Watersheds

I never thought at all about watersheds for the first 50 or so years of my life. Or I barely did, even though that makes no sense because I grew up near the Susquehanna River, and spent almost all of my childhood very near streams that were its tributaries. I visited its headwaters and had relatives who lived in the city that's a few miles down the road from it. 

But I never thought much about where it went after it left our area, or how all the water around me flowed into it.

I learned not long ago from the book Watershed by Ranae Hanson that Minnesota is the only state that has no rivers flowing into it: all of the rivers in Minnesota start here and flow out in three directions. Again, I hadn't been very aware of the watersheds near me, though I was more aware of the Mississippi than I used to be of the Susquehanna. But the other rivers in Minnesota had mostly escaped my notice because they're farther away. 

A few days ago I saw this map on Twitter. The person who posted it accompanied it with these words:

Organizing ourselves by arbitrary states was a mistake. It should be by watershed:

Another person pointed out that the more complete watersheds look like this:

But the original poster's map is also correct, since he was portraying the Assessment Sub-Region watershed boundaries of those larger watersheds, and was trying to make a point about areas that could be functional and coherent ecological "states," if one had a mind to do things that way.... vs. combining the entire Mississippi watershed into a single state, for instance. 

An aspect of Ruthanna Emrys's novel A Half-Built Garden that I didn't mention in my earlier post is that the main characters at the center of the story live within the Chesapeake watershed, and watersheds have become the organizing principle for most of society. That difference is startling at first, but becomes natural as the story goes along, because these latter-day people have become attuned to the planet in ways we are not currently.

For my own edification, here's a close-up map of the Susquehanna watershed:

The river flows to the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Imagine if that part of New York was instead one with that part of Pennsylvania.

And here's Minnesota, describing how its rivers go in three directions:

 

One thing that I notice about the state maps vs. the watershed maps is straight lines vs organic shapes. The latter map would be much more difficult to draw, especially from memory, but that would be a small sacrifice for more of a connection to the natural world we live in.