Leaning Into Our Amazing, Sometimes Abusive Relationship with Water
Leaning Into Our Amazing, Sometimes Abusive Relationship with Water
The mother molecule is elusive, essential and just weird.
Water is a curious thing. It is a source of life, but few things terrify more than being overwhelmed by the stuff and drowning. It makes surfaces more filthy, provides a breeding ground for disease and yet is also our go-to substance for cleaning away filth and germs.
For humans there are two kinds of water: 1. The predictable, controlled, mostly indoor kind that reliably flows from a variety of taps and faucets on-demand, and; 2. The more primal and unpredictable form in its natural element — picture a whitewater rapid on a mountain creek, a wave breaking offshore or a torrential downpour starting and stopping seemingly at will and in defiance of countless meteorologists and computer models.
Sometimes we try to bridge the two modes by recreating and harnessing this wild force in controlled environments — water parks with slides and wave pools or channeling huge volumes through locks, dams and turbines.
There’s something innate in this impulse. Water is one of our earliest playthings as children and splashing can be as basic a joy as laughter. To say nothing of sand castles, slip-n-slides or cannonballing into a pool.
So you’d think there would be more joy in fashioning and maintaining an end-to-end off-grid water system that attempts to steward the substance through a big chunk of the water cycle. In the suburban home of my youth, all water was controlled, managed, metered. Some professional called a plumber was in charge of making sure our water would flow on-demand, and he would interact with a network of other professional people operating other various stores and conduits of water nearby to get it done.
For some reason I decided in mid-life that I would assume the role of not only the plumber, but also every other function in our single home independent water delivery network.
It seemed like it might be fun. Fun to learn and assemble the system. Few days in my youth were better than when we took trips to the beach or the lake or the water park or the river.
But memory is faulty and it compresses events relentlessly. Hours spent packing, driving, parking, walking, waiting in lines and burning in the sun are conspicuously absent from my most euphoric recollections of speeding down water slides on August afternoons.
So it is with building and maintaining the surprisingly complex system of gutters, downspouts, hoses, tanks, valves, pumps, pipes, faucets, drains, sinks, basins, filters and other components involved in collecting, cleaning, pressurizing, delivering and then disposing of water to keep three people, a dog, a garden and a few fruit trees alive and relatively well.
The frustration and the diligence involved in installing and then maintaining all of the above is 98 percent of the story. The other two percent is what makes it all worthwhile. The crescendo of a strong rainfall and the sounds of running water across the roof. The trickles into our tanks turning into solid flows. And all with minimal leakage. This is how gravity exhilarates me now. Although I still don’t mind a water slide either.
After taking it for granted for so long, I have recommitted in my lifelong relationship with water.
Brutal and Beautiful Mistress
It gives life, it takes life, it supports life, it enriches life, it immiserates life. And it’s just two hydrogen atoms and oxygen playing third wheel. Why is this molecule so critical to just about every part of our existence?
We’re also surrounded by nitrogen, which is useful to life, but not nearly to the degree to which water is really our everything. We are addicted to the stuff. Can’t quit it. Not for a single day. Well, maybe. But please don’t try to go much longer than that.
Water seems to see us being so thirsty. And it likes to tease.
Why else would it slip so easily from phase to phase? It falls from the sky to form cool puddles, only to quickly evaporate and escape being temporarily imprisoned in our throats, arteries and countless plastic bottles. Neglect to keep it warm, comfortable and stable and it will stubbornly harden into frozen blocks or crystals. Those blocks are, of course, useful in their own right, but water is stubborn and refuses to stay in that form for long when you need it.
Most construction is built with the assumption the precipitation respects the force of gravity foremost, falling more or less straight down out of the sky and then flowing downhill. It’s more difficult to build and plan for the fact that this is usually true, but often high desert winds and a curious thing called snow squalls take over and blow rain, hail, sleet and snow sideways.
I swear that we even get certain gusts of wind that actually carry rain and snow diagonally upwards. I can come up with no other explanation for the snow drifts that I’ve seen accumulate on the underside of our eaves and other overhangs occasionally.
Water conspires with the other elements of our universe to tease, clearly.
One autumn evening, one such whirligig type storm was roiling outside. A steady drip of water rudely interrupted my daughter’s homework as she sat on the couch in the center of the house. The stuff was seeping out of the highest beam in the house above her head. Because we know water runs downhill, to be leaking from the highest point in the roof would seem to be the most unlikely place to find it penetrating the structure. It only happened during that one stormy night, which was punctuated by strange updrafts out of the east. A day spent on the roof with a drill and some asphalt sealant soon followed.
It can be cruel, but I am still wooing water. Over the years and going off-grid our relationship has deepened. Yet it is still coy.
It falls from the sky in unpredictable sheets during very limited times of year in the high desert. I rush to catch it, channel it and contain it.
Each summer I find myself putting gutters on increasingly silly structures and running hoses to our large tanks behind the house. Our shed got the treatment this year and I’m still working on accessorizing our ground-mounted solar panels in the same fashion. Next up - the outhouse.