Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and racist violence, hate crimes, and the legacy of colonialism.

“A history-book version of the creation of Blue Mesa Reservoir might portray the project as heroic, part of the grand vision to carry precious water from the Colorado River’s tributaries to the arid Southwest. Good intentions may have plugged the once wild Gunnison River and forced it to be a lake, but I know another story.”

Victoria’s retrospective narration reveals the impacts of loss through time, emphasizing the theme of Grief as a Journey. Read examines the complexity of the outcomes of environmental development policies on individual’s lives, highlighting the limitations of a one-sided narrative of history through Victoria’s first-person narrative of her losses, which counter the dominant narrative of progress.

“But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.”

The motif of rivers and water as a symbolic force that flows through people’s lives and links them is used to connect Victoria, Wil, and eventually, Lukas. Victoria learns from Wil how to see the truth of things behind the false narratives of bigotry and prejudice that her community has perpetrated. The world beneath the water is therefore demonstrated as being portrayed as being full of the metaphorical sediment of life, representing all the memories and connections that Victoria makes and carries into her future as a legacy of wisdom.

“He would teach me how true a life emptied of all but its essentials could feel and that, when you got down to it, not much mattered outside the determination to go on living. If he had told me this then, I wouldn’t have had the ability to believe him. But time pulls our strings.”

Although the event of Wil’s murder happens early in the novel, his legacy is relayed through Victoria’s flashbacks as she spends a lifetime reflecting on what their relationship meant to her. Victoria’s character arc of survival and growth through starvation, isolation, and displacement is the “essence” of her story.