A river runs through Carrasco

I hope I´ve convinced more than a few of you to pull out a map over the past couple of months, if nothing else to confirm just one more time the coordinates of this tiny, faraway country called Uruguay. If you have, you’ve noticed that the capital fans out from the banks of the Río de la plata, which keeping within the parameters of the marvelously real, supersedes the limits of any normal river. In all actuality, it´s an estuary. But no one ever tells you that: it´s referred to here as either river or sea (río or mar), even though everyone knows perfectly well it is neither. And in a country that shuns all things extreme—in politics, natural disasters, love—the Río de la plata represents a sobering exception to the rule.

With a body of water as wide as the one that entrenches this former military stronghold turned port city, it´s easy to find tributaries. In fact, the neighborhood where I live—Pocitos—was founded along the banks of one of the city´s many streams, where immigrant women from Italy and Spain would come to wash their clothes.

More recently—last Saturday, in fact—I became part of a rambling human river that cut through the heart of Carrasco, a wealthy neighborhood to the Northeast of the city center. Donning dark-blue shirts with at least four written references to the race´s sponsor—Reebok—five thousand Montevideanos (and at least three Americans, a Swede, and a Peruvian) congregated to run the city´s first of many spring-season 10k competitions.

The levee wall broke at exactly 5pm, releasing a body of seasoned and less-than-seasoned runners out onto the normally quiet, residential streets. From a distance, we must´ve looked like a river, running through the city, defying logic and the basic principles of engineering as we passed over the Bridge of the Americas.

To maintain my flow of energy, I focused on the ripples, watching the heels of those in front of me as they beat against the river bed, and then rapidly kicked back up--churning the stream, propelling it forward.

I tried my hardest to keep my running face on (which permits even less emotion than poker´s equivalent) during the entire race, cursed my joints and then quickly blessed them for holding out, and sailed past the finish line no less than six miles and an hour and seven minutes later.

And although Carrasco´s river won´t appear on any map you´re likely to find on the Internet, I´ve come to expect the unexpected from Uruguay—this, the most moderate of countries--, which unpretentiously turns rivers into seas over the span of generations, and bodies into currents in the matter of an instant.

Just in case you were wondering, only one person stopped me to ask if I was really from Kentucky.