Maybe it's because I'm three-fifths water myself, but lately I've been thinking a lot about the wet stuff.
Not the big picture. Not the drought, or the prospect of rationing, or the call for huge new water projects so California doesn't dry up and blow away.
But the little picture. As in, why doesn't this drinking fountain work?
Last week I attended a town hall meeting at the Scripps Ranch Library. It was hot that evening, and I was thirsty.
Outside I found two drinking fountains, beckoning like golden bowls. But neither worked. Or, more precisely, they emitted streams no bigger than your curved pinkie. To drink from them required a disturbing proximity to the plumbing.
When the meeting ended, I grabbed Mayor Jerry Sanders and asked for 90 seconds of his time. Ever since I drubbed him at miniature golf, the mayor pretty much does whatever I ask. So he dutifully watched my demonstration of the library's low-pressure fountains.
“To drink from them,” I said, “you have to suck on metal.”
“You're absolutely right,” the mayor said. “I've been noticing that for years.”
Sanders recalled how the drinking fountains at the Long Beach schools he attended had similarly weak streams, thus casting the problem as universal, respecting no geographic and governmental boundaries. Still, he promised to look into it.
Then I noticed, in the mayor's hand, a plastic water bottle – Aquafina, I believe.
It doesn't take Oliver Stone to see where this is headed.
On the one hand: drinking fountains that don't work. I see them everywhere, and the mayor is right – schoolyards can be the worst offenders. There are bigger infrastructure problems, but isn't a ready supply of drinking water a core government responsibility?
On the other: the gazillion-dollar bottled-water industry, selling at huge mark-ups something we can get free.
Yes, bottled water has its advantages. It's portable. Sometimes it tastes better. It has cool names like Dasani.
But I fear that our addiction to it may doom us to the day when public drinking fountains go the way of the pay phone. Use them or lose them, I say.
Then again, dehydration may have left me a tad woozy.
For edification, I visited the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park, to see its new exhibit, “Water: H20 = Life.”
Unfortunately, the show wouldn't open until this weekend. But the advertisements said it all: “More valuable than oil, more precious than gold – the essential ingredient of our life, culture, history and future.”
I wondered: When future generations go looking for water on distant planets, would they expect to find it in plastic bottles? And would they even know how to glug water from a drinking fountain, or would they all be chuggers?
Deep thoughts, yes. But they were soon interrupted as the modern-day economics of water played out before my eyes.
A 14-wheel Sysco truck pulled up outside the Village Grill, the little snack stand near the Spanish Village Art Center.
I watched as the driver unloaded pallets of restaurant provisions, including 1,155 half-liter bottles of water, which the Grill sells to the public for $1.75 each, and 264 one-liter bottles, which fetch $3 each.
“More valuable than oil?”
Heck, yeah. Complain all you want to about $4-a-gallon gas, but water bought a half-liter at a time costs $13.26 a gallon.
“More precious than gold?”
You bet. That weekly shipment of water was worth – let's see, multiply by 3, carry the 1 – a boatload of money, more than $2,800. And the Grill is just one park concessionaire.
Families were shelling out $10 or more just to hydrate themselves on a hot day. And where was the alternative, the public drinking fountain? Nowhere to be seen.
With some effort, I found one inside the Spanish Village. A metal model, reflecting the midday sun, its only customer was a circling bee. The stream was strong, the taste a bit minerally, but it was gloriously free.
“I wouldn't drink out of it,” jewelry designer Ramon Villon warned from under his canopy. “The water is terrible. Do you have medical insurance?”
Villon is a 20-year fixture at the Spanish Village, and he regularly deters visitors from sampling the water, steering them instead to the Grill.
Why? He thinks bottled water is healthier than tap water, despite studies showing the opposite can be true, or that they are often the same thing.
He's so distrustful of the fountain that he urged me to fill a plastic bottle from it, predicting it would be murky with asbestos. I did, and it was clear as glass. He was unconvinced.
We talked about water for half an hour, during which I noticed an ominous trend: The Village Grill was selling water by the caseload, while no one but me had drunk from the fountain.
It was then I realized I am a dying breed.
That day I saw scores of water bottles, but I confess I didn't see another soul use a drinking fountain. That includes the adorable Madalyn Morris, a 4-year-old who tried to use a child-height one, only to discover it didn't work. (Her equally adorable sister, 8-year-old Hailey, provided me with their ages and spelled their names.)
“They should keep the fountains operational,” their grandmother, Barbara Morris of El Cajon, told me, “especially as hot as it is today.”
Then I learned that Madalyn didn't want to drink from the fountain, only to wash her sticky hands.
Still, an ally is an ally.
Me and you, Madalyn, I thought as she dunked her hands in a decorative pool. Together we'll solve this problem.
Gerry Braun:
(619) 542-4563; gerry.braun@uniontrib.com
