Small Talk #6 - Water
To be really good at small talk, you have to understand that everything is interesting. Let’s take a topic commonly considered boring: other people’s dreams. I think that’s because dreams evoke feelings and senses we can’t articulate—we lack the vocabulary. So someone says, ‘Oh my god I had the weirdest dream last night,’ and everyone scoots their chairs back to their cubicles. But if you watch the person relate their dream, if you study their expression, feel the weirdness they’re feeling—well, that’s pretty interesting.
Recently I found myself thinking about the most commonplace thing in our world: water. Now I don’t think people consider water boring per se. But I do think we take it for granted. And that makes it a ripe topic for this week’s Small Talk.
Water
How is water the most commonplace thing? Well for starters, we are water. Just big sacks of water contained in various forms of tissue. If you’re an adult, you are about 60% water. (Depending on various factors like gender or if you’ve just prepared for a colonoscopy.) If you are a baby human, you’re about 78% water. Our brains are three-quarters water! So everywhere we go, there is water, within ourselves. And most places you go around the world, there is water. Basic geography tells us that about 71% of the surface of Earth is water. Most of it’s saltwater. Lakes and rivers are just a fraction of the Earth’s surface, except for here in the upper Midwest, where we’re surrounded by lakes as vast as seas, making it the ideal place to live (but let’s keep that to ourselves).
The water molecule is simple, but remarkably versatile—like a good tight end. Chemists describe the molecule as ‘bent’ referring to the way the oxygen and two hydrogen molecules bond with each other. The hydrogen atoms retain a positive charge, while the oxygen molecule is negative. Chemists wouldn’t like this analogy, but think of a AA battery. What’s great about this bond is that it enables water to do some crazy things. For example, water is considered the ‘universal solvent,’ because it can dissolve so many other chemical compounds (except for oils, because they are non-polar). Furthermore, the bond allows for water’s surface tension, which has proven handy for many water-borne insects and also for Jesus.
A single drop of water from the surface of the ocean contains millions of microscopic organisms. I just have to pause and think about that. One drop of sun-lit ocean water is an entire world in itself, with creatures that defy the imagination, inspiration for the wildest video games (or inarticulable dreams). Consider the rotifer, common in fresh water but also the seas, named for the hair-like structures on its front end, which rotate like a wheel, propelling it and scooping food from its microscopic world. There are more than 2,200 species of rotifer. In some species, the female is ten times larger than the male. In others, there are no males at all.
We humans use a lot of water, especially in industrialized nations, especially in the U.S. of A. The EPA says the average total home water use for each American is 50 gallons a day. Average daily water use is, of course, much less in developing nations. But here’s what puts that 50 gallons into perspective for me: When my friends and I go backpacking, we plan for about ONE gallon per person per day, and it usually works out! Admittedly, our bathing in the backcountry is what you might call ‘natural’ and usually very cold. But still. You can definitely get by on less than 50 gallons.
Here's a factoid popular on the internet: There is exactly as much water now as when water first manifested on Earth. We could debate a lot of nuance in that statement, but it is interesting to consider that your Hydroflask contains the same molecules that once filled the chalice of Napoleon or the gullets of pterosaurs. And now, since we’ve gotten bored with all our old water, we’ve become obsessed with finding water on other planets. There is a surprising amount of water detected just in our solar system, most famously in the ice caps of Mars. Water is a prerequisite for life, so who knows? It does feel like we’re getting ahead of ourselves, though—less than 20% of Earth’s ocean floor has been mapped. I bet the creatures down there would like it to stay that way.
Water’s qualities have inspired a lot of incredible art. It may be the most fascinating subject for painters, seeking to see things as they are, and discovering that water is often not blue. Water also has a strong presence in literature. Now, please be warned that I’m about to name-drop James Joyce, and worse, reference Ulysses. But you can’t talk about water and art without considering the passage where Leopold Bloom thinks about water. It begins with “What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?” And then it goes beyond what I ever thought was possible to write about water. I’ll include the rest of the passage below. It doesn’t really fit into the purview of this essay—I think Joyce was better at Large Talk.
Have a good one,
Kipling Knox
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From Ulysses, Chapter 17 (Ithaca), by James Joyce
“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”
