A Tune to Water

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“I never drink water because of the disgusting things fish do in it.”—W.C. Fields

“I’ve taken a proprietary interest in our children and Lake Hartwell for over forty years.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/11/11—In Wind, Sand, and Stars, Antoine de Saint Exupéry writes of three Moorish chieftains who had never drunk from a sweet-water spring. Prior to 1930, the three had lived in the Sahara all their lives and had dug in the sand for most of the urine-scented water they’d ever drunk.

Then a mail pilot in the service of the French diplomatic corps flew them over the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean to France, where they saw green pastures, cows with udders near the bursting point, trees taller than a dune, and roaring cataracts—all for the first time. As they stood awestruck by the aquamarine abundance of the French Alps, their guide begged them to leave, but one chief said he wanted to wait until Allah shut off the tap. The puzzled guide assured him that these falls had roared for thousands of years and would continue to do so long after they left.

When the chiefs returned to the desert, they broke into tears telling about the trees and cows, but they kept the blue torrent to themselves lest the faith of their followers in Allah be shaken. “The God of the French,” one said privately, “is more generous than the God of the Moors.”

The gods who open and close the spigots of heaven are indeed fickle. One small hill town in India receives 467 inches of rain each year, while some places in Antarctica, which harbors 70 percent of Earth’s fresh water, have not had a fresh flake in a million years.

Yet stone harpoon heads have been unearthed in Saharan caves.

Closer to home, Lake Hartwell, which is about three miles from where I sit, was 22 feet below what the Corps of Engineers considers “full” in November of 2008. Local mayors and Clemson’s president found themselves invoking mandatory cutbacks on people accustomed to hydrotherapeutic extravagance. Just a year later, the lake with a coastline of nearly a thousand miles was up 24 feet.

Because Americans are so blessed (the country averages about 45 inches of precipitation per year), we typically use 70 times more water than Ugandans do and four times more than the Swiss, where the depth of Alpine glaciers is measured in miles. Only in America can one still find toilets that use three and a half gallons of drinking water to flush away a cup of urine.

Comprising just 5 percent of the Earth’s population, Americans account for 20 percent of its waste in all forms. Only in the States, where a couple of generations back people took weekly two-minute “horse baths” if they needed one, do people take half-hour-long showers. My German wife has scolded me for 40 years to shorten my ablutions, and I have: they now average 15 minutes, but it’s unlikely that number will shrink any more because I enjoy the luxury of shaving while hot water bathes my sore back. I am learning: it only took me a decade to get in the habit of turning off the water while brushing my teeth.

One place you won’t find me indulging myself is at a California-style water bar choosing among 200 brands of bottled water. Has no one noticed that “evian” spelled backwards is “naïve”? Call me cheap, but I refuse to pay more for water than I do regular gasoline. When carcinogens turned up in Perrier in 1993, I thought the scam would wither and die, but stories of nanotraces of hormones and antibiotics in tap water had people scared. Never mind that most water is distributed under more stringent guidelines than the stuff packaged in plastic bottles made from 17,000,000 barrels of oil per year. Often bottled water is tap water as PepsiCo acknowledged in 2007 when they agreed to add the words “public water source” to every label of Aquafina. Other bottlers are cannier, arguing that they aren’t selling water; it’s “portable hydration.” Where is the child among us who will stand up and say, “The Emperor is a con-man; it’s all H2O”?

The latest riff on selling oil to the Arabs is bottled holy water. One brand, called Holy Drinking Water, is blessed en masse in the warehouse by an approved Anglican or Catholic priest. Another brand, Spiritual Water, offers ten scenes from the Bible to choose among while deciding which bottle you want to buy from a former pest controller. And Liquid OM, according to the bottler, gives the purchaser cosmic energy. Of course it does—every bottle is immersed in a “gong bath” before leaving the plant. My plasma is rebooted just writing about it.

That which should be cheap and abundant to all is the stuff of natural science, but it often reads like myth. Without “the universal solvent,” the Blue Ridge Mountains that I can see from my window would be taller than the Himalayas—30,000 feet, instead of the three to four thousand they are. By the same token, Niagara Falls will be as flat as a Mississippi sandbar in just 23,000 years. Moreover, a single gallon of water yields a cubic mile of fog. And ice under 600,000 psi will not melt in boiling water, nor will it float.

One of the beauties of water is that no matter how contaminated it becomes, it can always be filtered and aerated until clean. A drop of rain that falls at the headwaters of the Thames may be safely drunk and excreted eight times before it reaches the sea. And just a few years ago, veterinarians successfully replaced lost blood in mammals with—you guessed it, sea water.

Should humans ever manage to contaminate water absolutely, there’s plenty of the virginal variety in space. We now have solid or liquid proof of water on the moon. There’s an excellent chance that it also exists on Mars as well as on some of Jupiter’s moons, and the Orion constellation features clouds that dump a volume of water greater than 60 of all our oceans combined every day.

How are we going to retrieve that water, you ask. Well, it seems that we already take delivery of close to two million tons from the Aquarian realm every day. Over the next 20,000 years, this perpetual cosmic hailstorm will produce another inch of water for the entire planet. And at the current rate of global warming, the seas are expected to rise over 200 feet in this millennium. Where I live, at 666 feet above sea level, this increase will not give my future neighbors a beach-front home, but it will make a trip to the coast two to three hours shorter.

As my semi-lavish showers suggest, I love water. I drink at least 64 ounces daily, swim in it every opportunity I have, and play in it with the grandchildren until I emerge shriveled as a dried peach. Moreover, my Calvinist conscience insists that I’m not really exercising unless I’m sweating profusely. Unlike many I know, sweat does not offend me, especially my own. On a humid day in South Carolina, you’d better like your greasy secretions, or you’re going to be very unhappy living at this Moroccan latitude. Working or just walking among the tall, skinny pines of August, water trumps champagne, and it won’t leave you with a headache, either.