The water will bind you, and keep you.

Every now and then, when I visit a place, I wonder if I could live there.  I've noticed, over the years, that my answer is almost always "no" if the town has no river.

It's a strange thing to have as your "deal breaker", but I've always lived in towns with rivers.  I've also always lived on the coast (which is a fairly normal thing for someone who grew up in Australia), but the ocean is something I see occasionally during the month.  The river is something I see almost every day.  Ideally, I would like to have both in my habitat but, if I had to choose one, I would choose a river.

I have great difficulty understanding towns that don't have a body of water near by.  Surely all towns were built on the water?  The water is what keeps your crops and cattle alive and powers your mills.  The water is what brings the ships (and the ships are what bring the goods).  The water is where the fish live - and fish are tasty and nourishing.  How could you build a town where there is no deep water?

And yet, I have been to towns where the only water is a trickling creek some where outside the town itself... oh, and some underground thingy that probably should be left alone - I'm almost entirely sure underground water tables were meant to stay under ground.  Don't they feed the rivers and lakes in different parts of the country?  Should you really be pumping water out of them, just because you were too stupid to build your town on a real river?

Mostly, though, towns without water completely disorient me.  I feel like I have no sense of what is up or down until I can find the shore.  It's strange, the way water defines the boundaries of your personal map.  The coast marks the furthest reach of the land, and the rivers bisect it and divide it into meaningful spaces.  North and South, East and West...  they mean little to me without the water to provide the context.  I travel East when I head towards the coast.  I travel South when I cross the river.

More than that, though, the river is a place to go.  It's hard to explain, but there are times when you just need to go somewhere, and the river is a prominent point in my universe.  It's not where I always go, but it's where I often go.  If I need to ride my bike somewhere I'll often head to the river.  When I lived in Tasmania, I was walking distance from the river, so that was where I'd often walk.

If I couldn't go for a walk by the river...

I would find that a very hard place to live indeed.

My home town has a river running through it.  The name of the town is irrelevant, as are the state and country in which this town lies.  The river is not.