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The myriad lives of people and water

You can’t choose where you come from, the geographical contours that shape your personality, and this is as true for a river as it is for a person. My parents found each other in New Delhi in the 1970s, as likely a place as any for a woman from South Dakota to fall in love with an Englishman, and for a decade they hopscotched around Asia, hippies searching for meaning. For a time, they lived in Laos, where my father would curl his body into the shape of an egg and float down the Nam Khan River, a tributary of the Mekong.