Go as a River: A Novel

Written by Shelley Read in 2023, Go As a River is a historical fiction novel set in the mountain town of Iola during the construction of the Blue Mesa Dam in the 1960s. This dam eventually flooded the town in order to create the reservoir. To explore the displacement of Iola’s population of hundreds of multigenerational family farmers, the novel uses the singular narrative of Victoria Nash, a fictional peach farmer living through relocation and loss. Read is herself a fifth-generation Coloradoan and was a literature lecturer at Western Colorado University for three decades. This is her debut novel, which is an international bestseller and has been optioned for a film.

This guide refers to the 2023 Kindle edition published by Spiegel & Grau.

Content Warning: Go As a River features racism and racist violence, hate crimes, the legacy of colonialism, and threats of sexual assault, which this guide discusses. The novel also uses offensive terms to refer to Indigenous Americans, which this guide quotes to undertake a critical and literary analysis of the text.

Plot Summary

In 1948, 17-year-old Victoria Nash meets a mysterious stranger on the road into the small mountain town of Iola from her family’s peach farm. She is immediately attracted to him. He introduces himself as Wilson Moon, or Wil. He is an Indigenous American traveler who has recently escaped from a hard life of working in the coal mines in Durango. He asks her to walk with him, and they head to town where they come across her younger brother, Seth, who is publicly intoxicated and immediately starts yelling racial slurs at Wil. Victoria drags her volatile brother back to their farm, but on the way, she falls and twists her ankle. Wil, who has been following her at a distance, picks her up and carries her back to her house. When they arrive, Seth attacks Wil from behind, and a scuffle ensues until Seth and Victoria’s infuriated father threatens Wil, demanding that he leave and never come back.

The townspeople in Iola treat Wil with a similar level of bigotry and hostility, kicking him out of the local hotel merely for using the restroom, and falsely accusing him of stealing laundry. A reward is posted for his capture, which inspires Seth to hunt for Wil, motivated by his desire to get revenge because Wil won their fight. Other men join the hunt, including a farmhand named Forrest Davis, who works on Victoria’s family farm to harvest the peach crops. Victoria believes that Wil has left town for his own safety, but she soon discovers that he has stayed in order to remain close to her. He is hiding at Ruby-Alice's place, an old lady whom the locals believe to have a mental illness.

Despite the danger, Victoria and Wil continue to see each other secretly. Wil becomes Victoria’s first lover; she visits him in his hut up in the mountains and they sleep together. Shortly afterward, Wil fails to show up at one of their secret rendezvous spots, and Victoria fears that he has been captured or worse. Her fear is confirmed when her brother Seth returns with blood on his hands. She later hears that an Indigenous boy’s body has been found dead in a nearby canyon, nearly skinless after being dragged behind a car. There is no official search for his murderer, as Wil is believed to be a “drifter” and a thief, and Indigenous Americans have few civil rights.

Months pass, and Victoria realizes that she is pregnant. She fears that Seth or other people from town will harm the baby if they realize that Wil is the father. When she can no longer conceal her physical state, she runs away from home to Wil’s hut in the wilderness to have the baby, hoping to survive alone in the wild. When the baby comes, it appears to be stillborn, but she massages it to life using a technique that she learned from Wil, thereby saving their child. After giving birth, she is too weak to hunt or forage for food, and she and the baby begin to starve. She begins to walk toward town for help, but when she comes across a couple picnicking in the woods, she decides to abandon the baby in their car, hoping that the mother will adopt him and save him. The couple does take the baby, leaving behind a peach on a boulder in the clearing.

Eating the peach, Victoria realizes that it is a Nash family peach. She is filled with longing for home. She returns to her family farm, expecting everything to be as she left it, but instead she finds that Seth and her uncle have left, and her father is dying of lung disease. When he passes away a few weeks later, she finds out at his funeral that he turned Seth in to the sheriff’s department for Wil’s murder. Seth has since been freed due to a lack of evidence, but the sheriff has warned him and his friend Davis to leave town.

Alone on the family farm, Victoria continues to grow peaches for several years. In 1954, the town receives news of a new dam construction project that will destroy Iola within the decade. A government official offers to buy Victoria’s farm, and she accepts, incurring the wrath of the townspeople, who see her as a sellout. Victoria decides to transplant her family’s precious peach trees to a nearby valley in Paonia and start a new life away from the reminders of her numerous losses. Before she leaves, Seth visits her, explaining that it was Davis who killed Wil with Seth as a witness. She threatens him at gunpoint, ordering him to leave and not return until she is gone. She never sees him again.

In Paonia, Victoria tries to move on with her life, but she finds herself returning to the spot where she abandoned her baby in the woods 12 years prior. She decides to make a memorial to remember him and places 12 rocks in a circle for each of the years of his life. She returns to the rock memorial every year for the next eight years, adding a new rock each time. Just as she is giving up hope of ever seeing him again, she decides to go back one more time and is astonished to find a letter left for her from the woman who took in her child.

The letter reveals that the woman’s name is Inga, and that she and her husband have raised the baby as their own, calling him Lukas. While the boy was growing up, Inga never revealed the secret of Lukas's origin to him until he became a young man and his fictional birthday was pulled for conscription to the Vietnam War. Inga tried to save him from the war by revealing that his birth certificate was a fake. However, this truth only drove Lukas away, and he signed up to join the army of his own volition, hoping to find a place to belong to after the shock of Inga's revelation. Distraught, Inga writes the letter to beg Victoria to help her fill in the mystery of Lukas’s past.

Victoria is afraid that the truth will cause Lukas to be angry with her, but she decides to meet with Lukas to help heal their relationship and have a second chance at motherhood. When Lukas steps out of the car to meet her, she is struck by the similarity of his appearance to Wil’s. The novel closes with them walking toward each other for the first time.