These seven river stories, written after the author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European American, Native, and African American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South Rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon, Georgia. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river--and their ignorance of it--are altered by their personal experience of the watershed's danger, power, and life.