We Drank Water Straight from the Stream

My thanks to the organizers of Blog Action Day for a great idea, well implemented, and here’s hoping that it changes the world. I’m certainly proud to be participating. I’m also happy to see this happening, belated or not.

I have to admit that it’s a bit disheartening to think that we were talking about environmental issues back in 1964 when I was a sophomore in high school in suburban California. So much of what Al Gore has finally convinced a lot of people is true was already there. My family joined the Sierra Club in 1964, in part because of an annoying 15-year-old (me) who wouldn’t shut up.

I’m happy to see the success of An Inconvenient Truth, and the success of blog action day. Later is better than never.

So much has changed for the worse in so little time. Here’s one simple example. My wife and I used to take our kids, now grown, into the high Sierra mountains in California every summer. We rented a burro at the Tuolumne Meadows stables in Yosemite, and went up into the mountains where we would be two or three days hike from the nearest road. You see the stream in the background in the picture here? We drank out of it, used it to cook our food, without any worries about salmonella or parasites or anything.  That picture was taken in 1988. We didn’t carry bottled water, we didn’t carry iodine pills, we didn’t boil the water, it was clean runoff from Sierra snowmelt. It tasted so good. It was deliciously cold, clear, and completely clean.

In fact, we used to carry aluminum Sierra Club cups on our belts. Instead of lugging water, the cup would bang pleasantly along with the beat of our walking pace, keeping time to the hike, there in an instant. Streams came along at perfectly reasonable intervals, every half hour or so.

I just Googled the Sierra Club cup. They’re producing them again, but as a tribute to the past. They had been discontinued for at least 10 years. After all, what good is an aluminum cup for dipping in streams? Just get a plastic water bottle with a section top.

So that’s just a detail, I know, but details are the only way I can get a handle on this. Those days are gone now.  It hasn’t been that long. Our grown-up children, the oldest of them now in their 30s, remember that well. Our younger children,  now in their 20s, have no such memory. The idea of drinking water straight out of a stream sounds like some scratchy old black-and-white storyteller from the distant past.

When my kids are the age I am now, what else will they be telling their kids about? I guess polar bears and penguins are already doomed. “They used to live in the wild, dear, not just in zoos.”  Will they be telling them that there were streams running down the mountainsides, fed by melting snow? Yosemite Falls? The San Francisco Bay?