Mother Ocean

I live in a world of water.

After shopping for food today, a kindly bagger pushed my cart to my car (hey, I'm a senior-like citizen, I can accept help) and loaded my groceries to the cargo area of my Vibe. He had to work around the case of bottled water that I habitually carry so that I have plenty of water for trail rides, or a greatly-needed bottle of water for when I'm done riding in the arena.

The bottle of chilled water that I had added to my checkout was in my purse.

Six gallon bottles of water sloshed in the well of the front seat of my car, bottles I was too lazy to bring in the day before.

Bottled water.

The stuff from the tap in the sink is potable. You can drink it and not die. This is good. But it reeks of chlorine, and tastes like the bottom of a brick. It's fine for cooking, as the boiling process makes the chlorine smell dissipate, and maybe bricks are good for stews.

But I wouldn't drink it if I could help it. If I were parched, and tap-water my only hope, I'd drink it. Reluctantly.

I rely on filtrated water from a vending source (25 cents a gallon, relatively cheap) for my daily liquid needs. We try to keep a few days' worth of drinkable water on hand at all times.

Yet I remember, when I was a child, living in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, drinking straight from the tap (I was supposed to get a cup, but didn't) and having the water taste clean and sweet. Not sweet as in sugar-sweet, but sweet as in "wholesome" and "earthy" and "uncontaminated."

Sometimes, when I was a child, we would go to a certain mountain spring, and fill bottles there because the water tasted so good. I remember that it did have a "wild" taste to it, a taste that bespoke of earth, and limestone, and oak leaves that layered the mountainside.

No one said, "Don't eat fish from the river more than twice a week because the chemical content is dangerous." In fact some people caught most of their food from the Juniata River and its tributary streams: sunfish, rock bass, small- and large-mouth bass, catfish, muskellunge, pickerel, trout -- carp, if you could get yourself past the foolish cultural negativity about the fish. Out here you just can't do that. Where the fish are safe to eat, the water is over-fished.

Water rules the world.

green=thoughtful