The day after Thanksgiving, our well ran dry. Like most of our neighbors, we'd been entertaining a house full of guests, washing great numbers of dishes and hands. After a summer of drought, this was too much for the well. The pump whirred and whirred, but nothing flowed. We had lost our connection to water.
Eventually the well recovered, and so did we. But we aren’t taking water for granted, these days. We’re more careful to conserve, and we study what comes from the tap. We’ve learned, for instance, that as the water seeped back to the well shaft from fissures and crevices deep in the rock, it unsettled a layer of fine, black grit, which rose through the plumbing and swirled when we lifted a glass to the light.
Our uneasy spell without water led me back to Loren Eiseley’s book, The Immense Journey. Man, Eiseley observed, is a way water has of going about on dry land. To Eiseley, this was more than the biological observation that we are, by volume, substantially water. It was also a statement of perspective, a way of attaining the humility necessary to understand our origins in nature, our ripple in the branching stream.
In this issue of Endeavors, we haven’t ranged as far as Eiseley did on the subject of water, but we’ve covered more ground than we’d planned. When we chose water quality as a topic, we assumed that the relevant questions were these: How much bad stuff is in the water, and what are Carolina researchers doing to clean it up? Yes, we found some answers to these questions. But we also found that the topic of water quality rapidly annexes everything it touches.
The search for sources of pollution, for instance, does not confine itself to industrial hog farms or overloaded wastewater-treatment plants. It extends all the way to our doorsteps, to the fertilizer on our lawns. When we held our topic up to the light and looked at it closely, it swirled with a cloudy confusion of issues that will never quite settle, that are constantly stirred.
But as we worked on these stories, one message was clear: Every one of us is a part of the flow. And so, when we ask about the health of our water, we are, in a sense, asking about the health of ourselves.