WATER

 

         A few years back I bought a good-sized place in rural St. Clair county with a big house and two cabins on it, intending to make a retreat for small churches that had a youth group but didn’t have the money to send them to a church camp. It was all free, no one who ever came there had to pay a cent for anything. In those years I estimate we had more than 500 kids visit us.  

         It was a historic place because on our property there was an historic old iron bridge that some said was made in 1892. Nearby was a huge spring full of watercress that flowed hundreds of gallons of water into the creek. Local folks therefore called it Green Springs.  Author Lowell Myers was a neighbor and an accomplished Ozark writer who passed away a few years back. Mr. Myers was born during the 1920’s and I talked to him often about the history of that area in the very southern part of St.Clair county.  You can find his name and books on the Internet and I highly recommend them.

         He told me that he was a boy during the great depression and the drought that came with it in the 1930’s.  He said that many wells went dry during that time and people would come to Green Springs in old trucks and horse-drawn wagons to fill up buckets and barrels with the spring water. But he said that even during the 1930’s drought there was more water flowing from the spring than there was when I talked with him ten years ago.

         That receding water is something that bothered my grandfather, an old-time riverman who spent his whole life on the Big Piney and Gasconade.  He could not understand why so many small springs that were flowing full in his boyhood had gone completely dry in the 1960’s. My dad, back in the 70’s and 80’s often commented that the Little Piney and Big Piney rivers were not carrying near as much water in the summer as he had seen when he was younger, before I was born.  He was perplexed that so many shoals were shallower than he ever saw them and we had to drag our johnboat over them.

         The Buffalo is drastically lower in the summer now than it was when I was working there as a park naturalist from 1971 to 1976. Only older folks could have commented on what they saw in our streams 70 or 80 years ago but I think all the young kayakers and canoeists of today will say, as they grow old, that they too remember a time when the rivers had so much more water.

         On the land I turned into a youth retreat several years back the previous owner had drilled a well for one of the cabins that ended up being a dry hole until they got down about 500 feet and then it turned into an artesian well, with dozens of gallons a minute flowing up out of the casing like a water fountain.  The owner from that time told me he had sent samples of the water to Jefferson City and was told that the water was pure enough to bottle and sell.  It gushed cold clear water and yes it had a definite pleasant taste. This summer that artesian well was dried up after flowing for fifteen years!

          I have never bought a bottle of water but I have tasted some that was given to me and I cannot understand how anyone would buy it.  It tastes awful!  But the people who drink it don’t know that because it is all they drink.  Here on Lightnin’ Ridge where I live there is a 500 foot well and if you could taste water from that well and compare it to what is purchased off a store shelf you would see what I mean.  A time will come, I think, that it will dry up.  In the Ozarks, many shallower wells already have.

         Running around on the Big Piney in the early fifties with my grandpa, we both drank from small streams and springs and even from the river itself.  Taking water on a float trip was not done, it seemed a silly idea.  But grandpa told me that there would be a time folks would be paying for a bottle of water just like we paid for a bottle of soda back then. He was very bipolar, something no one knew about then, and when he was down he told me many things that were coming that have indeed happened.  I have included my grandfather’s fears in my book that will come out in the spring--- The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid. It is unbelievable what he knew would come to pass long after he was gone.

         Grandpa’s prediction concerning what we refer to as “Nine-Eleven” was accurate, and what he said about the future of nuclear weapons and what he called the ‘Japanese atom bombs’ meant nothing to me then, but it scares the heck out of me now.  And one of his predictions was that water in the oceans was all we would have left someday, and men would have to learn how to fix it so they can drink it.  I don’t know about that but I am sure of this… I will never buy a bottle of water!