Water is Everything

Like the need to be free, water is Indivisible, ancient, unstoppable. You may use it to wash your face or sprinkle it on your garden, but it’s still all the same water and so far it continues to bless us. Consider the Atlantic at Amagansett. Endless August days sticky with suntan lotion, reading awful paperback novels, digging for clams in the shallows with your toes. Later, prying the clams open with a special knife, rinsing out the sand, and cooking up a massive pot of New England chowder. Or even earlier, those interminable rides on the el all the way out to Rockaway to visit Aunt Ada and Uncle Teddy, his bald head shining, his belly growing larger every year. These were my relatives who moved every summer during the New York dog days from their over-furnished apartment on 101st street into one of those flimsy shacks lining the side streets off the ocean at Rockaway Beach. Consider the ferocity of the waves there, dragging you under, back where you came from, so you thought each time you’d never see land again. Inhale the aroma of the salt air infiltrated by the scent of dead fish. Listen to the plaintive cawing of crows. The Atlantic is what I know. I can see the day-long card games. All the other Uncle Teddys on folding chairs playing pinochle, the other Aunt Adas playing canasta. All the old people blissed out, barefoot in the sand.

Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash

I didn’t meet up with the Pacific until much later. But oh my, the Pacific at Big Sur, the Pacific in Costa Rica. The sense I had that Tahiti was just over there on the other side of the clouds. In Big Sur, we watched the surf from hot tubs at Esalen. In Costa Rica, in the town of Manuel Antonio between the jungle and the volcano, we drank rum out of coconuts. The ocean was around the corner, just like in Rockaway. The land life was provisional. Clothing skimpy. Buildings wobbly, designed for intermittent brief rain showers. In Tobago, where we went more than twenty times, it never rained unless you flew in before the first of the year and then only for five minutes to moderate the Caribbean heat. In Tobago, snorkeling off Buccoo Reef, you would meet fish in canary yellow, carmine, iridescent purple. It was like living inside a kaleidoscope.

71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water and that doesn’t include the 60% of the composition of our bodies that is water, pure and simple. Sweat, saliva, blood plasma. We are swimming in the stuff. It is our habitat and who we are.

From the great oceans and enormous bodies of water like Lake Superior at Grand Marais, I am reflecting on the rivers that branch out in all directions. I can see the Mississippi between Minneapolis and St. Paul carrying the folktale of American history, the enslaved tied up in steerage, the cotton bales in cargo. I remember the filthy Hudson of my girlhood, gliding past the imposing apartment houses on Riverside Drive, separating the great city from neon New Jersey. I see the Red Cedar River behind my son’s cabin in western Wisconsin, the woods on its banks an amusement park for deer and the occasional bear.

Through feats of know-how unknown to me, some of this water is captured in reservoirs or retrieved from wells dug in backyards and then through further miraculous engineering directed into pipes that allow you to calibrate the hot and cold just as you like it to take a bath in a big porcelain tub and later to fill a glass with the stuff, cold, transparent and delicious. You pour the contents of the glass down into the dark, red, wet inner reaches of your body and it keeps you alive. Every one of the eight billion people in the world must drink this elixir of life every single day. We are all, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Mahmoud Khalil, JD Vance, on the receiving end of this sacred gift, more precious than anything you can fold up in a box covered in wrapping paper and tied up in ribbon. Regarding water, we are the same. Dependent, even helpless. We desecrate the biosphere when we fail to recognize this. We have participated, unwittingly, in a massive experiment in diversity going back hundreds of millions of years to our ancestors. Not the ones from Hungary and Romania, in my case, or South Africa where Elon Musk’s forebears originated. Not indigenous people in the forest or chimpanzees and other primates. But microbes, the first organisms to colonize terrestrial environments. Every one of us is descended from colonizing microbes that transitioned out of the water onto the land. Note the words colonizing and transitioned. Everything is and always has been about movement, about migration, about flowing, about indivisible water. We are all in the same boat even though some people erroneously believe they are in first class.

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