Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [1]
At the bottom of the valley we park near five matching well houses, smaller versions of the stone building uphill. We walk into the woods and down a staircase flanked by white pine and larch. Where the slope bottoms out, tussock sedges line a shallow, sandy-bottomed raceway—narrow canals lined with boards. “The stream feeds into a trout hatchery,” Brennan explains, pointing toward a shed in the distance. I walk along the watercourse, looking for springs. The ground is soft, and the water bubbles here and there through fallen leaves and watercress. Finally I see what I am looking for. I squat in a patch of swamp dewberry and contemplate a tiny boil of water.
“Can I drink it?” I ask. Brennan shifts his weight and hesitates before saying, “If you want to.” If I expect encouragement, it isn’t forthcoming.
Filled with a sense of moment, I bend and dip my hand into the water, which appears black. I check to make sure there is nothing obvious swimming in my palm, then close my eyes and sip. “So this is it,” I think. “I’m drinking from the source.”
The water tastes good to me. It is cold—forty-five degrees according to Brennan—and it is fresh. It has no smell. Beyond that, I can say only that I feel privileged to be drinking straight from the ground, a rare possibility in this age of ubiquitous animal-borne diseases and pollution. I can choose from nearly a thousand types of bottled water on store shelves, but I can’t, with infinitesimally few exceptions, drink from a naturally occurring body of water. Magically appearing from inside the earth, springwater has always had a powerful mystique. Civilizations have fought over such resources.
But I’m not feeling any mystique right now. What I’m mostly thinking as I sip anew is that this simple substance, rising in a rill not five hundred feet upstream from the Shy Beaver trout hatchery, is the driving force behind a multimillion-dollar plant that directs three hundred million gallons of water a year into the farthest reaches of New England, New York, and parts west. I try to stay focused on the moment, the elemental and pure (at least until it flows through Shy Beaver) nature of this liquid, but I can’t help thinking that this water is so much more: a signature product of the world’s largest food corporation, a flash point for activists environmental, religious, and legal, and either the biggest scam in marketing history or a harbinger of far worse things to come.
Brennan doesn’t hurry me; he doesn’t ask what I think of his water. He explains the morphology of the earth: the way glaciers retreated from this part of Maine thirteen thousand years ago and, in the process, formed deep beds of sand and gravel that expertly filtered the water. He shows me some test wells along the raceway and explains that water pumped through boreholes, the wells inside those little stone buildings, can be labeled spring if it has substantially the same chemical makeup as the actual spring, if it comes from the same geologic stratum as the spring, and if a hydraulic connection between the two can be proved. “And we did that,” Brennan says.
We take a look inside one of the well houses—more security cameras, more spotless linoleum and gleaming pipes—then Brennan locks up and we head back up to the bottling plant. We’re almost out of the woods when suddenly an electronic alarm shrieks through the silent forest. Rising from the valley floor, it drives crows from their treetops and brings my hands to my ears. Whoop, whoop, whoop—ten nerve-jangling blasts in a row, then a pause, then ten more. Brennan stomps on the brake and speed-dials the bottling plant, a look of mild panic on his face. Waiting for advice from HQ, he turns toward me and says, “You know all those caps getting screwed onto bottles that we just saw?” It’s a blur to me, those half-liter containers moving around the plant at warp speed, more than five million containers a day, but I nod. “Well, all