This thesis traces the multiple ways in which individuals relate to the River Beane, an increasingly waterless chalk stream in Hertfordshire, South-East England. It notes how a sense of uncertainty which is social, environmental, climactic, and now too pandemic, comes to be reflected on, experienced through, and in some cases produced by virtue of these local river relations. Based on sixteen months of multi-sited ethnography the thesis engages anthropological theory and methods – with geography, history, and interdisciplinary social science work – to shed light on the myriad ways in which peoples in Hertfordshire, through these relations, come to question authoritative ways of knowing and enacting health for the river, its non-human life, and the humans connecting in and through it. In the first of three data chapters, concerned local parties decry the death of the River Beane. Death here is enacted as a narrative, metaphor, and as a powerful call to arms, aligning the River Beane with a wider politics of chalk streams in ‘crisis’, and lobbying for more connective, more-than-human relationships for the future. The second data chapter traces encounters of boundary maintenance and health-as-separation, discussing their temporal, spatial, and species inflections, and noting how the uncertainty wrought by the coronavirus worked to disrupt them. The final data chapter homes in on peoples traversing the boundary of land and water, exploring the relationship between rising numbers of river swimmers on the River Beane, a time of pandemic uncertainty, and emerging enactments of health. The discussion proposes an analytic of public intimacy to make sense of these river engagements as embodied desires for connections which are more-than-human, more than individual, and through which health can be sought and experienced as something connective, intimate, and public.