Soia

In the mountains, water is everything. Folk from Mancuróu are a quarrelsome bunch (I swear they are closer in kin to hobbits), and if our neighbors aren't aggressively comparing how many mushrooms they collected at the end of the season, they're almost certainly arguing about the water; how many people can tap into it, when to close the pipes for winter, when to reopen them for spring, and - who is going to clean the reservoir this time? These are just a few of their most pressing concerns.

The Soia runs just below our cabin; you can always hear her sibilant song. As a kid, my brothers and I would go down and play at the river. We would stand on opposite banks and splash each other with rocks, or see how long we could dip our feet in the icy water. Our favorite thing to do was creating pools by forming 'dams' with stones. It was a lot of fun, but at the back of our minds, our father's warning always lingered: 'if the water rises, run.'

You see, the Soia is connected to the Luzzone Dam, and any excess water is re-directed down our valley. When this happens (especially after heavy rainfall), the river can swell to a great height, the result of which is something akin to a flash flood. In 2004, it destroyed the bridge so that a new sturdier one had to be made, and apparently it has also claimed a life.

I never admitted it, but I was always hesitant to go down to the river. The prospect of being swept away by a tidal wave quite frankly scared me. The water never rose. But the fear fed my imagination, inspiring a river of the same name in Aldaheim, which 'can rise in fury at any time.'