Water

"Oh holy crap, there's water! Just sitting there, being water!"

My fiancee and her mother burst out laughing as we cruised down one of the main streets of her Illinois hometown.  If I'd been a normal human being, I probably would have turned beet-red, but since I'm some sort of alien I just patted myself on the back for having successfully, if inadvertently, amused people.  And it really was inadvertent.  After spending nineteen of my twenty-one years, including the entirety of the last decade, in New Mexico, the sight of a large pond just...being a large pond...came as a sort of revelation.

And then, a year and a half later, I moved to western Oregon.  Oregon is one of those fantastic places that includes pretty much every kind of ecosystem - there's the high deserts of the east, the rainforest, the coast, and so on, but this was Portland, roughly the greenest, trees-iest city known to man.  It's like living in Lothlorien or something, but with more hipsters.  My poor little desert brain is still reeling, and I like it that way.



Seriously, it's pretty miraculous.  Inasmuch as someone who has moved as much as I have can claim to have a home, mine is Albuquerque, New Mexico, land of eight inches of rain per year, on a good year.  Set against the sheer 1300-foot red granite face of Sandia's Peak rising out of the desert to the east, it's a beautiful, especially when the summer monsoons come in over the mountain late in the afternoon. Its beauty runs to golds, reds and tans, though, blushing green and dusty purple after the rains and blue in the evening shadows when the light turns gold.   The only major body of water closer than Elephant Butte over a hundred miles to the southeast is the Rio Grande, bisecting the city between its cottonwood-lined banks.

The Rio Grande may be one of the northern hemisphere's more ironically named waterways; its name means "Big River."  It's about eight inches deep.  Part of Colorado, most of New Mexico, and a hefty portion of Texas all leech off it so much it's a wonder it hasn't joined its cousin the Colorado in petering sadly out in the desert before it reaches the sea.  The infighting between various cities with a claim to its waters gets downright nasty every summer, and for the last ten years or more a current of dread has undercut Albuquerque and, I'm sure, other cities in the area.

We're running out of water.  That's the long-term worry.  In the meantime, there's watering restrictions, incentives to xeriscape your yard and switch to low water usage toilets, and informational literature galore on ways to cut down water usage.  I grew up with this sort of thing, so it's natural to, for example, turn on the water just long enough to get my hands wet, then turn it off, put on soap, wash and scrub, and turn the water back on only long enough to rinse.

Up here, people leave the water running while they wash their hands.  They stick their hands in it, and comfortably wash them several times...they take long showers, too, when the water bills aren't outlandish.  It's surreal, getting used to this surplus in the place of scarcity.  I'm used to the Rio Grande; now, having moved from Portland to a small coastal town, we live within two miles of the mouth of the Columbia, a river that so close to its end measures about three miles wide, riddled with lanes deep enough for the passage of big cargo ships carrying automobiles.

We can water the garden in the middle of the day.  We can wash our cars in the middle of the day.  People rejoice when it stops raining.  The landscape is green, and anything that hold still long enough grows verdant with moss.  The world is a strange and wonderful place, and I really hope I never quite get used to this sort of thing.