The View from Mudsock Heights: Throats Burned Dry and Souls that Cry for Water -- Cool, Clear, Water

By Dennis E. Powell | Jun 29, 2009 at 22:2:39

I’m pretty sure that grass isn’t supposed to be brown. But it’s been so long since it was any other color, I’m not quite sure.

It’s funny how our minds work sometimes. A glance at a parched, burned-up lawn makes me thirsty, even if I’ve just had a glass of water.

When it’s dry, it affects us.

The other day I went looking for the can of “Pam,” the kitchen equivalent of WD-40, which I knew I had but could not find. Finally located it out by the lawnmower, where last I had used it. Why on the lawn mower? Easy: I bag lawn clippings and put them on the compost pile. I discovered a few years ago that if a non-stick spray is applied to the underside of the mower, it doesn’t get clogged with grass and instead the cuttings flow more easily into the bag. Why Pam? I could use WD-40, but I figure that keeping petroleum products out of the compost pile is probably a good thing.

It had been so long since there was new grass to cut, I had forgotten where I’d put my can of the stuff.

Not that weeds fail to grow even when it’s very dry. Why is it that we want our lawns to comprise the plants most difficult to keep alive and thriving?

And weeding on a hot, dry day can bring about a powerful thirst. Which is also an opportunity to truly enjoy a glass of water.

This skill came to me on a summer’s day probably 40 years ago. A couple of friends and I had been catching snakes at Rock Bridge State Park in Missouri and were now walking on a dirt road the four miles back to my family’s house. It was about noon — we had started out early that morning, so we were done — and terribly hot, maybe 90. The road was covered in fine tan dust. That dust would rise as a smokescreen every time a farmer in his pickup came by.

And oh, my, I was thirsty. We weren’t even halfway home when thirst became the leading feature of my life, almost all I could think about.

I knew better, but when I saw the persimmon tree I figured that those astringent little globes surely contained a drop or two of liquid; they did, but the price was too high: until the first frost, persimmons are unparalleled in making your mouth dry, so great is their puckerability.

We kept walking. I almost ran the last quarter mile, and would have run if I hadn’t been carrying all kinds of equipment that truth be known wasn’t anywhere near as useful as a canteen of water would have been. No desire in the world, then, before, or since, surpasses mine at that moment for a drink of water.

Finally we were in the kitchen, with its life-giving faucet. The other two were thirsty, and they were guests in my home, so I was a proper host and drew glasses for them first.

Well, not glass glasses — these were those peculiar spun aluminum drinking vessels that were popular in the era when Formica was something you’d brag about. As I got my friends their water, I remembered how well the aluminum conducted heat and how cold water in them seemed even colder, the lips first encountering the chilly metal, a little dewy with condensation. I decided just then not to gulp it down — the water was running cold by now — but instead to savor it. The slightly metallic edge of the “glass,” the first sip, over my tongue and bringing me back to life like a good, soaking rain does the woods. Then slow, measured drinking. Never was a glass of water so enjoyed.

I’ve tried to recreate that happy moment every so often ever since — I even have the spun aluminum vessels — but it’s never been quite as good. Close, though.

We remember such things, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Perhaps it was coincidence that last week I felt the need to learn to play Bob Nolan’s old song, always one of my favorites, “Cool, Clear Water,” possibly the only song ever written about being thirsty.

Or maybe the desire for water is so very primal that it is always there. On my wall hangs a Jerome K. Jerome except, done nicely in calligraphic letters by my sister a couple of decades ago:

“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need — a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear and a little more than enough to drink, for thirst is a dangerous thing.”

‘Bout sums it up, I guess.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.