I was looking for some inspiration for this column when a quiet ding announced Anthony Drew’s arrival at the top of my inbox. A fellow editor at COLE, he’d been reading a book of essays over the weekend and came across Joan Didion’s 1977 essay Holy Water, in which she discusses her fascination with water. 

While Didion’s writing was brilliant, what stuck out to me more was her obsession with the movement and management of water. 

“As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand — the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped before — and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento.”

In some ways I get to live Didion’s passion and look at the industry through her curious but informed eyes. I sometimes think about water and weather in the same — if somewhat less poetic — terms, and about what utilities in different parts of the country are dealing with while they work to keep water flowing to their customers’ taps. I look at the ski report and wonder if the snowpack will be sufficient to serve Denver Water’s needs. When hurricanes roll in I think about Miami’s efforts to combat sea level rise and make its systems more resilient. I think about rain over Texas and wonder if it’s filling the 26-square-mile reservoir — Bois d’Arc Lake — that the North Texas Municipal Water District built to provide a more sustainable future for the communities it serves.

I also appreciate that Didion makes the distinction between the politics of water and the water itself. There are politics involved in any municipal endeavor, but water is life, not politics. They may play a role in the supply of water, but they’ll never impact our need for it. And your work at its core is for people, communities and the environment, not political gain. Humans need clean, safe water regardless of political affiliation.  

While lawyers and judges will discuss water rights and allotments, they’ll never change our baseline need for water, so make sure you’re using your voice and your knowledge to educate people about the need to quit wasting it.

Enjoy this month’s issue.