Years ago I either read or was told that one of the first questions people ask each other when they meet for the first time varies with which part of the United States they are from. Some people ask, “What part town are you from?” Others ask, “Who is your family?” Still others ask, “What do you do for a living?”
Recently I came across another first-encounter question, and it strikes me as more interesting and more complex than any of the questions I just mentioned. According to nature writer Robert Macfarlane, the Maori of New Zealand sometimes ask “Who are your waters?”*
This particular question caught my attention because I’ve asked a similar question of myself a dozen times over the years. Ever since I’ve moved to La Crosse thirty-two years ago, I have wondered whether, deep down inside, I am a lake person, an ocean person, or a river person. The problem is that I am fickle in this regard. I seem to change my affections depending on where I am at the time. Until I left home for college, I lived within a bicycle ride of Lake Michigan, the fourth largest freshwater lake in the world. Back then, I was a lake person. After college, I wound up in the San Francisco Bay Area and taught coastal ecology to sixth graders. I heard the sound of sea lions from one of my apartments, and I can’t count the number of times I watched sunsets over the Pacific. I fell in love with the ocean. Now, for the past thirty years, I’ve lived a stone’s throw from the east bank of the Mississippi River, and I wonder why it took me so long to realize that my waters are a river.
I am not surprised that every great body of water puts me under its spell. Still I sense that there ought to be one lake or one ocean or one river that remains special to me. I compare it to the connection I have with bears. If the Maori question had been “Who is your animal?” rather than “Who are your waters?,” I could have answered “black bear” without hesitation. I knew my spirit animal was the black bear before I knew that there was such a concept as spirit animal. I didn’t move to California and switch over to seal lions. I didn’t paddle the Mississippi River and decide that I’d been an eagle person all along. Why is it not the same for water?
Fortunately, I do not lose sleep over this quandary. How can I feel bad if I am drawn to all waters? If the alternative is to sense magic in only one water source, that’s not much of an option.**
* Macfarlane, Robert. 2025. Is a River Alive? W.W. Norton: New York, p.22.
** Loren Eiseley’s classic quote is, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Eiseley, Loren. 1959. The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man. Vintage: New York.
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