Behold the Fuschia With Apologies to Ogden Nash

Behold the delicate Fuschia
With its fusion of beauty and grace.
fallacy - phallic pistols stem protrusion profusion confusion fusion illusion muse fused infused refused ruse

Potable Water

Introduction of the Term
I confess the first time I heard the term "potable water", I thought it was referring to more tea that classmates assigned to the basement of the college dormitory where I was living during my college days in the early 1970s.

The High Desert of SW Idaho
Despite being raised and spending the majority of my life living in the high desert of southwest Idaho, initially I never gave the thought of potable water being accessible in sufficient quantities other than wondering at times which of the town's two water towers our house water came from. Frankly, as a child, I never gave the idea of potable water being limited and found the idea of paying for bottled water in a gas station only ror suckers to naive to walk around the corner and use the garden hose. God forbid that there come a day when water bottled and sold by the quart inside the gas station would cost more than the gas being pumped outside the gas station.

Backpacking
My first experience of encountering not having potible water accessible was when I started backpacking as a kid. I was taught that water could be your enemy when it came to trying to keep your pack as light as possible. There were companies that specialized in packaging dehydrated food for backpack trips. My memory was that you had to be pretty tired at the end of the day of hiking to be able to convince yourself that the re-constituted dehydrated green beans were anything else than green-colored cardboard. Freeae-dried food didn't come along until later. We quickly learned to try to avoid having water of any kind while hiking. Afterall, like manna from heaven, there were newly formed creeks intersecting with the trail once you got up into the meadows and trees. The creeks derived a thousand or two feet higher in elevation where the winter snow pack was melting and gurgling down mountainside.

At the time, I had no need of a belt, but for backpacking, I rigged one up of nylon cord so that I could hang a Sierra cup with which I could dip into the literally just barely less than freezing, ice cold, clear water of an Idaho creek in the Sawtooth mountains. As my father said on many occasions, the water was worth the price (meaning the effort expended hiking up to the creek) of admission.

During my latter part of college in the mid-1970s, my college hiking buddies and I started hearing of this disturbing report of a disease called giardia that was spreading through the mountain waters of the backcountry - Idaho included. Most of us did not want to address the issue. Maybe it wouldn't spread to Idaho. It was absurd to hike all that way and then have to boil or dissolve pills to kill the microscopic parasitic SOB that was ruining the whole concept of backpacking. Eventually, small, lightweight filtering pumps would be developed. But the concept for me had been introduced, that potable water - whether mountain-fresh creek water or even room temperature - it couldn't be assumed that it would always be present.

US Forest Service Fire Lookout
Fast forward to July of 1977. I had recently graduated from college, had gotten married the month before, and was assigned to spend the summer fire-season living a US Forest Service fire lookout tower along with my new bride and our 6-week old puppy until the end of August when I would start my professional teaching career assigned to teach second-grades students. After quickly discovering short-wave radio, and having the companionship of a new bride and pup, I thought I had cleverly dealt with the anticipated issue of loneliness for the summer. What turned out to be the bigger challenge was the issue of potable water.

By definition, a fire lookout is at the top of a mountain, or in our case, a mountain ridge. Due to the law of gravity, water did not flow up the mountain. Fortunately, there was an amazing spring bubbling up from the hillside just over a quarter of a mile away. Coming directly out of the ground, we did not feel we needed to worry about giardia, just the matter of transporting the water uphill. We immediately got into the routine of taking four one-gallon canteens to the spring, filling them and bringing them up to the lookout. We found that we could function readily enough off of three gallons of water daily. The fourth gallon was stored in two milk cans in the shade under the lookout for when I abandoned my new bride to go start my teaching career, leaving her and our pup to fend for themselves amongst the huckleberries and occasional hiker that came by. The thought of living happily on a mere three gallons of water a day for two of us now seems completely impossible - even without having to hike down and up a hillside to obtain it.

Paraguay
My next experience with limited potable water was during my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay, South America. Similar to the red clay of Georgia or the Grand Canyon, much of Paraguay maintains a reddish color from its clay content in the soil and often in the water.










Paraguay Alaska But by the mid-1980s, SW Idaho was starting to experience "brown outs" in which even irrigation water was needing to be limited. Despite having to deal with school closures due to snow, and having to push myself to clear sideways and drive ways (back then I was young and energetic enough to also clear the snow from three of the homes of neighboring senior citizens as well), I still prayed that there would be a sufficient snow pack up in the mountains for an adequate spring run off into the Lucky Peak Reservoir. After more than one or two years of restricted irrigation schedules on public service advice that if it's brown, flush it down, but yellow is mellow, my first wife and I focused only on wetter areas when seeking to leave Idaho for friendlier and more lucrative places to teach. We settled in the Washington Puget Sound area. power outages in Washington But even now in 2024, having returned to the Idaho high desert in order to marry a lady I dated back during high school, I confess to succumbing to the guilt pleasure of excess when it comes to enjoying frequent baths for soaking and resting my diabetic feet and averaging well more than once a day showers to deal with my sense of feeling sticky from excessive perspiration. corporate greed contamination of aquafer depletion of aquafer Old West fights over water rights