How to Swim Across the Mississippi with a Broken Arm (Memoir)

The Mississippi River ran through the center of my hometown, and sitting on the riverside watching it flow was an escape from my small, landlocked city. The river rolled from Granite City to mysterious otherworlds, snaking southward under the giant Minnesotan sky to everywhere my imagination could conjure.

I was sitting by the river on the day I decided to swim across it with a broken arm. It was a decision that began earlier that day when my friend, Tim, woke me up at noon by throwing a can of beer at me.

I was still asleep in bed, and after he threw the can, he commanded, “Wake up, Gench.”

I sat up against the wall behind me, wiped my long hair from my face with my left arm, and looked at the beer sitting on my futon. Then, I picked it up and used the same arm to crack it open with one hand.

“Stroh’s, huh? We’re drinking good beer today?” I sarcastically asked.

“I’ve got a case of them. Figured we could go to Riverside Park before I have to work at the mall and make pizzas.”

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Tim was freshly nineteen years old and although he was too young to buy beer, we always managed to acquire alcohol somehow. It helped that he looked like the clean-cut Catholic boy he was raised to be, but I knew his ruse.

Tim sported short, dark hair with a slight mullet that hung down over his fashionable sweatshirt and wore cut-off jeans rolled up just above the knee. Even though he looked polished, I knew he was a teenage scoundrel like me, and I loved him for that.

It was the summer of 1989 and Tim’s last months before he would head to college. We were both aimless teenagers living in a conservative, northern city. Although we managed to get good grades in school, other than playing music and working minimum-wage jobs, there was little to do but find trouble, and we were good at that.

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I pulled myself up out of bed, stood up, and tied my hair into a ponytail. It was down the middle of my back and reached my chest in front. I hoped my look mirrored a combination of Michael Stipe from R.E.M. and Chris Cornell from Soundgarden, but I was only sixteen and had a round face that barely grew a light mustache, so I looked more like a juvenile delinquent Charlie Brown.

“I gotta wake up Ruari. He’s still asleep,” I said.

“You both out late last night?” Tim asked.

“We were playing around with a bunch of English girls in Munsinger Gardens. I think I broke my arm more.”

“I don’t think you can break your arm more, man,” Tim said and cynically grinned.

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Ruari was a seventeen-year-old British exchange student who was staying with my family for a month. I had been fortunate to go to the UK the summer before, and I stayed with Ruari and his family in Newcastle.

My experiences in England and Scotland radically and positively changed my perspective on the world, and I was never the same again. Afterward, the world became a wonderfully large place, and I wanted to see as much of it as I could. I was bursting at the seams to get out of Granite City.

I wanted to reciprocate my experience for Ruari, but Central Minnesota felt incomparable to Northern England, except maybe for the violence.

During the second week that Ruari stayed with me, he and I were out with a pack of my colorfully punk rock and theater kid friends wasting time downtown. That night, we were jumped by a marauding group of redneck college students from Granite City State University.

The giant beefheads wearing football jerseys managed to get a hold of our friend, Paul, and planned to kill him for being Korean-American. As they beat his head into the sidewalk, I taunted them, they released their grip, and they came after me instead. Before I could flee to safety in a nearby alley, they broke my right arm.

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As I walked down the hallway to Ruari’s bedroom, my arm was in a purple sling. The break wasn’t bad enough to require a cast, but it was tightly wrapped.

I knocked and said, “Get up, you Geordie bastard.”

The door opened and Ruari was already dressed and smoothly put together for the day. Like Tim, he neatly presented himself with short, coiffed hair and stylish clothes accompanied by a blazing white smile, which showed no signs of the hoodlum he really was.

“Another day of adventure awaits!” Ruari exclaimed.

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No one was home at my house, so we slipped out easily into Tim’s green Bonneville parked in the driveway. Our beautifully belligerent trio headed out to the river that flowed along the lush, green banks of the city in June.

Summer was the only time of year I enjoyed living in Minnesota. It was when I could celebrate having survived seven long, subarctic months of winter. Those frozen months of whipping wind and blizzards made the landscape a barren wasteland of black and white.

During winter, I dreamed of the day when the layer of ice over the Mississippi thawed, and when I saw the river running again, it meant summer was near. That June day as we drove, summer had arrived in full color.

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I rolled the car window down and let all the colors and warmth of summer fall on my face. The warm wind blew through my long locks while we raced by the Fingerhut warehouses, the Frigidaire factory, and the veterans hospital where the trees were full of leaves and the grass was bright green.

There was always a soundtrack to our lives, and we were on a classic rock kick then. Tim popped a cassette of Fragile by Yes in his tape deck and the song Roundabout blasted through the car speakers. We sped by water towers that rose over our heads, and beside railroad tracks with lines of Burlington Northern cars, until we pulled into Riverside Park.

The three of us got out and cracked beers. Tim and Ruari played frisbee while I drank and smoked cigarettes sitting on a fallen tree. The music sounded dazzling and blended perfectly with the taste of Camel smoke on my tongue.

When the song Heart of the Sunrise faded, Tim called, “Hey, Gench! Flip the tape!”

The other side of the cassette was Traffic’s Mr. Fantasy and the sounds of 1967 surrounded us. As I drank more cheap, watery beer, my ears time traveled to a past I’d never lived. While in my present, I felt the coarseness of the tree bark under my partially broken body, and my mind wandered to the future.

Tim was leaving for college and Ruari would return to the UK. I had a year remaining in our suffocating city and another winter to survive before I could get out and get away.

I’ll head to college in the West, I thought, and then I’ll travel everywhere.

My naivete, impatience, and youth made me feel like a thousand-pound weight was chained to my ankle. I wanted exploits. Movement and music. Beautiful people and better beer.

Then, I saw the river ahead. A bruised, blue ribbon rolling to somewhere else.

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“Let’s go swimming!” I yelled.

Ruari and Tim stopped throwing the frisbee and looked at me.

“I believe you have an injury,” Ruari said, his posh accent smooth and controlled.

“Yeah, Gentry. Probably not a good idea,“ Tim concurred.

“I’m going,” I said and started walking toward the river’s edge.

The beer in my brain was giving me tipsy courage and my sling felt like a security blanket when I put one tennis shoe-covered foot in the water. I never wore socks when it was warm, and I didn’t care about getting my shoes wet.

I was up to my knees quickly and already thirty feet off the bank when I heard, “Hey, John Denver! We’re coming with you!”

It was Tim using one of his many nicknames for me.

I replied with one of my nicknames for him, “Get in, King of Cartoons! It feels good!”

I was moving slowly but the water had gotten to my waist. My sling and T-shirt were dry, but my cut-off jeans were soaked. Tim and Ruari had all their clothes on, too, but none of us seemed to care. They sloshed forward and caught up to me fast.

“I wonder how far we can go?” Tim questioned, speaking to no one in particular.

We had no plans to cross the river that day, but after those words were uttered, I knew we were going to try to cross it. No one said it out loud, but the three of us had a nonverbal pact we would.

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The Mississippi River began in the Headwaters area of Lake Itasca just 150 miles north, so it hadn’t grown that wide when it ran through Granite City. But it was 250 yards across where we were, and that was a lot of moving water to cross for three half-drunk teenagers and one with a broken arm.

When we arrived in the middle of the river, it was only up to our chests and I could feel the sandy bottom. I was encouraged and thought maybe we could just walk across. But the current was getting stronger, and the further underwater our bodies were, the more we were being pushed by the strong and steady flow.

I saw Granite City State’s academic buildings ahead on the opposite side of the river, and to our right, there was the loud sound of the hydro dam. Downstream, it was just the river, which bent and disappeared into the horizon.

I hadn’t noticed my arm much since I’d got in the water. Beer and adrenaline were good painkillers, and my desire to make it to the other side was greater than any discomfort.

With only one arm to pull myself forward, I decided to let my sopping-wet wrap and sling fall off and slip into the moving water. I watched both of them float downstream and swam forward, the coolness of the shallows had become ice cold in the deep.

We were at our necks and smiling ear-to-ear in the afternoon sun. Nerves, combined with stupidity, surrounded by youthful swagger.

“Do Americans do this every summer in Minnesota?!” Ruari called out.

Tim and I just laughed.

That was the moment I kicked and felt nothing but the river underneath me. We were too deep to feel the sandy bottom anymore, and we were being quickly pushed downriver by the current.

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Anxious, I kicked harder and my broken arm started shooting bolts of pain, so I pulled forward with only my left.

“You okay, Gench?” Tim yelled.

“I’ll make it, man!” I said.

Bodies floating and flowing, we pulled and kicked hard, further and closer to the opposite bank. Struggling and moving until Ruari touched sand.

“I feel the bottom!” he cried out, excited and happy.

The bottom grew shallow fast and I watched Ruari climb up and to his waist. Tim followed on his heels. They whooped and screamed back at me, laughing like insane, young men.

“Come on, Gench! Come on!”

I needed to make it to them. I needed to make it across to the other side and stand on it. I pulled and kicked one final time until I felt the riverbed under one foot, then two feet, and then I was walking up toward the shore and the high grass growing there.

We were all soon sitting on the riverside together looking back from where we’d come, dripping wet and exhausted.

“We did it,” Tim said.

“Yes, we did,” Ruari agreed.

I rubbed my throbbing arm and said, “Let’s get back over the bridge to the car before the cops show up.”

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We made it back to the park and to Tim’s Bonneville. Our clothes were dry by the time we got in the car but we still smelled like the river. Marsh and mud mingled with moss, metal, and grass.

The day dove into dusk as we drove home listening to R.E.M.’s Green. Tim dropped Ruari and me off at home, and he made it to work at the pizza place in the mall on time.

Ruari flew back to the UK a few weeks later. Our summer was filled with exploits but none were quite like crossing the Mississippi.

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After Ruari left, I returned to the doctor for a follow-up. He examined my arm and said, “I don’t know what you’ve been doing. I have to put you in a full-length cast, and your arm will be in it for another month.”

I knew what I’d done and I didn’t care about the cast. It was a heavy plaster badge of honor I wore as a reminder of our accomplishment that day.

When my two young friends and I were high on beer and summer and music. The day we made it to the other side of the river.