The Gift of Water

as seen in the Marquette Monthly August, 2018
By Joe Secreast

I’ve always been a big fan of weather, but that early May evening was extraordinary, even by U.P. standards. The sun had just sunk below the horizon and the western sky looked like clear blue glass. Straight above our heads, the crescent moon was aglow. To the south and east rose towers of sunset-painted cumulonimbus, fat and thick and solid-looking as piles of pink and gold cream. In the darkness behind that looming wall, flashes of soundless lightning pulsed.

We need to go see this, I told my son. And so we headed down to a beach on the Lake.

Water’s pretty amazing, full of odd contradictions and weird facts. It’s the most plentiful stuff on the planet but only a tiny fraction of it is drinkable. Humans are more or less ambulatory bags of sea-water, but we need regular infusions of fresh water to survive. I’d guess it’s the most studied substance in the history of science, as simple as three atoms of ridiculously plentiful material, but as of now it’s impossible to make. Lately, it’s gone cosmic: there’s ice on the moon and water in the Martian soil, which is great news for anyone hoping for life somewhere out there.

But back here, on this blue planet, my son and I were having a contest, seeing who could stand in the Lake the longest. It physically hurt, the bones of our feet afire. And then the clouds moved in, much like the needle on my gas gauge drops—slowly, slowly, then all at once. The air temperature dropped fifteen degrees, the wind shook the leafless trees so they danced like skeletons in the gloaming, and then came the rain.

Of all the facts I know about water the one that really gets to me is that there’s roughly the same amount of it on Earth now as there was millions and millions of years ago. That the same water you drink today could have been drunk by a T. Rex.

It’s the ultimate recyclable. It freezes, it melts. Ocean levels fall and rise. It soaks deep into the bedrock, bubbles back out in springs clear and cold as if run through a refrigerated filter. The melted glaciers of the Ice Age come out your tap, are made into ice again in your freezer. The rain that fell on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is still percolating around the place. Those prehistoric seas that once covered Nebraska didn’t disappear, they just migrated.

There’s something about this idea that really intrigues me, that I recognize and relate to.

Whether there’s more to my son and me, as we race laughing back to the car in the rain, than biological processes I frankly couldn’t tell you. But, man, it sure feels like there is. It feels like I am more than an ambulatory bag of sea water. Certainly, I’m convinced he is. I don’t know exactly what to call that. Our consciousness, our souls, our naturally secreted selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. You know what I’m talking about. And sometimes it feels like there’s an ocean of it in us, and sometimes just a trickle, and sometimes it all seems dried up, gone forever.

But it never really goes away. Like the hydrosphere, it’s all still there. Pooled in the lightless places deep inside us. Frozen round our hearts and in our veins by time and disappointment. Evaporated out of us into the surrounding air, but still enveloping us, cloud-like. When my son was born, I was refilled as if something were pouring into me, like water filling a reservoir. Every time my son laughs, it’s a summer rain. Those are the big ones, but it’s also the little things that refill us—a stranger’s smile, a snowfall, cats on the Internet. And trips down to the beach to look at the clouds, water suspended improbably in the sky, waiting to fall and gather and flow back into the Lake. And the Lake itself, of course, clean and cold and reflecting the sky back at itself like a mirror.

The day after a storm on Lake Superior, the beaches are swept clean of footprints and you can imagine that you’re the first person to ever step out onto that sand. A line of detritus marks the waves’ high point. Crawdad claws and beetle shells and feathers. Wisps of fog float across the top of the water which is so clear you can see the sandy bottom, ribbed like the roof of your mouth.

My son runs down to the water, steps in and jumps back out. It’s even colder than it was last night, he yells. And whatever else might happen today, in this life, I pause in this moment and let it top off the reservoir.

WATER SAVER TIP

Water dripping from a faucet, a toilet running—these are wastes of fresh water. Waste does no person or plant any good, and the lost water is later mixed with worse wastewater before it’s treated and released back into the wild, where it takes a long time to assimilate.

Contributor’s note: Joe Secreast lives in Marquette.

“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.