Drinking Water (3 page)
Water is now widely viewed as much as a commodity as a public good. The highest-margin product in restaurants and convenience stores, twenty ounces of bottled water sells, at more that $8 per gallon, for far more than gasoline, yet it costs a fraction to produce.
No wonder Nestlé is so interested in McCloud. But how to explain the paradox that in the United States today, at a time when we are delivering more clean tap water to more people than ever before, sales of bottled water are gushing through the roof? In the face of this growth, environmentalists, church groups, and local governments have turned their sights on bottled water, denouncing the packaging waste and transport impacts.
T
HE LARGER THEMES OF
M
C
C
LOUD, THEN, SUGGEST MUCH BUT LEAVE
even more unanswered. Where did bottled water come from and why has it become so popular? Why is the opposition so intense? Have natural waters always held such a powerful allure? Is our water safe to drink? What can be done for the billions of people who do not have access to safe drinking water? Will the combined threats of climate change and pollution soon make safe drinking water a scarce resource in America? And, as safe drinking water becomes increasingly scarce, who should own it? In answering these questions, the stories recounted in this book will feature different actors, different regions, and different eras, but all will be concerned with fundamentally the same issue: our relationship with drinking water.
“Relationship” may seem a strange word to use for a glass of water, but it is apt. This book argues that how we conceive of drinking water has always been fundamental to our relationship with the liquid. And the relationship is ever evolving. Drinking water has long been the source of both conflict and veneration, of healing and sickness, and it has always been central to our sense of well-being.
From ancient societies to the present, our conceptions of how this resource should be understood and managed—as sacred or market commodity, safe or unhealthy—have changed dramatically. In the chapters that follow, we will chart the course of that evolution.
I
N THE WINTER OF
1512, J
UAN
P
ONCE DE
L
EÓN HAD IT ALL
. Two decades earlier, he had set off for the New World as a raw seventeen-year old deckhand on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage. When Columbus returned home, Ponce de León chose to stay on and seek his fortune. As his biographer later described, Ponce de León was a fierce fighter, hard and ambitious: “a man spirited, sagacious and diligent in all warlike matters.” These were valuable qualities in Spain’s emerging empire, where fabulous wealth was waiting to be taken, and they assured his rapid advance. He led the conquest of Puerto Rico, claiming the island for Spain, and was appointed governor in 1509. With lands and wealth to his name, he had officially arrived.
Life at the top, though, was unsatisfying. Official duties and managing territories for the Crown were not the life for a conquistador. He wanted more. Seeking new adventures, he set out again, but this time in search of far more than the riches of land and gold. He had heard stories from local Indians of a truly remarkable place. As Washington Irving, the famed short story writer, later described:
[This place] promised, not merely to satisfy the cravings of his ambition, but to realize the fondest dreams of the poets. They assured him that, far to the north, there existed a land abounding in gold and in all manner of delights; but, above all, possessing a river of
such wonderful virtue, that whoever bathed in it would be restored to youth!
Here was the dream of the alchemist realized! One had but to find this gifted land, and revel in the enjoyment of boundless riches and perennial youth! Nay, some of the ancient Indians declared that it was not necessary to go so far in quest of these rejuvenating waters, for that, in a certain island of the Bahama group, called Bimini, which lay far out in the ocean, there was a fountain possessing the same marvelous and inestimable qualities.
Juan Ponce de León listened to these tales with fond credulity. He was advancing in life, and the ordinary term of existence seemed insufficient for his mighty plans. Could he but plunge into this marvelous fountain or gifted river, and come out with his battered war-worn body restored to the strength and freshness and suppleness of youth, and his head still retaining the wisdom and knowledge of age, what enterprises might he not accomplish in the additional course of vigorous years insured to him!
Entranced, Ponce de León sought a charter from Spain’s King Ferdinand II for profits from any lands he might discover. The king granted his wish, and in March 1513, Ponce de León set out with three ships and sixty-five men. His pursuit of these magical waters took him throughout the Caribbean. He discovered the Gulf Stream, so critical to later navigators, and came upon a new land on Easter Sunday that he called Pascua de Florida—“flowers of Easter.” It was he, not Columbus, who found his way to the American continent. His discovery of Florida opened the way to future European settlement in North America. By most measures, his career should have been a great success.
Ponce de León failed, however, in his overriding quest. On his second voyage, he was wounded by an Indian attack in Florida. He died from his wounds in Havana, Cuba, in 1521. The intrepid explorer, who did so much to chart the seas and lands of the Caribbean, never set eyes on the Fountain of Youth he sought so obsessively. Ironically, while Ponce de León was unable to drink the fabled elixir, his search has gained an immortality of its own. His quest for the mythical Fountain of Youth has become one of the most famous of all adventure tales.
Juan Ponce de León, 1474–1521
Sadly, though, little of the story is true.
Ponce de León did sail with Columbus; he was governor of Puerto Rico; he set sail on expeditions with royal blessing in 1513 and again in 1521; and he did discover the Gulf Stream and Florida. Washington Irving’s riveting account of his search for the Fountain, though, has more in common with Irving’s other classic fables, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” than the actual voyage.
Like his contemporaries and other successful men throughout history who have it all yet still want more, Ponce de León sought gold and new lands where he might be appointed governor. There is no evidence that he ever looked for or even knew about a Fountain
of Youth. That romantic search was apparently fabricated by the Spanish court’s historian, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, writing fourteen years after Ponce de León’s death. Spicing up the story, Oviedo even claimed that the explorer had sought the Fountain to cure his sexual impotence (
el enflaquecimiento del sexo
). Oviedo’s failure to mention that Ponce de León took his mistress with him on the voyage, or that he was the father of four children, suggests he may have held a somewhat poor view of the conquistador. But why let facts get in the way of a good story?
Subsequent historians took the search for the Fountain as given, some imputing the powers from drinking the waters, others from bathing in them. The myth is alive and well today. St. Augustine, Florida, boasts the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, where, according to its website, you can “Drink from the Legendary Fountain!”
If the search for the Fountain of Youth was made up, then why has the story stuck around for so long? What is it about Juan Ponce de León’s mythical quest that has struck such a popular chord in successive generations for almost five hundred years?
In part, the legend speaks to our shared longing for eternal youth, to our fear of aging and inevitable loss. How else to explain the attraction of cosmetics and plastic surgery to those approaching the far side of middle age? But the Fountain of Youth story resonates deeply within us for another reason. It draws from far older legends—stories of eternal youth, passages to the afterlife, miraculous cures, and mystical wisdom. In fact, drinking water myths appear in every culture, though with different meanings and in different contexts. These special waters serve as a medium to the supernatural, a means of connecting the physical and the metaphysical.
This chapter explores our deepest relationships with drinking water—those of myths and legends from around the world—from Babylon, Greece, and China to Ireland and India. In recounting these stories we learn not only about past cultures but something of how our current drinking water myths define visions of ourselves. For, to be sure, the mythmaking continues today. Just look at the
market power of “natural” bottled waters, or at the millions of pilgrims who voyage to Lourdes, France, every year to take its holy waters.
P
ONCE DE
L
EÓN’S QUEST FOR THE
F
OUNTAIN OF
Y
OUTH IS HARDLY
the only legend of a special substance that renews youth. The first volume of the amazingly successful Harry Potter series follows the attempt by Lord Voldemort to seize the regenerative powers of the Sorceror’s Stone. Many of the eternal youth legends turn on drinking special waters as the means of renewal. These tales go back well before the time of Hogwarts or even the discovery of the New World. In fact, the earliest version goes back at least five thousand years to ancient Mesopotamia and the journey of Ishtar to the Underworld, one of the very oldest of recorded legends.
Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, is grief-stricken over the death of her lover, Tammuz. Descending into the Underworld, she hopes to find Tammuz, resurrect him with the Water of Life, and return with him to the world of the living. During her descent, however, Ishtar must pass through seven gates. At the first gate, the guard demands she give up her crown; at the second gate, her earrings; at the third, her necklace, and so on until, upon passing the seventh gate, she stands naked. Ereshkigal, goddess of the Underworld, insulted by Ishtar’s willful descent into her domain, then afflicts her with all manners of disease. Thus is Ishtar gradually stripped of her clothing, flesh, and ultimately her life. With her death, fertility on earth ceases. No calves are born; no harvests are gathered. Only upon the entreaties of the other gods does Ereshkigal provide Ishtar the Water of Life and allow her to return, alone.
A Fountain of Youth legend developed later in the Muslim world, with the tale of Alexander the Great and his vizier Khidr. The legend commences with Alexander’s fortunate discovery of Adam’s will (perhaps this makes law the world’s oldest profession). The will relates that God had created a spring beyond the mountains surrounding the world, in the Land of Darkness. The water of this spring was unique—“whiter than milk, colder than ice, sweeter
than honey, softer than butter, and sweeter smelling than musk.” Those who drank from it would be granted eternal life. Khidr set off to find this distant place. Enduring terrible hardships, he traveled through the Land of Darkness where he found the spring, bathed, and drank its sweet waters. He became immortal. Upon returning to show Alexander its location, however, he could not find the spring again.
Tales of life-renewing water were by no means entirely situated in ancient times. The English knight Sir John Mandeville provided an eyewitness account little more than a hundred fifty years before Ponce de León’s supposed quest. Mandeville’s travel memoir was hugely popular. Translated into every major European language by the year 1400, it was one of the books that Leonardo da Vinci brought with him to Milan. Columbus used it to plan his voyage to China. Mandeville wrote of a forest near the city of Polumbum, India:
Beside it is a mountain, from which the city takes its name, for the mountain is called Polumbum. At the foot of the mountain is a noble and beautiful well, whose water has a sweet taste and smell, as if of different kind of spices. Each hour of the day the water changes its smell and taste. And whoever drinks three times of that well on an empty stomach will be healed of whatever malady he has. And therefore those who live near that well drink of it very often. I, John Mandeville, saw this well, and drank of it three times, and so did my companions. Ever since that time I have felt the better and healthier. … Some men call that well the
fons iuuentuitis
, that is, the Well of Youth; for he who drinks of it seems always young. They say this water comes from the Earthly Paradise, it is so full of goodness.
Mandeville paints a fantastic scene, and one wonders what else he might have been drinking. Who would not want to discover such a magical place? The famed sixteenth-century German painter Lucas Cranach’s vision of the Fountain is shown on the facing page.
