Walkies Talkies #2 – The Water Bill

Today’s quote that I randomly chose for this episode of Walkie Talkies is one from the incomparable Henry David Thoreau in his classic book of essays, Walden. He writes, “It is well to have some water in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One value of even the smallest well is, that when you look into it, you see that the earth is not continent, but insular.” I then noted that this is one of many beautiful sentences that I will likely only ever imitate, not emulate, in my own writing.

So, this is a particularly powerful quote to me. I have a complicated relationship with water. In my youth, I spent my summers by the St. Croix River in Maine, and it was perhaps my favorite time of year. It was the one time that I could always look forward to, and it’s a blessing now that I now have a property that sits on a river in Vermont. In fact, the river traces our entire property in sort of a semicircle. Like, you can look on a map and see where the river curves around the bend in the road, and our house is smack dab in the middle of it. Pretty cool.

I do know how to swim. I’m not a particularly skilled swimmer, but I can keep myself from drowning. I have a terrible allergy to chlorine, so I have a very hard time swimming in chlorinated pools. I often consider wading in the river here when it’s not so raging, but lately the river has been moving quite quickly. And it’s been freezing, to boot.

I want to talk a little bit about how water is often used as a symbol in many ways. Probably my greatest issue with water is that I have this tendency towards dehydration. In fact I’m pretty parched as I’m saying this right now. I probably should stop to take a drink, but I’m going to weather my dehydration for the next few minutes to get my train of thought back to the station.

Well, what makes water so special, especially salt water and fresh water and the distinction between the two? One of the greatest ironies I’ve always found on planet Earth is that our drinkable, potable water is a tiny fraction of the massive amount of water available on Earth. So much of the water is salt, and naturally we can’t drink salt water. Yet so much of the world’s life depends on salt water to sustain it. People, I think, underestimate just how important the world’s oceans really are. Now, we live in a time when the ocean level is rising and seeking to reclaim the land that it once gave up.

I feel like in the next few years, global warming will get to a point where it’s going to displace not just tens of millions of people, but potentially hundreds of millions. What I mean by that is that, yeah, low-lying areas are going to be flooded, but the problem is, again, these low-lying areas are going to be flooded in salt water, not useful to land-dwelling creatures such as ourselves. And the reason that Thoreau’s quote in Walden about Buoyancy is so important is that, in the end, we’re all afloat. The world is not a continent. I don’t know how in-depth plate tectonics were in the 1850s, but Thoreau made a very interesting observation. In reality, even land is not land. Land sits on tectonic plates that shift about on a molten core inside of our planet. So, technically, our continents are afloat on an ocean, just an ocean that goes much deeper and is a no go for swimming in, definitely.

We live in a part of Vermont where there’s no sewer system and no town water. There is in town, but where we are, we’re on the town line of the neighboring town. We have well water and a septic tank. What’s funny is when people visit our house, one of the first things they ask us is about our water bill. That’s the first question my parents asked when they came to our house, what is your water bill like? Other people since then have asked that, as well. I suppose we’re rather liberal with our water usage in our house, but we’re not wasteful. Then, when we tell them that we have no water or sewer bill, they get agitated and even angry, like it’s somehow unfair that we chose to live in an area where water-based utilities have no bearing on our property.

People’s fascination with water bills has always been very interesting to me. Like, your water bill must be really expensive to even bring that up! We live on a well next to a river on highly saturated land that was previously agricultural land. In fact, it’s still zoned agricultural. If you dig down like a foot, you’re going to hit water. Water is a necessary component for life, obviously. So, people being obsessed with it isn’t the issue; it’s people’s relationship to said water, especially potable water.

For example, bottled water. That’s something that I gave up last year. The only reason I drank bottled water in the first place is because of the convenience and the taste. Before Tom installed a complex filtering system in our house, the water didn’t taste very good. Being autistic, if something doesn’t taste right or have the right texture, I won’t drink it. I grew up with Poland Spring, so naturally, I drank a lot of it. I also am used to whatever it is Safeway uses for their water. I forget the brand they use. It’s a white label brand.

But bottled water is such a waste. After a while, the plastics leach into the water. After a certain time, the water is no good and you’re basically drinking plastic, which is essentially petroleum products. It just makes me sick when I see these pallets of bottled water stacked up that are no longer safe to drink. Water is not something that I feel like should even be charged for, if that makes any sense. I understand the need for infrastructure maintenance, but water is such a basic need. I feel like by bottling it up, we are crippling ourselves and taking it away and storing it up for no reason. Keep it in the earth where it belongs!

Now, if it’s in a glass, obviously it’s fine because glass won’t leach. Aluminum cans are okay, too. I think that we should get rid of plastic bottled water entirely and only go with glass or metal. That way, it can last hundreds of years like that.

Anyway, the idea that your consumption of water is tied to some utility bill to me is disconcerting and worrying to me. We are so disconnected from one of the key elements of life and chemistry in general. As carbon-based life forms, we need hydrogen and oxygen to survive. Most of our bodies are made of hydrogen and oxygen. It just blows my mind that people are so concerned about the cost of water without really understanding the utility of water, if that makes any sense.

And yet, people are more than happy to fill these ginormous swimming pools and chlorinate them and do whatever other treatment they do to pools. They just surround themselves with all these chemicals. To me, that’s just a huge waste. Bathing is fine. Swimming is fine. But I feel like we artificially waste water in so many ways – water that we could be using more productively.

In a lot of ways, we’re afloat in this sea of misinformation and chemical baths. We don’t even realize it most of the time. I’m okay with fluoridating water, which is beneficial, and whatnot. Beyond that, though, why can’t we just have pure water? Why do we have to have a water bill? That’s so dumb. I understand that there are costs associated with maintaining said systems and not everywhere has a well, but to me, this idea just divorces people from understanding that water should not be a commodity. Worse yet, we’re in the middle of a freshwater crisis! Especially in California, they’re running out of water. There are other places, too, across the world that are running out of fresh water because these places are not only overpopulated but also incredibly wasteful with their water.

If we run out of potable water in any of these urban areas, think about how many people are going to die from just not having basic water. That’s one of the basic needs of life. But people are so obsessed with the other things in their life – the material things that don’t really matter. And then they poison the well with their own stupidity and carelessness. We keep dumping all this crap into the earth. Eventually, the world is going to return to the saltwater creatures because all the freshwater creatures are going to die out, all because humans decided to be stupid and forget how to use water properly.

So, that’s my thoughts on water for now. This has been a scatterbrained session. But hopefully, I said something useful that you can take away from my ramblings. Catch you soon.

~ The “Phoenix”

Photo courtesy of Gustavo Belemmi, “Antique toy walkie-talkie,” under Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0 International License