"The Tennessee is a river at risk," says Mimi. "The point of my swim was to challenge people, to make them stop and think about what we're doing to the river. Each of us is responsible for the shape it's in." Some stretches of the river were so dirty, that at day's end, Mimi emerged with scum coating her neck and shoulders. Even worse were the chemical smells that spoke of a witches' brew of manmade pollutants. "Some days I dreaded putting my face in the water, but even on the worst days, I was still awestruck by the river's beauty." Mimi divided the Riverswim into 10-day segments which she completed over five consecutive summers. She began the swim in 1999 at the Tennessee River's headwaters just east of Knoxville, Tennessee. In 2003, when she completed the Riverswim at Paducah, Kentucky, she had swum a total mileage equivalent to the distance between Nashville and Dallas. Back