Last fall, my dog and I moved to a rural Rocky Mountain house-share from our Brooklyn apartment. On our first Rocky day, I stepped on something spiky in our meadow.
My new housemate pronounced it a cactus. "This is a desert," he added, before heading off to juggle fire in town. As a newly-non-East Coaster, I was amazed that a mountain could be a desert, too.
But this fact hit home, big-time, the other morning, when I turned on my bathroom sink and nothing happened. The loo didn't flush. The kitchen sink was dry.
"Could be the well," my housemate said. Then he set off toward the highway, cold-weather layered in leather and fleece. Minutes later, the mystery was solved. The tank in our pump-house had frozen.
Our pump-house is a small wooden shed sheltering a tank of water drawn from the well on our property. Like a knight in steel armor, the tank waits to be tapped by someone turning on a sink or shower inside our house. But someone had left the pump-house door ajar in sub-zero temps. The tank now held a hundred-or-so gallons of ice.
Folks familiar with the ways of well-water know that only a) time and b) high temps can unfreeze a pump-house tank.
But I was used to receiving my water from The Catskills reservoir, a water tower and rust-dusted pipes. The idea of "No Water" lived in my personal Land of "No Way", somewhere between the Tooth Fairy's condo and same-day reservations at Babbo.
"My name is Sharon," I told my reflection, five minutes into my new Life Without Water. "And I'm an acqua-holic."
I tried to work. But then I'd go to the sink to pour a glass of water. I'd feed the dog to distract myself. Then I tried to wash my hands.
Luckily, no hydration is the Mother of Invention. I brushed my teeth with lemonade, melted ice cubes to make coffee and called a friend, who invited me over to fill my buckets. My friend is a Rocky realtor today. But when she was a teen, she told me, she'd lived in a school bus in Kentucky, drinking rainwater run-off from the roof.
Back at home, I researched the What's and Why's of water:
* Through my NYC friend, Liz, I learned about the Blue Planet Run. The organization, started by a philanthropic runner Jin Zidel, hopes "to deliver clean drinking to 200,000,000 people by 2027" by sponsoring long-and-short fundraising runs, including a series of relay races this spring. One billion people are currently without clean water, according to UN figures used by Blue Planet Run.
*Here in the Rockies, my friend Anne writes about matters enviro-energetic. Big Coal is number one on Anne's list of eco-nemeses, for reasons that include water. In an era of wind and solar, coal plants don't just fill the air and rip the land, she told me. They (along with other big industries) deploy mega-quantities of otherwise-useable water to cool their workings.
*In Atlanta, I found a kick-ass blog that chronicles the Georgia water shortage, along with crises in the Carolinas and - gulp! - The Rockies. According to the blog, water is the like the unacknowledged elephant in the local and global room.
"It doesn't seem like people are concerned enough,'' Atlanta Water Shortage's creator, Mickey Mellen, told Bloomberg News. "What happens when we run out? Nobody has a real answer.''
I felt pretty guilty reading those words. I didn't have an answer to America's water crisis. Even worse? Until my pump-house tank went kaflooey, I didn't have a question, or even a clue. Food banks and Santa-less kids have always been my top take-action passions. On a personal note, purple mountains majesty inspire my wonder. Oceans inspire my fear of drowning.
Part of my ignorance about water came from bliss. Back East, water was everywhere - at least, it seemed to be. All of it was drinkable (at least it seemed to be). I'd never realized the stuff could run out.
But here in the Rockies, I've learned, there's water. And then there's Water. The former is the kind that people drive to, or swig from plastic bottles. The latter is the stuff of life.
A recent New Yorker article says that industrial change may be our greatest source of environmental salvation.
That sounds right to me. At the same time, I'm looking for Big things little I can do to set things righter, water-wise.
My house went without water for two small-but-huge days. That experience convinced me: Hell may be a cold and thirsty place.
Within weeks, the desert outside my house will bloom thanks to waters unseen.
But the question remains, what will we do when the water runs out?