I ’m at home in Ohio when the call comes. It’s a Saturday afternoon, late summer, and in a few moments I’m going running (or so I think). I’ll start out easy down the long hill to the railroad tracks, past the row houses where the miners lived when Athens was a coal town. Then I’ll lean into the rise of the hill toward campus, running beneath a cloudy sky, rainwater still dripping from the broad leaves of the sycamores. I can see the route before me: the green athletic field, the asphalt path behind the red-brick dormitories, and then the highway, the hill climbing and climbing, the cupolas and spires of the Athens Mental Health Center towering above me as I pass alongside its rocky wall. Or maybe this time I’ll stay along the river — the Hocking — following its graceful curve and marveling, as always, at how, years ago, a team of engineers moved the river to alleviate flooding. Moved a river, I’ll think, imagining the cuts and angles and drainage paths it must have taken to redirect the river’s flow, what lengths it took to change this landscape forever.