The Gift of Water

as seen in the Marquette Monthly March, 2020
By Christine Saari

I learned early to conserve water.

At the Austrian mountain farm where I grew up during WWII, we had a cold water faucet in the downstairs kitchen but no running water upstairs, where my mother and I lived. I carried heavy buckets of water up steep wooden stairs. For the toilet, we used grey water from washing dishes. We had water pitchers and washbasins for a nightly sponge bath. To heat up water for a full bath was a major production. My mother and I shared the tub, alternating who got to bathe first.

In 1968, my American husband and I had a bathroom and kitchen sink installed at the farm. What a gift it was to have water run out of a faucet! To this day we are grateful for this pleasure, this luxury, and we have remained conscientious ever since about not wasting water.

In Hongkong, where we lived in 1962 under drought conditions, we had four hours of water use every four days. In the short time available, our three-person household washed the accumulated dishes, did the laundry, took showers (standing in the water from the previous bather, which was later used for flushing), and we filled every available container with water. I learned how to take a bath with a cup of water!

Here in Marquette, I cringe when someone washes dishes under running water, takes long showers, or lets water run while brushing teeth. Though Lake Superior seems to be a never-ending source of water, even here we have ground water issues because water has been polluted by industry. I believe that we should be grateful for every drop of clean water and that we must preserve our water and not take any of it for granted.

My family learned this the hard way last summer at our farm in Austria. Our water source is a surface spring on a hillside, a spring that we share with our neighbor. There have been few problems over the years. We have had only occasional water shortages, and though after heavy rains the water turns muddy, it has always cleared quickly. So we were not overly concerned when, last summer, brown water ran from our faucet. But instead of clearing quickly, the color got darker and darker until it began to stink. Nothing like this had ever happened before. We tried a chlorine treatment, and we cleaned out mud deposits which had clogged the filter in the storage tank. We had the pipe system in the house checked. We had the water tested in a number of places where pollution might have entered. The end result: e coli in the spring itself, the last place we envisioned. We now have a temporary line that brings clean water from a nearby neighbor, until we can dig a new well and create a self-cleaning system that keeps the water in motion and does not let bacteria multiply.

We discovered that other farms have similar problems. How can this be happening, we wondered? These established systems have functioned for hundreds of years! Global warming, we were told. Due to higher temperatures and less rain, the balance in a finely-tuned system has changed. Less water flows and bacteria can flourish in our now warmer conditions.

In the UP we are still blessed with an abundance of water. While many places the world over suffer from drought or floods, dry stream beds or polluted ground water, we have so far been spared major water disasters. True, there are cases of industrial pollution, and the Lake Superior shoreline has lately been battered and damaged by more violent storms than we have been used to.

Nonetheless, we can consider ourselves lucky. We can sit on our city’s public beach and watch the surf roll in. We can hike high above the Carp River. At our fish camp, we can observe a doe drink from the Mulligan. We can canoe on the West Branch of the Whitefish, an unspoiled stretch of stream between our log camp and the falls. We can walk along the Dead River on multiple trails within the city limits of Marquette.

We are blessed indeed. Let us preserve and protect what we have here. The least we can do is not to waste a drop of water, even if, for now, it is here in abundance.

WATER-SAVING TIPS

Install toilets with big and small flushes.

If you use a dehumidifier, reuse the water that accumulates.

Contributor’s note: Christine Saari has lived in Marquette since 1971 and feels at home in the UP and at her childhood farm in Austria.

“The Gift of Water” columns are offered by the Northern Great Lakes Water Stewards and the Cedar Tree Institute, joined in an interfaith effort to help preserve, protect, and sanctify the waters of the Upper Peninsula.