207. Water

I love water. I know that’s not a particularly American thing, but an earthly thing by which I am haunted. I was born on the shores of Payette Lake in McCall, Idaho and raised on the banks of the Salmon and Little Salmon rivers. The water in Idaho has always had a purity that as I age is gradually being muddied by politics. That makes me angry and I do what I can to prevent it.

The waters where I have lived sometimes bubble forth from the ground in hot springs. In winter as a child I had the privilege of being able to soak in hot baths that were naturally heated in the earth. In summer I was able to swim in lakes and rivers. We used to take tire inner tubes and float down the Salmon and Little Salmon rivers. Sometimes, on trips to Boise, we would float the Boise River as it slowly drifted through all the parks as if we were in a wilderness. Water and the waterways around me have always been akin to freedom of want or worry away from the craziness of human strife. I have spent hours drifting on Payette Lake, Lake Coeur d’Alene, Lake Pend O’Reille, Priest Lake and countless alpine lakes in the mountains of the Northwest and western Canada. A good vacation for me is to go anywhere there is a large body of water.

Of course, I also love to drink water and I find it maddening that anywhere in the United States there would be municipal waters unfit for drinking. What happened in Flint, Michigan is simply criminal and enrages me that such a thing would happen out of negligence or greed in this country.  Yet I am certain it does happen in small towns across the country on a daily basis, not just a one-off boil order that one might not be surprised by after a flood or natural disaster.

I believe in protecting our waters. It amazes me the stories of people in the mining district of North Idaho and their outbreaks of cholera in the early 20^th century. People have known forever that you don’t ingest your own feces, yet they would drink the water downstream from where they knew the privies dropped right into the river? We still do stupid stuff like that to our water only now big corporations or municipal governments hide it because we all know that it is dangerous. So, I try to stay apprised of what is going on with water here in Idaho. I want it to stay clean. While I seldom fish anymore, I still want others to be able to do so. I still want to camp on the shores of Priest Lake and watch for trout. I want Redfish Lake to again turn red with the annual return of Sockeye salmon.

Water in my part of the world is a precious resource because the western part of North America is largely desert and the mountains serve to scrape off the moisture of Pacific storms, preserving it in snow pack and glaciers that thaw in summer to green our otherwise barren lands. I love that. I don’t want to lose that for myself, for my children, or for any of my descendants. I want to be taken to the north shore of Payette Lake during a full moon and swim in the moonlit waters. I want to canoe from the north shores of lower Priest Lake to the upper Priest and watch for bear and moose on the shores. I want to stand on the edge of the Snake River Canyon and feel the mist of Shoshone falls wetting my face. American waters, Northwestern waters, Idaho waters provide me life and haunt my being. I love that.