Is your town/city on a river?

Tiltsta

Tiltsta

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Does your town or city sit on the banks of a river? Multiple rivers? Is the river clean enough to swim?

This came up in a discussion with my kids, and it turns out almost every town or city I have lived in is on a river or a lake. I guess that shows you the importance of water to settlers of yore.

My current town sits on the river Birs/Birsig and the Rhine. You can swim in both and the Rhine is really popular for swimming in the summer. The Birs is shallow and rocky with rapids, so it isn't much of a swim, but people swim in the places where it is wider and slower. I would call the Birs a large brook and not really a river.
 
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Most definitely. It used to be fairly well polluted when I was a kid, but nowadays it's clean enough to swim in if you want to. I remember my dad telling me that he and his buddies would swim in the canals during the summer when he was a boy. That must have not been too often, because the mills used to dump all sorts of shit into 'em.
 
My city is on one of the Great Lakes.
There is a river a short drive away.
There are a lot of creeks, ponds, and smaller lakes in the area.

And then there’s the canal.

People swim in all of them.
I don’t swim in anything that isn’t chlorinated.
 
I'm a simple country bumpkin with poor language skills so I don't live in a town or city but I do live on a small ridge above a creek. Don't even like to touch the water. A log jam has developed over the past decade or more and it gives you a good idea of what ends up in there, not to mention the agricultural runoff. Sangamon River is at the extreme north end of Springfield. Dangerous river to swim in. There were your typical commerce wet dreams in the mid-1800s and they got a steamboat all the way here but it couldn't turn around. They went back downstream backwards and then got stuck. I think they ended up burning it. Gnarly river.
 
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The little town I live in has a creek. Wide enough to look like a river, I guess, but it's very shallow, too shallow to swim in. Probably why it's listed as a creek.

I can take a walk out in the country and watch cattle wading in it and peeing/pooping in it, so not sure I'd want to swim in it anyways :embarrassed:
 
Not currently.

But my entire life, I’ve never lived in a town or city that wasn’t either on a major river or an ocean.

Most have been ok for swimming. Some, though, definitely not.
 
parrotheada1a said:
Most definitely. It used to be fairly well polluted when I was a kid, but nowadays it's clean enough to swim in if you want to. I remember my dad telling me that he and his buddies would swim in the canals during the summer when he was a boy. That must have not been too often, because the mills used to dump all sorts of shit into 'em.
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Merrimac? Swimming in it several decades ago? Yikes. Swimming in the canals? YYYYYYYYYIKES!!
 
Theodore said:
I'm a simple country bumpkin with poor language skills so I don't live in a town or city but I do live on a small ridge above a creek. Don't even like to touch the water. A log jam has developed over the past decade or more and it gives you a good of idea of what ends up in there, not to mention the agricultural runoff. Sangamon River is at the extreme north end of Springfield. Dangerous river to swim in. There were your typical commerce wet dreams in the mid-1800s and they got a steamboat all the way here but it couldn't turn around. They went back upstream backwards and then got stuck. I think they ended up burning it. Gnarly river.
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that was uncharacteristically eloquent
 
Yes. Up north I’m on the Monongahela river. Down south I’m nestled between the Halifax and the Atlantic Ocean in Daytona Beach Shores. We spend as much time as we can on the water. The mon is ok for swimming and much cleaner than it was 50 years ago.
 
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