Water, Water, Everywhere (Everywhere You Can Make a Buck from It)

I went for  swim at the Y a few days ago. When I plunked down my stainless steel water bottle by the poolside, my friend Carol asked, “What’s in that, coffee or water?”

“Good old Glosta tap water, of course,” I replied.

She blanched.

“I never drink tap water,” she said, “I only drink Poland Spring.”

“Oh,” said I. “Don’t you know that bottled water is a scam, and that it’s nearly all tap water anyway?”

She bristled, and was understandably defensive.

Not sure I hadn’t overstated my case, I nevertheless said, “You can look it up online.”

Of course I did too, as soon as I got home. 

For the most part, I had not overstated my case. In fact, it’s worse. The bottled water industry has succeeded in bamboozling much of the nation (heck, much of the world) into thinking municipal water supplies are dangerous and only bottled water is safe. They make pots of money out of this outrageous canard, and few if any public figures  speak out against it. Just look at television coverage or newspaper photos of almost any Congressional hearing, international conference, or public meeting and see the ubiquitous plastic bottles at each attendee’s place.

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing

At a UN Conference

 (A Google search of photos of presidential cabinet meetings as far back as Reagan’s, however, showed that the White House always served water – presumably from the tap -- in glasses, with not a bottle in sight). 

An Obama Cabinet Meeting

You can also Google “poison in tap water” and find dozens of lurid You Tube videos and web sites claiming that municipal water supplies are full of poison,  starting with that old villain fluoridation (once viewed as a communist plot), and including rivers of vaccines, discarded pharmaceuticals, and other assorted menaces, none of them, of course, detected or neutralized by standard water treatment procedures.

Bottled water is a huge global business, with or without the help of such scare stories. According to the New York Times (October 25), “Coke sold 5.8 billion liters of waters abroad and 253 million liters in the United States and Canada from 2007 to 2012. Pepsi’s water sales in North America actually declined by 636 million liters over that period, but it still sold 4.7 billion liters overseas.”

At the same time that the bottled water industry is expanding its global reach, public water supplies in most industrialized nations couldn’t be safer. Health and safety laws and regulations insure that filtration and treatment are conducted to the highest standards; and now tertiary sewage treatment plants are even producing an end-product -- water -- that is totally safe for public consumption (though there’s a an understandable public reluctance to try it out).

Speaking specifically to the question, "Does Poland Spring water actually come from underground springs?" the answer appears to be yes; though the original spring in Poland, Maine was pumped dry nearly 50 years ago, the parent company (Nestlé) does put spring water from Maine and elsewhere in its Poland Spring bottles. But more than half the water sold by others as "natural" or "spring" water comes right out of the tap, particularly that sold by the big two bottlers, Coca Cola (Dasani) and Pepsi-Cola (Aquafina).  Look at the label; if it says “purified water” or “municipal water supply” it’s tap water.

And, irony of ironies, Poland Spring is selling its bottled spring water to buyers in Maine communities that are already getting the same water from the same springs out of their own wells. Talk about selling iceboxes to Eskimos!

But that's beside the point. Study after study has shown that municipal tap water is as healthy or healthier than bottled water, and infinitely cheaper.  Of course it's treated, and we should all be glad of it. Sometimes it tastes funny, as it has here in Gloucester the past few days when they had to switch to chlorine instead of the less noticeable chloramine while refurbishing and refilling two big storage tanks at Plum Cove and Blackburn Park. But it’s safe to drink. And bottled water has additives too.

The bottled water industry is carrying out a world wide scam job. Somehow they have persuaded millions of people worldwide -- not just in America -- that municipal tap water is dangerous. In some parts of the world where there is no publicly treated water they may be right, though portable water purifiers are extremely simple and cheap and readily available.

But in the industrialized world there's no excuse, and many reasons not to turn to bottled water. Not only are treated water supplies safe; tap water is far cheaper, tastes good, and is readily available. Bottled water comes in non-biodegradable containers made from petroleum-based products, uses still more petroleum to transport it, and while some of the used bottles are recycled into items like road surfacing materials and synthetic lumber, more often they are thrown away. Empty water bottles constitute a huge proportion of America's trash problem. They are not biodegradable, and not redeemable for a deposit in most states. Consequently millions of tons of them wind up in landfills or are thrown away by the roadside or into rivers, streams, and oceans, where they add to Texas-sized “gyres” of  plastic refuse, circling endlessly in mid-ocean.

Trying to Paddle in the Pacific Gyre

But the industry has put on heavy advertising campaigns to persuade people that their products will make people healthier, stronger, sexier, and that therefore we should all shell out many times what we pay for tap water. Bottled water prices keep dropping, but even at today’s prices that are sometimes as low as 16¢ per liter for bottled water, treated tap water costs less than 1¢ a gallon. So people who buy bottled water are still paying more than 600 times what they would pay for tap water…and unless you’re the homeowner who pays the water bills, you’re paying nothing! 

Furthermore, bottled water is not healthier and may be less so. There's no added fluoride in it, for example, which is essential for healthy teeth. The American Dental Association has estimated that there has been a 20-40% reduction in incidences of tooth decay since additional fluoride has been introduced into most municipal water supplies (some fluoride already occurs naturally in water -- including bottled water).

There's not a whole lot to be said in favor of bottled water. 

Even if it does make you feel kind of sexy.

A Boyhood Memory -- The Good Old Kanahoya

(Updated October 29, 2013)

Gampy in 1935

My father’s father, my grandfather and namesake Dr. Thomas Henry Halsted, was born in Listowel, Ontario in 1865 and moved to Syracuse, NY around 1890. Widowed twice, from his three marriages he eventually had six children, most of whom married in turn and provided many grandchildren. We Halsted grandchildren called him “Gampy,” which he never liked. I remembered him as a gruff, unsmiling 19th century man, with a Victorian sense of decorum and a conviction that the proper place for children was out of sight.

For a few years in the early 20^th century he owned a “camp” on Honnedaga Lake, in the large private preserve managed by the Adirondack League Club, an organization dedicated to hunting, fishing, hiking and recreation on 55,000 forested acres in upstate New York. The camp was named "Kanahoya," an Iroqouis name for the mountain ash, a red-berried shrub growing by the water. There he and his family spent their summers swimming, boating, hiking and trout fishing, for lake trout in the deep Honnedaga Lake itself and in a chain of outlying smaller lakes and streams, stocked with brook, brown and rainbow trout. Each outlying camp was provided with flat-bottomed skiffs for fishing. Rustic lodges and open lean-tos, all connected by miles of trails, provided shelter and a comforting destination after a long day’s hike. Tame deer wandered the paths and begged for handouts.

The air was crystal clear and the water in Honnedaga Lake itself was so transparent you could see objects on the bottom as much as 40 feet deep through the cobalt-blue water (and it really was blue, not just a reflection of the sky)  It was a  paradise, all built and maintained by the Adirondack League Club. 

"But it's my turn in the Packbasket!"
At Honnedaga, 1938:
The Author (4), Pa (Dr. Jim Halsted, 33), Nell (6)

Enjoying these amenities was never cheap, and even with a successful medical practice (he was a well-known ear specialist whose patients included Bernard Baruch and Eleanor Roosevelt), Gampy wisely decided to sell his camp in 1920, though he retained his membership in the club so that he and his children and their families could continue to enjoy it. My parents stayed there soon after their marriage in 1930, and until World War II came in 1941 were spending the month of August there in rented camps -- including the old Kanahoya camp -- each year with their four children. We made several short visits there after the war, and I returned once with Joy and our then-infant son in 1957.

In those pre-Interstate days it was a challenge to get to Honnedaga from almost anywhere, which made the place all the more magical. From Dedham, MA, where we lived from 1933 to 1950, it was a 300 mile drive, and took two days. Our family of six would take two cars, crossing Massachusetts on Route 20, spending the night in “cabins” – clusters of one-room shacks that predated motels, and continuing on across New York State, through Albany, Schenectady, bypassing Utica, then on to Forestport, where the pavement ended. From there it was 20 miles of dirt and potholes. We called it “the bumpy road,” for good reason. 

The road ended at the “head of the lake,” as everyone called the terminus of the bumpy road at the western end of Honnedaga Lake, which was shaped like a dipper, with a long narrow handle, stretching east for four miles before widening into a broader bowl, a mile square. We would leave our car at the head of the lake and board a launch that would take us to our camp’s dock.  The launch was named the "Honnedaga," but my younger brother called it the “Dagy-Boat,” as did we all.

In 1911 Gampy bought a used 25-foot Fay and Bowen launch, powered by a single-cylinder engine.  Like the camp, she was named “Kanahoya.”  She had a huge cockpit, and could easily carry a dozen passengers or more.  He and his family used her on picnic excursions and to travel to Forest Lodge, the “clubhouse,” a mile away, where there were a boat house filled with canoes and graceful Adirondack guide-boats, tennis courts, a grocery store, an ice house, and a restaurant.

I loved the Kanahoya. She could and did hold Gampy and at least two of his offspring’s families.

The Kanahoya, August 1946
Gampy, surrounded by the families of his son Jim (4th from left) and daughter Frances (6th from left). That's me between the two siblings.
The old boat could use a fresh coat of paint

At the bow flew a burgee with the ALC emblem, an eight-point buck; an American flag was at the stern. There was a small foredeck, then a huge open cockpit, and a smaller afterdeck. There was a small steering wheel at the bow, but she could also be steered with a wheel on the portside coaming. Some sister ships had a striped awning, though the Kanahoya’s cockpit was open to the sky.

Another F&B launch,  with all the trimmings

But the Kanahoya's crowning glory was her one-cylinder engine, which sported a large iron flywheel with a shiny nickel-plated rim, just ahead of a tall black single cylinder with a gleaming brass cap on top, containing the magneto and a governor, whose little balls on the end of scissor-like arms spun around to control the speed of the engine. There were important looking throttle and spark levers , a glass bowl through which you could see the gasoline flowing, another for oil, and a bronze priming cup. There were grease cups at strategic points to keep the shaft lubricated. A six-volt “hot-shot” dry-cell battery was stowed in a locker on one side, its wires threaded under the floorboards.  A tall shift lever with a spring-loaded grip straddled a toothed metal quadrant. You squeezed the handle to disengage the tooth from the arc and shoved the lever forward to go forward, aft to go in reverse, because under the transom at the end of the shaft was a shiny bronze propeller with reversing blades.

Starting the engine was a suspenseful project, requiring coordination, patience, and luck. First you’d switch on the current to the magneto, then set the throttle up a notch, open the lever on the side of the priming cup, and while one person slowly turned the flywheel (sitting on the starboard side and pulling it counterclockwise), another person would dribble gasoline into the cup, hopefully not spilling too much into the bilges. It made a whistling, sucking sound (the shift lever would be in neutral, of course).

Then you’d close the priming cup, reach across the flywheel to grasp it with both hands, and heave it toward you in the hope that the engine would catch. It never would on the first pull, but by pulling it two or three more times, if spark and throttle were set right, it would suddenly let loose a satisfying whump! sound. Pull it again, and the engine would catch in earnest. Whump, whump, whump would turn to putt, putt, putt, as you adjusted the throttle. You’d cast off from the dock, put the gear lever in reverse, pull away from the shore, shove the gear lever forward, advance the throttle and away you’d go, at a stately four or five knots.

Here's a video of an identical engine in operation at an antique engine show in Mystic, CT in 2012 (click on the link).

Digging recently through a packet of old V-mails my father had saved throughout his service in North Africa and Italy in World War II, I came upon one I had written to him in 1943, which said in part: “You remember you said when I was ten, I could have the Kanahoya? Well, I’m ten now.” Wisely, he never replied.

The last we heard of the dear old Kanahoya, she was hauled out of the water in 1948 and never launched again. I have searched in vain for any evidence of her eventual fate, but with no luck. Perhaps her old cedar and oak bones are resting somewhere in the Adirondack forest, slowly returning to the soil. And that grand old engine is putt-putting away somewhere in one-lunger heaven, or wherever old one-lungers go to die.

-- Updated October 29, 2013, after conversations with Alexander Millard, the present owner of the Kanahoya Camp and with Keith Billet, the restorer of the Fay & Bowen engine shown here, who kindly sent me a copy of a 1902 engine user's manual ("Rules and Suggestions: Fay and Bowen Gasoline Vapor Motors").