By Jordan Bradstreet
Water: the elixir of life. Everyone and everything loves water. No one would take water to a candle lit dinner; it’s not that kind of love. It is a bond like the one some might have with their parents, a bond that is often taken for granted and given little thought. This attachment is so fundamental, and so secure for many of us, that we never think about it. We forget that without water our skin would shrivel, our sweat would cake our bodies in salt, and our minds would plunge into delirium as they dry out.
Love for water, though, is rarely unconditional. Not all water is friendly. The water of the ocean is cold and abrasive, and we’re constantly fighting hurricanes, floods, and leaky roofs. Water doesn’t have any care for our love towards it. It does what it will, and sometimes it is an agent of destruction and death. We do a lot to ensure it will bring us life more often than death. We’ve funneled it into our homes, we’ve calmed it with dams, and we’ve harnessed it to power our cities. But what is the crown jewel of our triumphs? It is something mundane: bottled water.
Bottled water is incredible precisely because it is so mundane. It is the antithesis of the chaos of nature. Every bottle is a lifeless and sterile sea – each entirely identical to its predecessors. It has transcended all of time and space. We don’t know where it comes from. They say it comes from a glacier, or a spring, or God’s tears, but all we know is what is said on the bottle. Maybe they actually filter and bottle up my own sewage and sell it back to me. Who could say? And it tastes fine, so who would care at the end of the day? There are no limits to the perfect equanimity and uniformity of bottled water; it is truly the pinnacle of industrialism and man’s triumph over nature.
Grip. Twist, snap. Lift and lean back. Gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp.
The mild thirst that had been tugging at the edge of your mind is quenched, and your shoulders relax as the water hits you with its soothing, cool relief. How convenient! How renewing! Truly what a gift! What great ease and control you have with bottled water – as long as you’re strong enough to open the lid, that is.
It gets better: bottled water comes in different flavors. With tap water we don’t get to choose the taste. We balk at its subtle impurities. Who knows what’s in those pipes that deliver it to us? Do you really trust the government to give you clean water? Fortunately there is bottled water for everyone. There is Dasani, Aquafina, Smart Water, and for those of a more aristocratic bent, Fiji Water – water straight from the heavens, untouched by man and his sins. Don’t forget that there is more to choosing a kind of bottled water than how it tastes. A small part of your identity is at stake. Your choice is just as much part of you as the clothes you wear or the kind of music you listen to.
All of this has brought a great turn inward. Our choice of water has more to do with our frivolous tastes and identities – more to do with ourselves – than the outside world it comes from. It is brought so far away from the untamed, constructive, and destructive force of water in nature that we never even think to consider its source and what it once was before reaching us. We don’t stop to picture the mighty Colorado River fizzling out before it reaches the sea, the aquifers under our communities pumping out less than they did last year, or the factory gulping down oil to churn out thousands of bottles every day. Why would any of that be on our minds? We don’t see any of it. For all we know, the things we consume came from Mars. And why should we care? Whatever problems exist out there are not our problems. They happen somewhere else to someone else or something else. We don’t even see that there is a problem most of the time, because no matter what happens out there in the world, the same sterile and tame water is always there when we go to the store. Everything is fine. Everything will be fine until it isn’t – and we might not see it until it happens.