It Came From Out Of The Sky

Daddy! Come look! There's water falling right out of the sky, just like Grandma said it used to do!

Get your pale little fanny right back in here. Your five minutes are up. And you can't take everything your Grandma says right to the banking app.

She said it used to do it for months on end sometimes.

That's just the kind of thing I'm talking about. Use your common sense, boy. Remember what Grandma used to say about Florida?

She said that's where the old folks used to go when they retired.

Exactly. Now think about that. Why would anyone ever go to the Sunken Peninsula? It was just an expression. Like when we told you we took Rover to live on the farm.

Rover isn't on the farm?

Rover's fine. He's fine. What I mean is your Grandma comes up with some stuff sometimes.

What about the solid water? She said sometimes the water would go solid. She said she'd roll it into a ball and smack her brother in the head with it.

That I believe.

And there's be so much solid water that they'd pile it up in the mountains.

Where it would get all dusty. Eww. Solid water! As if!

No! She said! She said there used to be a lot of it in the olden days. That they had to have solid water to stand the mastodons up on.

See, right there. Mastodons? Your grandmother doesn't know anything about mastodons. She only goes back to the Cruz administration, and there haven't been any mastodons since Noah economized on cubits. What is it they're teaching you in the Edu-Pod these days?

But Crayonce's Grandpa said the same thing. That water used to fall right out of the sky, all the time.

I know, son. The old folks used to tell me the same stuff. And rainbows stretched across the sky like giant oil slicks! And there was a beast with a single horn coming out of the middle of its head! And tomatoes and corn came right out of the dirt. And people used to eat things that floated around in the ocean. It's revolting. If Grandma saw water coming out of the sky, why isn't she rich? Get in here before you dissolve.

But it's true! There's water coming out of the sky right now! Not a bunch, but little bits of it! Come look! We could take all our jugs and set them up on the, on the--the place Grandma calls a patio. Where she says they used to sit around, of an evening.

God help us.

And maybe they would all fill up with the water that's falling out of the sky.

Son. I'll break into next week's allotment if you absolutely must have water. The good stuff. With the minerals and the marketing in it and stuff. Where does water come from? Do you even know? You kids, I swear! They drill it. They mine it. They put it into bottles and your daddy and your mommy shovel data all day long to be able to buy it. Water doesn't just fall out of the sky, son. And what if it did? Would you drink something that came out of the sky? Do you know where the sky has been? It's all smoke and coal and farts up there. Now get in here before your eczema gets eczema.

What if we drill too much and we run out?

Son. You have to have faith. The Lord will provide.

What's faith? Is it like a drill?

It's more like a leaf blower. It takes all the chaos and things we don't understand and blows it into tidy little piles that make sense. If we run out of water, and we have faith, the Lord will take care of us. There are scads of other planets.

Why can't the Lord just put more water here? I get carsick.

Faith, son, faith. It's not for us to know how it works. But it will be easy. There'll be a portal or something. It'll open up for us once we...retire to Florida. And then we'll be on our new planet. There'll be a planet for you and me and Mommy.

Grandma said you could go to hell for all she cared.

And with any luck, there'll be a planet just for Grandma.

Bottling Money

Bull Run

There's a company that's advertising its bottled water as "the best stuff on Earth." And it is. People are starting to realize that. There are a whole lot of things that are turning out to be not quite as important as we thought they were, but water is not one of them. People have known that forever. They used to distribute themselves in a reasonable way across the landscape in the olden days. If there was a spot that had water, that's where they parked their fannies. You've got a confluence of rivers, that's where the cities were.

We've got it pretty good around here. We've got a big lake up in the foothills and over a hundred years ago some folks had the bright idea of protecting the entire watershed that feeds it, and not building on it or sticking boats on it or pooping near it or anything, and they ran a big pipe from the lake to Portland. Then they dammed up another area downstream and got themselves a new reservoir and between the two of them we've got enough water to waste, even with a much bigger population. And it's delicious. Even the water that goes down the driveway is delicious.

Original water pipeline

It's pretty low-tech. Nothing but rain and gravity. No one is allowed to set foot in the hills that drain into the lakes. It's a big mass of unobstructed green up there. There are some places along the water pipeline where a few unobtrusive chemicals are added just to take care of random bacteria from elk poop but it's a very simple system. Sensible. This is exactly how people should come together to provide for the common good. Lots of folks think socialism is a dirty word but it's a lot more efficient than giving everyone a bucket and a gun and wishing them the best of luck.

You'd think we could all agree that water is a resource that should be cherished and protected because none of us can live without it, but no. The very fact that it's necessary is a lever that can be used to pry up a bunch of money. So companies are diverting public water into petroleum-based containers with a half-life of forever and marking it up by a factor of thousands and successfully selling it to people who actually have access to the same stuff coming out of their own tap. It's a mystery why they buy it, but they do.

Right here, up the Gorge a ways, they're talking about giving the Nestle Corporation the rights to some of our super-clean water so they can put it in those bottles and make us pay a ransom for it, and they're doing it because it will mean fifty people in the small town of Cascade Locks will get jobs. Shoot, we would all agree to jump in a mass grave if it meant we were fully employed digging the sucker first. It makes no sense to privatize a necessity like water, but we give wealthy people a lot of leeway. We even mistake wealth for virtue. If you've got enough money, you can buy your own vocabulary and teach it to the masses. You're not a leech, you're a job-creator, and even without any evidence, people will believe it.

If you and your friends are rich enough, you can even buy the terms of a new conversation. You can get ordinary working stiffs to believe there is something called a Death Tax, as though you can be taxed when you're dead, and not your pink, entitled heirs, with their smooth hands, who are the feckless recipients of your slab of cash.

You're in control of the lexicon. Nobody even talks about "pirates" anymore.

Birthday Boy

Today is Oliver's birthday. Not the anniversary of Oliver's birthday, but his actual one. Did you feel that planetary wobble? That was our boy. He was supposed to show up more than a week ago, but he was disinclined, and had to be evicted. Baby Oliver, my great-nephew, is the first new thing in our family in thirty-one years, and is a production of the last new thing.

I don't really blame him for holding back. It's a scary world out there. Dave thinks I am unreasonably optimistic, but he's wrong. I am constitutionally wired to veer towards cheer, but I'm not really optimistic at all. I think we're going down, but I also think, in the context of each of our little lives, that we must continue to do our best, and that means we need to pay attention. As a species, we're still a teenager, and we're trashing the place because we are lacking an adult perspective and we don't think we'll ever die, but the ugly truth is not all teenagers make it to adulthood. We might party down and wreck the car and crash and burn and take some stuff down with us, but after the teddy bears rot off the milepost marker, no one will remember us.

Now that Oliver's here, I think it would be a swell time for all of us to try a little harder. Start anywhere. Start small.

Are you a sad, wounded, pea-hearted troll who slithers onto the internet at night to say nasty things to people, and you can't bring yourself to just say nothing at all? Maybe you could work on your spelling.

Are you a more responsible soul, standing in line at the store to pay for a shirt, a bottle of water, and a snack-pack? Pay attention, instead. You've got time; the old bat up front hasn't even started excavating her purse for her checkbook yet. How old was the person who stitched your shirt, and what did she get paid? Maybe it's cheap for you because somebody else is paying. And let's take a look at that snack. All those adorable little plastic compartments so you don't have to risk your crackers rubbing elbows with your cheese-like product! The plastic is a deathless unit of petroleum that contributes to global warming on the front end and spins forever in the ocean destroying sea life on the back end. The cheese-like product is manufactured using more petroleum and some minor contribution from cows that have been zipped up with antibiotics that are being outwitted by virulent bacteria right now, to our eventual regret. Maybe you could have an apple. Maybe you could grow an apple.

About that water. Tremendous news, maybe you've heard? We get water pumped right into our houses now. Not that long ago that would have been an unthinkable luxury. It's clean, too, because we got together and bought ourselves some protection with our tax money. You could pick up this uninspected fluid in the handy petroleum package so that someone gets some jingle in his pocket for the privilege of privatizing something that should be owned by all of us, or you could just turn on the tap for practically nothing.

Are you someone who is getting a whole lot of money and a big microphone that broadcasts to the whole world and all you can do is make fun of the First Lady's ass and whine that she's trying to take away your Twinkies? Seriously, dude? Maybe you can think of something more constructive to do.

Or maybe you're in a position of actual power and you're devoting your days to making sure that the people who have all the money get to keep it and add to it. Is this your legacy to the world? Give it a little more thought and do the right thing. Do one right thing. Extra credit if you can do it without getting your penis in the news, but we'll let that slide for now.

Start anywhere. Start small.

Or are you really wicked wealthy? So wealthy that you could give away 95% of it and still be wicked wealthy? Maybe you could let a little of it go, or maybe you could send a little down the line to the people who got all that wealth stacked up for you. Because, honey, you didn't earn it. Know how I know? It's not possible to earn that much money. You amassed it, honey, and that's about the most shine we can put on it. Maybe you could see that all those people who contributed to your fat bottom line could get more of a share. Maybe you could decline to do business in countries that do not care for their workers or the environment. Or maybe you could save a watershed a week, or cure malaria. Does that whole line of thinking make you pucker? Okay. Maybe you could merely call off Twinkie-boy with the microphone and tell him to quit making fun of the First Lady's ass just to raise the rabble that keeps electing the people who are allowing you to amass more money. Maybe you could quit buying those politicians who are raising all those armies for you so you can keep all those resources under your control and continue to trash the planet while the rest of us try to get some of it cleaned up, and maybe you could quit paying those people to come up with ideas like manufacturing all this fake uproar you don't even believe in about gay people so the ignorant keep coming to the polls and voting in your minions so you can keep all of your money and get even more. No? Baby steps, then. Maybe you could pay some damn taxes. Start small. Start anywhere. Start.

Because it's Oliver's birthday, and it's time we grew up.

Nor Any Drop To Drink

Many of us who grew up with black-and-white TV have been led to believe that the key to happiness lies in the chance discovery of oil while shootin' at some food. Ol' Jed's a millionaire, so it worked out well for him, but in the real world, it is a very unlucky thing to live over an oil reservoir or a seam of coal. Before you know it, Jed and his buddies are busily stripping oodles of cash off your land, then stripping off your land itself, and you're left with a god-awful job, poor health, no education, no topsoil, and few options. Warriors thunder through. Stuff blows up. You might get the feeling someone at a remote distance is pulling all the strings, and you'd be right.

I won't even shoot a rifle at the ground lest I ding a salamander, but I'm not going to discover a bubbling crude in any case. I'm one of the lucky ones who live on top of the best resource of all: water. We're planted on spongy ground, and if we sit still long enough our northern bits green up.

The annual rainfall is less than you might think. Most of the time it hangs in the air, sometimes acquiescing into a drizzle. Oh, we have had considerable deluges from time to time, notably during the last ice age, when the Columbia River repeatedly flooded to a height of a thousand feet, strewing chunks of prehistoric Montana and some surprised indigenous people all over the valley.

For the longest time, humans could be found only in places with good water. We don't do well without it; our cells gum up. A native American term for water is "pah," and it shows up in many place names in the arid west: Pagosa Springs, Tonopah, Pahrump, and the like. Pittsburgh, PA? Even coal country has its priorities straight. We need this stuff. The other stuff doesn't matter.

But because we are clever, we have come up with ways to make water potable and transfer it all over the place. Now we're everywhere.

Generally speaking, in view of the vital nature of water, communities band together to see to its distribution and safety. The Romans rendered unto Caesar and rigged up some mighty spiffy aqueducts. That's how we do it today: everybody chips in, and out comes the water, Crystal Light optional. It's hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Unfortunately, our powers of imagination are not required. The water we need is already being treated as a commodity to be bought and sold and traded to whoever can afford it. Examples abound. The oilman T. Boone Pickens has bought up significant acreage over the Ogallala aquifer in order to pump its water and sell it to cities. The aquifer is replenished but slowly, and not nearly as fast as he plans to pump it; in fact the water he's drilling was deposited in sands millions of years ago. It's fossil water, basically. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

"I don't have any concerns about depleting the aquifer," Mr. Pickens has said. That's a relief, because stress can kill a guy. "And it could make a lot of people a lot of money."

Pah.

There are other ways Ol' Jed and his buddies can privatize and profit from the water we need. Take the notion that people would actually buy tap water if only it were served up in a petroleum-based container and labeled something like Mother Nature's Woo Woo Dew. That succeeded beyond any sensible person's wildest dreams. In fact, the Nestle Corporation has been able to tap water sources for about $.002/gallon and sell it bottled for $5.30 a gallon all over the world. They are proposing to perform that very alchemy not thirty miles from here, in the gorge, where our seemingly inexhaustible supplies of water have already been drawn down, pumped, dammed and diverted; groundwater levels are in steep decline. Free speech tends to be less effective than the paid-for kind, but if you want to tell Nestle to stick to mining for chocolate chips and leave our water the hell alone, you've got till October 29th to do it. It's either that, or we start rinsing off our steelhead and salmon one bottle at a time.

Pah.


We have interrupted our regularly scheduled Murrmurrs to slip in this post on Blog Action Day, sponsored once a year by Change.org. This year's theme is Water. Bloggers worldwide, including my pals Sara Stratton and Vickie Henderson, are spreading the word about clean water issues. I encourage you to click on the "tell Nestle" link above to comment on the proposed bottling venture. 


And because I'm a softie, I'm going to go ahead and put in your regular Saturday Murrmurrs on Sunday. Y'all come back now, hear?