Water

I write this BLOG on February 25, 2021. The impetus for reflecting on the topic of water takes me to Texas. My relatives living there are struggling to have water to drink, to wash dishes or clothes. This is \ a result of the Texas Big Freeze of 2 weeks ago. Water pipes froze so there was no running water. Then the ice melted and the water came seeping from pipes all over the place, flooding walls, houses. etc. More than 10 days after the Big Freeze people still need to boil their drinking water.

All of this brings me back to the Walburg of the 1930”s when I was growing up as a young lad in Texas. Our water came from two wells. The one nearest to our house, just 12 feet from our back door, was shallow and the water was not considered very good for drinking. The well did serve as a kind of ice box before we got one of those. When the weather got really hot Mother would put our butter and milk into a bucket and lower it to just above the water level in the well. There it stayed at a reasonable temperature.

The well farther from our home supplied the water for our house, for chicken and cattle and for the parsonage, some 200 yards away. The water was pumped via windmill to an elevated large tank and then flowed via gravity to its ultimate destinations.

(As an aside to that windmill. I still marvel that when my Uncle Walter Jacob would come on occasion to repair the top part of that windmill. He did not hesitate to ask me ( at some 8 years of age) to climb up there with him to bring up and then hand him some of the tools he needed. I do remember that I was scared and did not dare to even give a hint of that!)

Water was central to our life when I took my first job in Tracy, California. The farmers were completely dependent upon water from the Sacramento River and all the various open canals which brought the water to their fields. The importance of this whole system was immediately apparent when I first arrived because on the day after I arrived we all went to a big celebration  noting the opening of a new dam, the California Central Valley Water Project

Nowhere was the critical importance of daily water made more apparent than in our years in Hong Kong. At that time Hong Kong’s dependence on water from China made it  very vulnerable to whims of decisions those Chinese authorities made regarding how much water might be allowed to flow from the mainland to Hong Kong. We never had water 24 hours a day. At its worst we had water for 3 hours every 4thth day. Under no circumstances were we to drink that water unboiled. I remember that when I was on home leave after 5 years in Hong Kong,  I just could not get myself to brush my teeth with tap water.

A recent development I would never have dreamed of earlier in my life is the current practice of many people buying their drinking water small botte by  small bottle.

Just two more reflections on water: I drink almost no water. Most days I may drink 4 ounces at most. This dismays my medical doctors . But it seems to have no bad effect on my health. My  last little water story relates to my cousin Elmo who accompanied me on a trip to China. I told my fellow-travelers that they were not to drink tap water. Boiled water was available for purchase in every hotel room. The second day Elmo came with an important discovery and he proudly announced “ Hey, folks, don’t buy that bottled water. I discovered that the bourbon for sale in our minibars is cheaper than the water. Brush your teeth with that!”