Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [36]
Chapter 5
THE PUBLIC TROUGH
WAY BACK WHEN I first contracted water on the brain, probably from the good people of Fryeburg, I started a poll: do you know where your tap water comes from? Most people, even those who knew exactly how many miles the arugula on their plate had traveled, had no idea. Back in the day, everyone knew the source of his or her drinking water: its purity was a matter of life and death. Today, there is an infrastructure disconnect: we don’t know how water gets into our homes, where our energy comes from, or where our wastewater goes once it swirls down the drain. Not only can’t most of the respondents I poll name the source of their water, they don’t know whether it is surface or groundwater.
Groundwater would be the safer guess—that’s what a slight majority of Americans drink. It falls from the sky as snow or rain, then trickles through layers of organic and then inorganic material into the water table. Pumps pull the water up and store it in tanks, to be delivered by gravity or electricity, via more pumps, into homes. The rest of us drink surface water, which is pulled through intake pipes from lakes and rivers. Whether groundwater or surface water, almost all municipal supplies are dosed with a disinfectant such as chlorine (including Fryeburg’s), filtered, and then piped into homes, offices, and institutions.
I live in New York City, which has the largest drinkingwater system of any city in the nation. We drink surface water here, but we don’t drink very locally (apologies to the locavores of Gotham). The Hudson and the East Rivers, which surround us, are salty and dirty, and we polluted and then paved our springs and streams long ago. When most New Yorkers fill a glass today, they drink what fell as rain or snow in the Catskill Mountains, west of the Hudson River and more than a hundred miles away.
“It takes about a year for a drop of rain to make its way through the system to your tap,” Emily Lloyd, the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), tells me on a blustery winter day, a few months after my first visit to Hollis and Fryeburg. We’d been talking about the system for hours, in a top-secret control room in a tiny upstate town, a community that seems nearly deserted except for the comings and goings of water department trucks. In a windowless room, the commissioner and a young engineer explain how they manage the city’s most valuable resource while I stare at blue and green maps of the watershed, which with their ballooning reservoirs and thin connecting tubes remind me of a ruminant’s alimentary canal. The system’s vital statistics are huge and unreal to me—the capacity of the six largest reservoirs, the lengths of the aqueducts and tunnels—and so it is a relief to eventually burst into the brightness of the day and follow the babbling Esopus Creek down to the vast Ashokan.
We park on a bridge at the edge of the enormous reservoir and, ignoring the bluish mountains that form its backdrop and a phalanx of security guards in our foreground, gaze down onto the spillway, which curves and drops like a wedding cake, in four tiers, before sending its excess flow through a granite passage. The water that ruffles over the edge looks icy and pure. The setting is grand, just what you’d expect of an enormous public work, a massive manipulation of nature for the benefit of man. (Or at least the eight million privileged residents of New York City. The descendants of the thousands who were displaced when the reservoir drowned their homes, farms, and businesses weren’t nearly so admiring, nor were the families of the hundreds of men who’d been killed while blasting, digging, and hauling rock and earth to build the thing.)
If the Ashokan Reservoir is not the one true source of the city’s drinking water, akin to Perrier’s Vergèze or the original Poland Spring, it is still evocative shorthand for the sprawling upstate waterworks imagined by city fathers more than a century ago, an engineering achievement