I heard on the radio the other day that some parents are sending plastic bottles of water to school with their kids so that they don’t have to drink out of the water fountains. The issue is one of the prevention of disease. Who knows what was on those little lips that last curled around the spout just before your pride and joy approached the water tap?
These parents would not have done well in the good old days of the one-room country schoolhouse such as the one I attended. Not only did we not have plastic bottles when l was a kid, but anyone who suggested water should be bottled and sold would have had to leave the county for good from the embarrassment he would have earned by even making such a ridiculous suggestion. That would be like capturing the air or sunlight or wind in a bottle. And even if somebody could have done any of those things back then, it would have been the brave or silly soul who would have laid out money to buy some of what was always considered to be free.
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It was not that water was not important. In fact, it was vital to sustain life and to run a farm, and ingenious ways were devised to bring the supply of the stuff to where it was needed. The most graceful and beautiful of these was, of course, the traditional windmill, or at least the North American knock-off of the bigger ones used in Europe. No huge motor chugging away to draw the water to the surface. Just the gentle, almost noiseless whirring of the fan 25 feet in the air that activated a shaft that brought up the water and splashed it into a big trough for the livestock.
But rural people had a somewhat different relationship with water than do people today, a kind of schizophrenic outlook, in a way. On the one hand, we desired it, of course, but we feared it at the same time, as it was needed to grow the crops but could be a potential menace come harvest time. One thing farmers didn’t do a lot of back then was swim around in it. Trips to the “beach” were rare, cottages and swimming pools practically unheard of. We came by our “farmer’s tan” honestly, rarely exposing any more than our arms and necks to the sun.
In school, our water supply routine, no doubt, would horrify some parents today. Each day, some lucky student would be chosen by the teacher for the honour – and it was a big honour – to take a steel bucket out to the handpump over the well in the schoolyard (we had no running water in the schoolhouse) and pump a pail full of cool, clear water for the benefit of all the occupants of the school building. Having filled the pail, the proud waterbearer would bring it into the school and set it up on a shelf at the back of the classroom (where eight grades of students were toiling away). When the breaks came, students lined up for a drink out of the same white steel ladle that hung in the pail when not in use. Thirty students all drinking out of the same cup and thinking nothing of it. If some modern parents found their kids in a similar situation, they’d sue the school board big time. But we somehow survived. And we’ve been, comparatively speaking, pretty healthy over the years.
We worry about health so much nowadays, and who doesn’t think that’s good? But sometimes our so-called solutions to problems only create more. Plastic bottles are suspected of releasing potentially harmful chemical substances into the water they contain and some dentists have said they’re seeing more cavities in children who drink bottled water because it contains no fluoride, unlike tapwater.
When my friends and I got to high school and saw water fountains up and down every hallway, we were amazed. We had to stop at every one of them and have a drink. Now they build rec centres with no fountains at all. They have machines that sell bottled water.
Maybe there should be no running water at all, anywhere, if it’s so dangerous.
We could haul the water into the arena in buckets from the handpump over the well outside.
©2007 Jim Hagarty
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