for air punctuated by the murmur of the river’s current.

I trapped muskrats and raccoons for only a few years. I gave it up to run in the mornings. The traps hung idle in the barn throughout my high school and colleges days. 

All this came back to me one early morning as I ran along Lake Michigan in one of the few desolate places along Chicago’s shoreline. I was on an old access road next to a golf course. Although it was open to the public, it was seldom used, getting a few runners and bird watchers passing through. I could run the entire mile distance and not see anyone. I was likely, though, to see raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and skunks along the rocky shoreline’s underbrush.

Now, nearly all my runs, hikes, and bike rides take me along Lake Michigan, usually on the bike paths and cement walls and beaches that line so much of the shore. It is the access road, however, that I return to most often, going north and retracing my way south.

Like when I was young, I cannot imagine life without running, hiking, or biking along a waterway. Water isn’t needed to do these things, but physical movement, inner stillness, and being near water inhabit me in the most pronounced ways when they are together. I can’t imagine a life with such movement apart from water.

As for trapping muskrats and raccoons, the desire left me long ago. What seemed so natural then—killing another living thing—feels so foreign now. It  was a violence perpetuated by me that I struggle to recognize today. My upbringing was no more violent than those with whom I grew up, at least not physically. I suffered emotional and psychological pain—pain of loss, rejection, verbal denigration. Without giving it much thought, I was able to inflict pain, to do violence to others in similar ways and to kill animals.

Maybe all that changed because of running and the subconscious desire to keep running literally and figuratively. Running took me away from trapping and from the place of my youth, first off to college and then even further. In those new places, I always found water. And to it, I always return to find myself.