About half a mile from my apartment, there’s a little plaque in the sidewalk that marks the continental divide between the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes basin, although it’s a bit of a fuzzy distinction: I grew up four miles south of here in the drained basin of a lake which would
empty into the west fork of the south branch of the Chicago river most of the time, but after a heavy rain would instead empty into the Des Plaines river and thus the Mississippi basin.
