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As a child I spent hours alone, roaming the woods near my home on the western edge of Minneapolis. I often dug my hands into the dank soil, praying to find an arrowhead, a piece of pottery, a handwritten note—some kind of clue that would help me understand who I was, where I was.

I had always been intrigued by the waterways around me, and by their names. But because my family was not of Minnesota, was not Dakota, no one ever told me that mni means “water.” Mni is embedded in the names of many places in Minnesota (Land of Smoky Waters): Minneapolis (City of Water), small towns like Minnewasta (Beautiful Waters) and Minneota (Abundant Waters), and giant lakes like Minnetonka (Great Waters). From the Minnesota River in the south to Big Stone Lake in the west, and from the Rainy River in the north to the St. Croix River in the east, water pulses through the arteries of the region I grew up in.

I remember one summer morning as an early crystallization of my lifelong love of the waterways of Minnesota. I was eight years old, just a few weeks from entering third grade. While playing at a park called Twin Lakes, I noticed a stand of golden cattails along the edge of a baseball diamond, waving at me like old friends across the manicured outfield. I wandered away from the teenager whom my mother had often charged with my care that summer. As I reached for a velveteen bloom atop a cattail’s spindly stock, I slipped into the marsh. Black mud and swamp water crept up to my knees, and then, clawing against slick banks, I quickly slid neck-deep into the muskeg. I turned toward the narrow band of open water that snaked through the cattails and swam, struggling through the rushes. Before long the sky opened and I emerged into a pond. I recognized it as the same pond where my little brother and I shoveled snow and played hockey in the winter. And with this recognition came a realization: Twin Lakes Park, which had always seemed so far away, was connected by water to this known place.