The eye, when it opens, is like the dawn breaking in the night…a new world is there.
—JOHN O’DONOHUE, ANAM CARA
IN THE SAPPHIRE HOURS BEFORE sunrise, ice floes on the lake crack the mirror reflection of trees. Elsewhere in town, waterfalls tumble and spume in lofty dialects of water. Icy scarves loop through glacier-carved gorges, and winter reminds us that light airy bits of water can hurdle fences, collapse buildings, and bring a burly city to its knees. On this blue winter morning, ice forms a cataract on the eye of Lake Cayuga, and milky tusks adorn the inlet, but the whole lake never freezes solid. It can’t.
Luckily for us. Eccentric right down to our atoms, we’d be impossible without water’s weird bag of tricks. The litany of we’re only here because begins with this chilling one: We’re only here because ice floats. Other liquids contract and sink when they freeze, but water alone expands, in the process growing minute triangular pyramids that clump to form spacious, holey designs that float free. If ice didn’t rise, the oceans would have frozen solid long ago, along with all the wells, springs, and rivers. Without this presto chango of water, an element that one moment slips like silk through the hands and the next collapses rooftops and chisels gorges, Earth would be barren.
Since life bloomed in the seas, we need perpetual sips of fresh water to thrive. Become dehydrated, as I once did in Florida, and the brain’s salt flats dry out, mental life dulls, and only electrolytes dripped into a vein keep death at bay. We are walking basins, who quaff water and also bathe in it, irrigate with it, paddle through it, simmer with it, and are rained on by it, so we rarely notice how magical water is. Water can be liquid, vapor, crystal. Though water often looks like glass, and in some brittle forms can shatter like glass, and in others flow thick and slow as glass, it’s not made of silica as glass is. But it does sponsor glass. The sandy skirts edging some oceans are a form of glass crafted by water.
No water is new. Endlessly levitating, falling, and condensing, every drop is recycled from somewhere and somewhen else. The water in today’s stalk of celery may have dropped as rain in the Amazon last year, or fed an African well three million years ago. We’ve learned how to catch and carry water, but not, alas, precisely where we may wish. Half of the world’s rain showers down on the Amazon, falling thick as rubber, a place where I once walked through an eerie veil of 100 percent humidity that wasn’t raining.
Covering half of the planet, clouds look collaged onto the sky, Rorschach-like nomads that collapse and descend as rain. But they do not move through the air, they are air, minute droplets so light they’re carried on the wind. Thousands of tons of water, millions of drops, they look serene but are unstable, jostling hordes. Who could begin to classify them? No one dared until 1802, when French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck sorted clouds as: hazy, massed, dappled, broom-like, or grouped. Soon afterward British pharmacist Luke Howard proposed the four classes of cumulus, stratus, nimbus, and cirrus, which we haven’t revised much except to add the altitude, as in the rippling pink and white bands of altocumulus on display right now.
Aerial water can’t compete with the oceans for sheer volume, of course, but snowmelt and rain replenish lakes and rivers, springs and wells, and abounding life-forms, including six billion humans. I may say and think humans walk, but what we really do is flow. When we lie down like spirit levels, our waters flatten, but they keep moving, sliding, gliding, renewing. Even inactive folk end up travel-stained after a while, thanks to the body’s aqueducts and navies. Drinking, eating, excreting, and thinking water, our tissues are marshes and estuaries, our organs islands, our bloodstreams long rivers with creeks and feeders. Sloshing sacs of chemicals on the move, we leak from many orifices throughout our life and still carry the salty ocean in our blood, skin, sweat, and tears. Menstrual periods mirror the tides. We need water to oil joints, digest food, build the smile-bright enamel on our teeth. We are water’s way of reflecting on the life it promotes.
Because we’re mostly water ourselves, surrounded by water, we go with the flow, water down proposals, spend money like water, have liquid assets, dilute drinks, take the plunge, go through baptisms of fire, try not to be shallow. Past events we banish as water under the bridge. Gushing out alive after nine months afloat, we nonetheless fear death by water, fear getting in over our heads, until we’re drowning in work, flooded by emotion, and flailing just to keep our heads above water, while we dissolve in tears. Unless we deep-six whatever was needling us. We picture laughter rippling around a table, or a few words setting off a froth of excitement.
On our planet at least, living plants and animals need to ferry nutrients and send messages, and both require a benign liquid. Water is the great go-between. A medium fit to carry sediment or information or ships, it provides arteries for bodies and cities. We need water to assume new shapes, reorganize, change phase, assimilate, because each of our cells is a tiny saltwater lagoon with many harbors. When we enter the water, inserting our portable ocean into its, it feels snugly present, touching us all over, and we become pendant again, as we haven’t been since the gestation of our last swim. But the body remembers the feel of floating in the womb, which may be why the sound of water is enough to lull.
Life is opportunistic, it adapts, it exploits what’s available. So in one form or another, water greets us every day, from the liquid we splash on our faces to water locked inside the cells of nutritious heads of grain. We water our plants, our homes, our bodies. Our food is mainly water. And so water connects us to every other facet of life on earth, in one large flowing enterprise. Predator and prey share water holes, friend and foe share oases. Without water cultures founder, civilizations die. Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? Look for water. Water allows even unrelated substances to mix, tumble, and bark with electricity. Because water dissolves things, it’s easy to pollute, and because water is persuadable, it’s easy to rule. So protecting the planet’s fresh water becomes an act of self-preservation. Though we can’t always see downstream from reckless events, we pay dearly for that shortsightedness. Not if, but when. The web of life trembles on such fragile threads. Listen, now, in the distance, a calamity—can you hear it?—like thunder warnings before a summer storm.
A 130-pound woman is 65 pounds of plain water. But suppose I were entirely water? As water, I’d cascade and seep, soothe and corrode, serve as mirror or lens. I’d act as a traffic lane or a roadblock or a sacrament. I’d be invisible, odorless, colorless. Yet I’d batter the earth, I’d fall like andirons with large plunking raindrops, and blast away minute fragments of soil and rock, wearing down mountains, carving ice-cut valleys and frost-striped canyons. I’d stagger light. On rare occasions, as “diamond dust,” I’d swirl and fall from air too cold for snow. In clouds, turning to crystal I’d fall; but in lakes and seas, turning to crystal I’d float. Because the soul of water is change, I’d dissolve almost anything on my travels through the ground and body, carrying sap and serum, minerals and blood, tiny chem labs to power thoughts and, at times, abominations. I’d sponge up the world around me, absorb new personas. And then, for a while at least, I’d strut out of the shadows, take the stage, and become visible, seasoned, a creature of substance with a real personality.
In portraits I’d look animal: two hydrogen atoms forming my ears, one plump oxygen atom my face. I’d live in bondage to hydrogen, that small common waif of an atom, and fat combustible oxygen. When hydrogen cozies up to oxygen, the magnetic attraction is so fierce it’s hard to pry them apart. This would make me versatile, flexible, dynamic, with bonds continually breaking and reforging, as every puddle reacted as one electric whole, a fellowship that extended to entire oceans. I wouldn’t swarm over surfaces as a thin film, but stick and stretch, clump and pile together, creating a dragnet that grips and carries things along.
Water, water everywhere. I’d be insistent, incessant, in torrents, in teacups, clinging to cool rocks, wobbling prisms of dew, supplying a bucket-brigade of bees with coolant for summer hives, shaping a baby’s pudgy fingers. I’d ink the layout of cities, conduct traffic between empires, and incite border wars. I’d reflect so poignantly that humans would use the image to describe their mental world. I’d feed the rain-guzzling cottonwoods and willows, stiffen plant stems, pool belowground as a water table where life dines, and swirl on invisible winds across the sky. I’d bubble as saliva at the sight of a ripe apricot, ooze sweat during a dragon boat race, incubate life in womb-time. I’d incant poetry as I trickled over pebbles. I’d echo with whale song, crackle with fish talk, geyser up everywhere as life’s wellspring, and herald the beginning and end of all thirst.