The Well is the ninth in a series of essays on the Spirit of Water by the Water Stewards II. Published in the Marquette Monthly May, 2025.
– Brad Pickens
There is the old well in the hill on our farm, any trace of it long dissipated under countless cycles of planting and harvest in the field where it once stood. And the new well in the bottomland was sunk more than a century and a half ago by a grandmother and grandfather with a good many greats now standing between me and them. And I am the current caretaker of this new old well that feeds water to the farmhouse and I’ve made my repairs and improvements, just as I helped dad make the ones that came to him, just as he helped his dad some eight decades earlier. When I drink from our well, I drink water and time.
And grandma and grandpa dug the well because the spring in the woods doesn’t run fresh all year and the surface water is the first thing to get contaminated anyhow. The entire history of people living in community is more or less the story of figuring out how to keep everybody in clean water. The building of wells gave us good water and it also drew us apart. Once access to water could be established at any location that suited an individual, we no longer had to congregate around living springs with other beings who, whatever their faults might be, shared a similar fortitude to tolerate the same microbiomed water that we could. And if we understand that the singular group of people who can drink the same water that we do represents the entirety of who is available to build a life with, then that’s the origin of community. Now we live together and apart, water drawn from individual wells or taps, separated by apartment walls, small yards, great fields. Water shared and community an unrelated afterthought.
And the holding of water is only and always for a season. Whether measured across centuries of familial stewardship or through the collective action that joined me with eight million good friends and neighbors for a few years of access to Chicago utilities and which joins me with a smaller group of new neighbors in the Upper Peninsula, where I share the water that I now drink from the great sea of the Anishinaabe. And it is easy enough to speak of “my” water, but if I begin to wonder about who owns the water that I draw from the faucet, the idea of water becomes unimaginably complex. The water I pull from “my” farm well flows through underground rivers across property lines and boundaries and the water that we imagine to be “owned” by one state, province, or nation is pushed by storm and current across great lakes and back again. Water ignores our ideas of sovereign rights, boundaries, claims and desire. It simply is, it moves, it has its own being.
And the water has always been there and it was stewarded by people before the Europeans arrived along with novel concepts of “ownership” about something as basic as water. And water must belong to everyone if community is to flourish. The way that we access water does not make it ours, whether we draw from a private well or share in our local utility. Instead, we belong to the water, for water is life and life is given meaning when it is shared with others. The first step in building new community is to establish that the people among whom we live are not first of all distinguished by their politics, race, religion, sexuality, or any of the gross markers that we use to alienate ourselves from the people who surround us. Instead, they become known as people with whom we share a common interest in good, clean water—safe nourishment for young and old alike, the people who abide with the same water that we do.
When I return to my farm home, I go first to a tap labeled “pure” and I drink from a well whose collective stewardship I know in time. And when I drink from my community municipality, I drink water that is held together, with everyone around me and I think that, perhaps this water can draw us together like the old spring once did. I keep on my desk a jar of water from my well to remind me of community, of life, of hope, or people different from me who are accustomed to the same water that I am. I won’t claim that a lone jar of water is enough to overcome the divisions of the world. But, if I can look at what’s in this jar, what’s in my kitchen glass, and recognize the embodied energies of all the people who made it possible, well, it’s not a bad place to start.
– Brad Pickens
Brad is a husband, father of two, Episcopal priest, and a person who marvels at each drink of water. He replaces the pressure tanks and lightening struck switches that power the well on his farm, as needed, and he gratefully pays a utility bill that provides water for his family and neighbors in Marquette.
