A Good Drink of Water

People with arthritis get advance weather warnings and when I was awakened in the wee hours by shooting pain from my elbow up my arm, I got up to take ibuprofen and check the weather radar on line. Surprisingly a huge storm was moving over eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska, and northwest Kansas. It was sailing eastward as if in a hurry to be on the east coast to greet the rising sun.

Watching the mass moving on radar I tried to calculate whether the southern edge of the storm would hit Paradise if it were to follow its trajectory. Probably not, I thought, and went back to bed and deep sleep.

This morning I woke to the patter of rain against the window. I thought it was a nice little shower, but Dennis, who was already up making coffee, informed me that a big storm had passed through. Small tree limbs were broken and lying on the ground. The

rain gauge read 1½ inches. In the garden one six-foot tomato (our best one) and its cage were lying on the ground. Other tomatoes and pepper plant branches were broken and leaves littered the soil. There must have been a heck of a blow driving the rain. Our garden needed the rain, though, to continue producing vegetables for our table.

I happen to be in the midst of reading Rain: A Natural and Cultural History*, by Cynthia Barnett. It is a strong reminder of life’s dependence on rain. Without Earth’s moisture-trapping atmosphere there would be no life on earth. Every living thing depends on water.

Earth has a closed system when it comes to water. There’s a finite amount of water in and around our beautiful blue planet. Under certain temperature, wind, and other atmospheric conditions, rain falls from the sky. The earth retains water in soil, underground chambers, lakes, reservoirs, oceans, and ice caps at the poles. Water is recirculated into the atmosphere through evaporation at the earth’s surface.

Only about one percent of all the water in and surrounding our planet is available for our use. The remainder is either inaccessible to us or unsuitable. Think of “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” and humans’ costly efforts to desalinate ocean water.

Given our finite supply of water we are well advised to care for it as the treasure it is, safeguarding it for ourselves and for the various forms of life on which we depend for food. Mighty civilizations have died for lack of rain, such as Ur in what is now Iraq, where no rain fell for 300 years. Cities were abandoned and eventually were buried beneath the sand. Our civilization could die, too, if we spoil all of our available water through chemical contamination.

An enormous amount of water is being infused with a chemical cocktail to be used in fracking, the chemical process that frees oil from shale. Afterward, that once-good water is injected deep into the earth to protect us from contamination. That water is gone from our limited supply for a long, long time – perhaps ever.

Scientists have found disturbing evidence that 40 percent of our rain now contains glyphosate, the cancer-causing chemical in the herbicide Round Up. They also have shown that the chemical is in the water we drink because it has been found in human breast milk.

Glyphosate and other chemical wastes in the water I drink probably won’t be the death of me (after all, I’ll soon be an octogenarian) but I worry about what they will do to my grandchildren and their offspring. Stewardship of water is a virtue we must to practice for the sake of both ourselves and posterity.

In spite of wind damage I’m thankful for last night’s rain, and fervently hope it didn’t rain very much glyphosate.

*Another good read on this subject is in Bill Bryson’s chapter on water in  A History of Nearly Everything.

Copyright 2015 by Shirley Domer