I was recently co-hosting a natural dyeing workshop in Ventura, California with the company I work for. California is no stranger to me being married to a man born and raised in LA and many trips all over California throughout our marriage. What I guess has changed is me.
Do you ever feel like that when you revisit a place? You were different when you were single or married, broke or flush with vacation cash, with kids and without, young or older? The more you learn about different issues, in this particular case, water quality, you look at the world a lot different. You work with it a lot different. If you’re me, you realize the complexity of getting access to clean water for swimming, bathing, drinking and if you’re foolish enough in a desert, watering your lawn.
The first time I went to LA I was young, single and gearing up to drive cross-country for the first time with my best friend from the Cape who had just finished college. Over the course of a week, we drove by man-made ponds and water features in the desert to a raging Colorado River whose fresh smell in the early morning as we drove alongside it made an emotional imprint on me forever. We drove by farm fields in Iowa with sprinklers a football field length long clicking in the afternoon sun sprinkling and disappearing quickly on hot dirt and as the grass got greener and the flora a lot thicker, and as we neared the Massachusetts line, I couldn’t help but exhale with relief. Even at 19 years of age, I knew we had water and cool shade and man, weren’t we lucky to call Cape Cod home.
Water is something we just take for granted but all you have to do is leave Cape Cod and head out west to see what’s coming in terms of access. Our Airbnb had signs all over the place about water usage and there wasn’t a single house around us with a lawn. Desert-scaped wildflowers, lemon and orange trees flourished everywhere, figs and avocados hung heavy off the neighbor’s branches and not a single sound of sprinklers.
One day during the workshop, I overheard someone say they had gone to “the water store” to fill up a few water bottles for the day.”Wait WHAT?” I asked.”There are water stores here to get drinking water?”
Long story short, people don’t like what’s in their water and would rather have purified or ionized water rather than risking having arsenic and chromium laced water. Plus, the tap water does taste pretty weird. Cape Codders don’t realize how good they have it.
Do you know how lucky you are to have so much beautiful water around you? This spring can you make one small change in your routine to take care of it?
Pond Stories are a collection of writings and other media from Cape Codders and visitors who love the almost 1,000 local ponds that dot the Cape. We hope this collection of stories awakens your inner environmentalist to think deeper about our human impacts to these unique bodies of water.
Send us your favorite pond photo, story, poem, video, artwork – we want to share with everyone why the Cape’s ponds and lakes are so special. Email your pond connection to [email protected]
