The River Doesn't Know Which State It Is In

One summer afternoon in 2023, I accompanied a friend who had gone fishing in the Red River. We were looking for a good place to fish. At one point, I noticed what seemed to me a much more convenient spot on the opposite bank and suggested that we cross over. My friend looked across the water and casually told me that we could not simply fish from that bank with the license he had. That side, he explained, was Moorhead, Minnesota. Where we were standing was on the Fargo, North Dakota, side. I remember looking at the opposite bank again. Nothing seemed different. The grass did not change. The water did not change. There was no visible line running down the middle of the river announcing that one state ended here and another began there. Yet a few yards of water separated not only two cities, but two states, and even something as ordinary as where we could cast a fishing line depended on which bank we stood on. Until that afternoon, I had not realized that the Red River forms the boundary between Fargo and Moorhead. It was a small discovery, almost accidental, but it stayed with me. Since then, whenever I have thought about the river, I have also thought about that invisible shadow line. We know exactly where North Dakota ends and Minnesota begins. The river, of course, knows nothing about it.

Perhaps that is why rivers have always invited us to ask them questions. In one famous American song, the Mississippi keeps rolling while people struggle beside it. In a Bengali song I grew up hearing, the singer asks a river where its country is and whether its journey has an end. In another South Asian song, a great river becomes a silent witness to human suffering. Rivers rarely answer. They simply keep moving. Looking at the Red River, I find myself asking: Which state do you think you are in? The question sounds reasonable only until we remember that North Dakota and Minnesota are our categories, not the river's. We divide the world into countries, states, cities and property lines, and those divisions often matter greatly. My friend's fishing license certainly made one of them matter that afternoon. Yet maps make boundaries look cleaner than human lives usually are. On a map, a line is sharp. In everyday life, people cross it constantly.

I know something about crossing lines, although I would never confuse crossing the bridge between Fargo and Moorhead with crossing an international border. I grew up in Bangladesh and later crossed national boundaries, an ocean and ways of life before arriving in Fargo. International borders carry passports, visas, permissions and consequences that a state line does not. Still, moving has made me attentive to what people carry across boundaries. A university makes this visible every semester. Students arrive in Fargo from North Dakota and Minnesota, from other regions of the United States and from countries thousands of miles away. They bring accents, languages, foods, family histories and different understandings of home. For some, Fargo may feel familiar. For others, even the weather and ordinary routines may feel new. Nobody arrives as a blank page. Everyone brings another geography into this one.

Over time, those geographies overlap. Students who might never have met elsewhere sit in the same classrooms, wait for the same buses, eat at the same tables and complain about the same winter. They do not lose their different histories; they begin making another history together. Fargo and Moorhead embody something similar. They are separate cities in separate states, yet we routinely say their names together: Fargo-Moorhead. That hyphen interests me almost as much as the river. The river marks a division; the hyphen creates a connection. People live on one side and work on the other, study in one city and meet friends in the other. Daily life keeps crossing the line geography so carefully marks.

Perhaps this interests me especially because I come from a country shaped by rivers. In Bangladesh, rivers have formed land and taken it away, fed communities and displaced them, carried people and filled our songs and stories. Thousands of miles away, the Red River makes me think not only about where places end but also about how places become part of us. When I first arrived in Fargo, almost everything felt unfamiliar: the streets, the distances, the silence of winter and the rhythms of conversation. Then, almost without my noticing, streets became familiar. I stopped needing directions. Faces began to repeat. Fargo did not become Bangladesh, and Bangladesh did not disappear because I was living in Fargo. Something more complicated happened: another place entered my memory.

I suspect many students experience some version of this, whether they have crossed an ocean or only a few hundred miles. They may miss a family kitchen, a familiar landscape, a language spoken easily at home or simply the people who knew them before they arrived. At the same time, new attachments form. A roommate becomes a friend. A coffee shop becomes the place where a friendship or a future plan begins. A city first encountered on a map starts accumulating memories. Borders can tell us where one jurisdiction ends, but they cannot tell us how many places a person can carry inside them. We often imagine movement too neatly, as though entering one place requires leaving another behind. Perhaps it is closer to a river receiving another stream. Something new enters the current without requiring everything that came before to disappear.

That afternoon in 2023, my friend's fishing license taught me something very practical: the bank mattered. Fargo was not Moorhead, North Dakota was not Minnesota and crossing the river could change what he was legally permitted to do. I would not want to erase that reality with an easy metaphor about boundaries being meaningless. They are not. But the longer I have lived here, the more I have noticed another reality alongside it: Boundaries can be real without completely determining where we belong or whom we become connected to. On one bank is North Dakota; on the other side is Minnesota. Around the river are people who arrived from different towns, states, countries, languages and histories, crossing visible and invisible boundaries every day and carrying something of each place with them. If I stood beside the Red River again with a fishing rod, I would now know exactly why I could not simply choose whichever bank looked more convenient. But I would probably still look at the water and smile at the strangeness of it. We have drawn the line, written the regulations and named both sides. The river keeps moving between them, carrying no map and needing none.