Go as a River

Go as a River Plot Summary

Introduction

The autumn day when seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash first locked eyes with Wilson Moon at the corner of North Laura and Main Street in Iola, Colorado, she had no way of knowing that this filthy stranger would reshape her destiny forever. He wasn't much to look at—coal-blackened overalls, tattered red ball cap, dark skin glistening with sweat—but something in his gentle, penetrating gaze made her insides leap like pebbles in a rushing stream. What began as a simple request for directions would spiral into a forbidden love affair that would cost Wilson his life and force Victoria into the wilderness to birth their child alone. In the shadow of the towering Big Blue mountains, where peach orchards had flourished for generations, a young woman would discover that love's consequences can drown entire towns, scatter families like autumn leaves, and force impossible choices between survival and belonging. The Gunnison River that nurtured her childhood would eventually swallow her hometown whole, but not before Victoria learned that some currents run too deep to dam, and some journeys home take a lifetime to complete.

Chapter 1: A Chance Encounter at North Laura and Main

Victoria Nash pedaled her bicycle down Main Street, her mind occupied with the mundane task of dragging her drunken brother Seth from the poker cabin behind Jernigan's. The autumn air carried the scent of ripening peaches from her family's orchard and the promise of an early frost. At seventeen, Victoria knew her place in the world—dutiful daughter, keeper of the household since her mother's death five years prior, silent observer of her family's slow decay. The stranger appeared as if conjured from the dust and dying light. Coal-stained overalls hung loose on his lean frame, and a red ball cap shadowed eyes dark as river stones. When he asked for directions to the flophouse, his voice carried something Victoria had never encountered—a gentleness that seemed to fountain from his center and spill out like an overflowing well. "The way to everything," she replied, gesturing down the crumbling sidewalk that led to Dunlap's boarding house. The words tumbled out unbidden, and his slight smile made her realize she was trying to be clever for the first time in her careful life. Wilson Moon, he told her, tugging his cap with calloused fingers. A drifter who had hopped a coal train when the mine foreman's whistle sounded like freedom calling. He moved with an unhurried grace that spoke of deeper wisdom—one place was as good as another, he said, though Victoria suspected he didn't believe it even as the words left his lips. As they walked together toward Dunlap's, Victoria felt the familiar landscape shift around her. The flagpole between the schoolhouse and white clapboard church suddenly seemed less permanent. The long whistle of the 5:47 train sounded different, more like a question than a statement. When Wilson's eyes met hers at the flophouse steps, she understood that she was no longer the same girl who had left the farm that morning. Something had awakened in her, dangerous and undeniable as spring flood. She agreed to meet him the next day, her heart racing with the recklessness of it. Behind them, Seth's roadster growled to life in the distance, but Victoria barely heard it. She was listening instead to the sound of her own becoming, fragile and fierce as a bird testing new wings.

Chapter 2: Love and Violence in the Shadow of Bigotry

The autumn afternoons when Victoria slipped away to meet Wilson Moon felt stolen from time itself. They would find each other by the arched cottonwood at the end of the road, where Willow Creek sang its ancient song and the world narrowed to just the two of them. Wilson moved through their secret meetings with the patience of someone who understood that moments like these were gifts not to be rushed. He told her little about his past, only that he had run from an Indian boarding school in Albuquerque and couldn't return home to whatever reservation had birthed him. When she asked why, he would only say that some bridges burn behind you, leaving no choice but to move forward. His hands, scarred and callused from hard labor, could coax life back into dying things—she watched him breathe warmth into a stillborn puppy at Ruby-Alice Akers' place, rubbing its tiny chest until it gasped its first breath. Victoria began lying with an ease that frightened her. Daddy accepted her excuses about helping sickly neighbors, too preoccupied with the failing farm to question closely. But Seth's eyes had grown suspicious, following her movements with the intensity of a predator tracking prey. The wanted posters that appeared around town offering twenty dollars for a "dangerous brown-skinned thief" made Wilson laugh bitterly. "More folks like your brother than stars in the sky," he told her as they lay together in the mountain hut where he had taken refuge. But when Victoria begged him to leave Iola, to hop another train to somewhere safer, Wilson shook his head. "I'll go as a river," he said, words his grandfather had taught him about flowing around obstacles rather than running from them. The night everything changed, Victoria waited by the cottonwood until the moon set and dawn began to creep across the valley. Wilson never came. In the weeks that followed, her growing belly would reveal the true consequence of their love, while whispered conversations in town painted the picture of a body found dragged and broken at the bottom of Black Canyon, skinless from being pulled behind a speeding car. Seth's triumphant grin when he stumbled home drunk that night told Victoria everything she needed to know about who had tied the ropes.

Chapter 3: Wilderness Birth and Impossible Choice

Spring snow still clung to the high country when Victoria saddled Abel and rode away from the only home she had ever known. At seventeen and seven months pregnant, she carried with her the weight of scandal that would destroy what remained of her family and the terrible knowledge that her brother had murdered the father of her unborn child. The wilderness called to her not as sanctuary but as the only place left where secrets could be buried deep as tree roots. The abandoned hunter's hut high in the Big Blue mountains became her refuge and her prison. Through the long summer months, she learned the rhythm of survival—gathering firewood, catching the occasional trout, coaxing vegetables from the thin mountain soil. Her body grew heavy with Wilson's child while her supplies dwindled to nothing. The baby moved within her like a wild thing, kicking against her ribs as if already eager to escape the trap of her circumstances. When her son finally came on a night when the moon hid behind storm clouds, Victoria nearly lost him before his first breath. The tiny boy emerged blue and lifeless, and in her exhaustion and terror, she found herself rubbing his chest just as she had watched Wilson do with the dying puppy. Her desperate cries echoed off the hut walls until suddenly, miraculously, the baby gasped and wailed his way into the world. But even love could not feed a starving child. By late August, Victoria's milk had nearly dried up and her son grew weaker each day. The early snowfall that killed her garden sealed their fate with the cruel finality of a judge's gavel. With her baby wrapped in a yellow knit blanket, she stumbled down from the mountains searching for help, for anyone who might save the life she was too weak to sustain. The picnic she discovered in the forest clearing seemed conjured from a fevered dream—a well-dressed couple on a red blanket, their own newborn fussing in the woman's arms, and most crucially, breasts swollen with milk. Victoria watched the other mother struggle to nurse her baby, then made the choice that would haunt her for decades. She laid her son on the back seat of their long black automobile, closed the door with fingers that felt like ice, and walked away before love could change her mind.

Chapter 4: Transplanted Roots in New Soil

The farm in Paonia felt like stepping into someone else's life, complete with ghosts Victoria couldn't name and rooms that smelled of other families' histories. But the land welcomed her Nash peaches with the generosity of old friends, and slowly, the transplanted trees began to bloom in their new soil. Greeney, the botanist from the college, had warned that moving mature fruit trees was folly, but Victoria's orchard proved that sometimes desperate acts of preservation succeed against all logic. The North Fork Valley embraced her with its rhythm of seasons and generous neighbors who brought casseroles and gossip in equal measure. Ed Cooper, the realtor, became an unexpected friend, along with his vivacious wife Zelda, who filled Victoria's kitchen with laughter and tried unsuccessfully to interest her in the local bachelors. But Victoria's heart remained locked around the memory of dark eyes and gentle hands, around the sound of a baby's first cry in a mountain hut. Each August, she drove the winding road back to the forest clearing where she had left her son. Year after year, she added stones to a growing circle on the jagged boulder, one for each birthday he would never share with her. The ritual became her prayer, her penance, her small rebellion against the silence that surrounded his absence. She spoke to him there, telling the pine trees and circling hawks about the peach orchard she was building for his return. The seasons turned and turned again, bringing frost and harvest, hired hands and broken equipment, the small triumphs and endless labor of farming alone. Victoria learned to trust the land's wisdom, to read weather in the mountains' moods and find comfort in the company of trees. But beneath the satisfaction of work well done ran the constant ache of incompleteness, the knowledge that all her careful tending could never fill the space where her child should have been. When she found the peach-shaped rock placed in the center of her stone circle, she dared to hope that someone else remembered that August day in 1949. Someone else was leaving messages in this sacred place, speaking across the years to the mother who had been forced to let go.

Chapter 5: The Circle of Stones and Hidden Truths

The pale blue pages fluttered in the mountain breeze as Victoria lifted them from the boulder where her circle of stones had grown to encompass twenty-one years of grief and hope. Inga Tate's handwriting covered sheet after sheet, telling the story Victoria had longed to hear since the day she walked away from that black automobile—the story of what happened next. Through Inga's words, Victoria learned that her son had been named Lukas, that he had grown up with an adoptive brother named Maxwell in a house beside the Rio de las Animas in Durango. She discovered that her boy had inherited his father's gift for healing, that he could calm Maxwell's rages with his touch and bring wounded creatures back from death's door. The photographs Inga had tucked between the pages showed a child growing into Wilson's image—the same gentle eyes, the same quiet strength that seemed to emanate from somewhere deeper than bone. But the story carried its own tragedies. Maxwell had died of an overdose in a van in Queens, needle by his side, while Lukas fought in the jungles of Vietnam because Inga had told him the truth about his origins at the worst possible moment. The draft lottery that called August 31st had seemed like fate's cruel joke until Inga realized she could save her adopted son by revealing he had no legal birthday. Instead, her confession had driven Lukas to enlist anyway, choosing war over the confusion of belonging nowhere. Victoria read through the night by lamplight, learning how her baby's life had unfolded in a parallel universe where he was loved but never quite understood his own restlessness. Inga's guilt poured from every page—how she had planned to bring Lukas back to the clearing when he was twelve, to tell him about his forest mother, but had lost her nerve at the crucial moment. Instead, she had watched him place a round rock in the center of Victoria's stone circle, an unknowing message between mother and son separated by time and fear. The final pages held Inga's desperate plea for help. Both her boys were gone now—one to death, one to the war—and she had no way to reach the surviving son who believed he came from nothing and nowhere. Only the forest mother, Inga wrote, could tell Lukas who he really was. Only Victoria could give him the belonging that had eluded him all his life.

Chapter 6: Two Mothers Across the Divide

Victoria's hands shook as she dialed the number Inga Tate had written at the bottom of her letter. Two rings, three, then a woman's voice tentative with hope and fear. "This is Victoria," she said, and heard Inga's sharp intake of breath across the miles between Paonia and Durango. "I'm ready." The meeting took place in Inga's tidy kitchen, where two mothers sat at the Formica table where Lukas had eaten thousands of meals, had grown from toddler to man in a life Victoria had never witnessed. Inga was smaller than Victoria had imagined, worn thin by grief but still beautiful, with kind eyes that reflected the same desperate love Victoria carried in her own heart. They shared photographs and stories, filling in the spaces between Inga's written words with all the details that mattered—how Lukas preferred his eggs scrambled, how he had learned to throw perfect spirals in the backyard, how he would disappear to the river when Maxwell's cruelty became too much to bear. Victoria learned that her son had never quite fit in his adoptive family, had always sensed some fundamental difference that neither love nor belonging could bridge. "He looks for you in every room," Inga said, studying a photograph of teenage Lukas laughing at the kitchen table. "Not consciously, but I see it. He's always looking for something, someone, some piece of himself that's missing." Victoria touched the image of her son's face, traced the line of his jaw that echoed Wilson's, the arch of his eyes that might have come from her. This was the child she had carried beneath her heart, whose first breath she had fought for in that mountain hut, whose absence had shaped every day of her life since. Now he was a man she had never held, traumatized by war and convinced he belonged nowhere in the world. "How do we tell him?" Victoria asked. "How do we explain twenty-one years of silence?" Inga's answer was simple: "We tell him he was loved from the moment he drew breath. We tell him where he comes from. Then we let him decide if he wants to come home."

Chapter 7: Reunion at the Drowned Valley

The silver pickup truck pulled slowly into the parking lot beside Blue Mesa Reservoir, and Victoria's heart stopped beating for one impossible moment. Through the windshield, she could see a young man who looked so much like Wilson Moon that she wondered if she had dreamed the last twenty-one years, if somehow time had folded back on itself to return her first love to this place where their story began. But this was Lukas, her son, stepping out into the April sunshine with the cautious grace of someone who had learned not to expect good things from the world. He wore army fatigues that hung loose on his lean frame, and his eyes held the shadow of battles Victoria hoped she would never have to understand. Behind him stretched the blue waters that had swallowed her childhood home, the reservoir that had drowned Iola and everyone she had once known. Inga and Zelda stood on either side of Victoria like sentries, but she barely felt their presence. Twenty-one years of longing had narrowed to this moment, this man walking toward her across the pebbled shore with questions in his eyes that only she could answer. She reached into her pocket and touched the sprig of peach blossoms she had brought him, pink petals from the trees she had saved and nurtured in anticipation of this day. "Lukas," she said when he was close enough to hear, and something in his face shifted at the sound of his name in her voice. He stopped a few feet away, studying her with an intensity that reminded her of Wilson examining a dying creature before coaxing it back to life. "You're her," he said finally, not a question but a statement of recognition that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than memory. "You're my mother." Victoria nodded, afraid that words might shatter the fragile bridge forming between them. Instead, she pulled out the peach blossoms and held them toward him like an offering, like a prayer made visible. Lukas stepped forward and took the flowers, their fingers brushing for the first time since that night in the mountain hut when she had counted his tiny fingers and toes by candlelight. "I never stopped looking for you," he said, and Victoria understood that he meant not in the literal sense but in the way trees reach toward light, in the way rivers seek the sea. He had been looking for her in every room, every forest, every quiet moment when the world felt incomplete.

Summary

The peach blossoms trembled in Lukas's hands as mother and son stood on the shores of the drowned valley, finally face to face after two decades of separation and silence. Victoria had saved her family's orchard, had transplanted those ancient trees to new soil where they flourished despite the odds, but she had never imagined that her greatest act of preservation would be this moment—the returning of a lost child to the place where he belonged. In the distance, the Uncompahgre mountains rose like ancient guardians over the water that had swallowed Iola, and Victoria understood that some stories require their landscapes to disappear completely before new ground can be claimed for love. The river that had nurtured her childhood, that had witnessed Wilson Moon's murder and her son's conception, now flowed beneath the reservoir's calm surface, still moving, still carrying the sediment of memory toward unknown destinations. Like that buried current, the love between Victoria and Lukas had persevered through years of darkness and separation, surfacing at last in this place where endings and beginnings converged. As they stood together watching the light dance on water that held the bones of their past, both mother and son understood that the longest journeys home are measured not in miles but in the courage required to forgive ourselves for the choices survival demanded, and to trust that love, like rivers, always finds a way.

About Author

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Shelley Read

Read connects Colorado's dynamic landscapes to the intricate web of human experience, grounding her narratives in themes of resilience, environmental change, and community. Her debut novel, "Go As A River", employs a lyrical style that transforms the mid-20th century rural Colorado setting into a living character. The book's protagonist, Victoria Nash, navigates a male-dominated world, mirroring true historical challenges like the damming of the Gunnison River. This powerful storytelling blends historical and environmental elements, evoking the beauty and brutality of nature while addressing complex issues like prejudice and survival.\n\nRead's career as an educator at Western Colorado University significantly influenced her writing, as she spent nearly three decades teaching writing, literature, and environmental studies. This background informs her nuanced exploration of human and environmental interdependencies. By establishing programs for first-generation and at-risk students, she honed her skills in mentoring emerging writers, balancing personal and professional commitments before retiring to focus on her literary ambitions. Her deep-seated connection to Colorado, where she is a fifth-generation resident, is evident in her detailed depiction of the region's natural and social landscapes.\n\nFor readers seeking a rich, character-driven narrative that transcends time and place, Read's novel offers a profound exploration of how environments shape identities and destinies. Her bio reflects an author deeply invested in themes of love, loss, and adaptation, making her work both a tribute to her Colorado roots and a universally resonant story. Recognized with accolades such as the High Plains Book Award and Reading the West Book Award, "Go As A River" not only captivates but also invites reflection on the enduring impact of our surroundings.

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