Water, Water Everywhere

Yesterday, I caught myself carrying a basin of water outside to the garden. Half the way across the kitchen, I realized what I was doing and stopped: I'd used the water to wash rice, but I didn't want to just dump it. But I had to. I walked over to the sink and poured out the water, gritting my teeth at the waste.

I don't need to save water anymore and it feels so weird.

Over the last two years, I've grown used to recycling the water I've washed rice and vegetables with. In our bathroom in North Cyprus, I had two large tubs of water saved from running the tap until the right temperature was achieved. When they got full, I mopped the floor with the water, watered my herbs with it, or used it to launder clothes, pouring it right into the washing machine.

Everybody conserves water in Cyprus -- you have to. Everywhere you go, you see air conditioning units with receptacles under them so as not to waste even the smallest bit of runoff, bowls carefully placed under leaky hoses, trays put out to catch rainwater. In Turkey too, we saw birds and animals drinking from air conditioning pipes; dry fields where the only green was the weeds growing in patches under leaky pipes.

In Cyprus, everything is dry as dust in the summertime. Root systems grow incredibly deep to tap what water there is; only the hardiest, most drought-resistant plants and trees can survive. We got used to seeing trucks delivering water, used to taking two-minute showers, used to turning the water off when we brushed our teeth or washed our faces. For one memorable weekend in November when we ran out of water, we got used to going to the local swimming pool every evening so that we could at least wash our feet. We stopped going to the tap to fill our glasses too: the water from our faucets was nasty-tasting stuff. We got used to hanging our clothes outside and being able to take them in almost immediately, bone dry. In all the time we lived in Cyprus, I never once saw a clothes drier in anyone's house.

In Scotland, water is completely taken for granted. When it rains, which is almost every day, water pours off rooftops and gushes into gutters. If it isn't rainy, it's cloudy and there is often mist. The ground is soon saturated. It rains so much, everything is generally damp almost all the time. Moss grows lush and thick in gardens, weeds go on a rampage, spreading far and wide, and grass grows so fast you can almost hear it. Everything in Scotland is green. On the rare days when the sun comes out, everyone hurries into their gardens to peg out laundry. You get used to hanging your sheets and towels out, then racing outside to take them back in when it starts raining. Two years ago, I often had to do this two or three times a week. Our neighbors, an ecologically-minded couple with a newborn baby, ended up giving up and buying a clothes drier. I could hardly blame them.

I grew up in Riverside, California, a hot, dry place. In Riverside, just as in Cyprus, we hoarded water and we respected it. In Scotland, you can't walk half a mile without finding some body of water: a bog, a stream, a pond, a river, a loch, or the sea, but in Riverside, where even a burst sewer main can be refreshing, you can go a long way to find a puddle. The joke of Riverside is that it not really beside a river. Actually, the Santa Ana River used to flow through Riverside, but nowadays you are hard put to see even the merest trickle where it used to be. When I was a child, my sisters and I used to love going to see the 'river' after a long, hard rain. It was thrilling to see a foot or two of muddy water snaking its way through the huge, parched river bed.

Here in Scotland, I've got one river practically in my backyard and another a stone's throw away from our house. Both are deep, full at all times, and lined by grassy banks and moss-covered trees. There are times I try to picture my childhood self gazing with longing at this green, wet world I now live in. Two years ago, I was beginning to take all the rain for granted myself, but after two years in Cyprus, I'm back to my Southern Californian water worshiping status.

I wonder how long it will take me to stop hoarding water?

Mud, Glorious Mud

We've had one of the driest months I can remember here in Scotland. It's so dry that whenever I go walking in the surrounding countryside, all the fields that are usually great slippery wastelands of mud are now perfectly navigable stretches of land that can be easily crossed. Walking has become virtually hazard free, and I am grateful. I am not a sure-footed creature and all too many times I've ended up on my butt, providing unintentional amusement to friends and family.

After leaving Southern California ages back, I moved to a succession of rainy places where mud was common. Believe it or not, I had to learn an entirely different way to walk. In my hometown, there was a lot of sand everywhere, mainly decomposed granite. This blew over the pavement and settled there, insidious to the unsure-footed. Countless times as a child -- ever ungainly -- I went sliding on that loose sand and ended up on my knees. It took me a long time to learn that I didn't have to negotiate sidewalks carefully after I moved away from my hometown, and it took me even longer to learn how to walk on mud without sinking knee deep in it. Now I can tell just from a glance whether I can put my foot down on a spot without slipping or getting sucked into it, but when we first got here it was a different story.

"You hate mud, don't you, mom?" my youngest said to me one day when I'd gotten ankle deep in the stuff for the fifth time.

"Yes--" I started to say -- then stopped. Because I didn't always hate mud. Quite the opposite, in fact.

It was hot where I grew up; just going outside in the summer could be exhausting. You couldn't really exert yourself in such heat, and air-conditioning wasn't an option when your parents were as frugal as mine. My sisters and I spent whole days sitting in the shade outside, longing for cool. It always amazed us to think there were people living in places like Oregon or Washington who actually complained about all the rain they got.

One day a neighbor happened to mention that there had once been an underground spring in the hills near our house. For three whole months, we nurtured the fantasy that there might be evidence of this spring somewhere. I spent a few days searching for it, clambering over boulders and behind clumps of sagebrush as I braved the rattlesnakes, bullthorns and horny toads in my flip flops. But I never found it.

Then on our way home from school one September day, my sisters and I made a wonderful discovery. Just at the edge of the field behind our house, we found a bubbling, gushing pool that seemed to come from nowhere. Was this the underground spring come to life again? We didn't care. The water turned parched, blistering sand into a delightfully muddy swamp. For a blissful week we played in this, bringing cups and twigs and other bits to make a Kingdom of Mud. Life had suddenly gotten a lot more interesting, and it was all because of this underground spring that had so fortuitously appeared.

It didn't last long.

"Why are your clothes always so dirty when you come home?" our mother asked us one day. "And -- you smell!" Innocently, we told her about the wonderful new spring. She frowned. "Show me where it is." And like idiots, we did.

The next day, engineers came to fix the leaky sewer pipe. We had been playing for a whole week in raw sewage.

"You could have gotten cholera!" our mother said, appalled. "You should have told me right away!"

We made no response. We were wishing with all our hearts that we hadn't told her. So what if it was raw sewage? It was cool, beautiful mud, and now it was gone forever.

There was a lesson in this -- one I've always remembered: It's not crap if you like it

Highlanders

I’m a Highlander. True, I grew up in a polluted city in the dry and dusty Inland Empire of Southern California, but I’m a Highlander all the same. I went to Highland School, passing Highland Terrace to get there. We had a Dunbarton Place just around the corner, and at the local university all the dormitories had names like ‘Aberdeen,’ ‘Bannockburn,’ and ‘Inverness. Our neighborhood, further up in the hills than much of the surrounding area, was known informally as ‘the Highlands.’

Highlanders we may have been, but our town was hot. In the dead of winter, it sometimes got almost as cold as summers in the U.K., but in the summertime, temperatures could easily go as high as 105 degrees and stay there. The heat made most sensible people go indoors and turn on their air-conditioners. Quite apart from the discomfort of the heat itself, there were rattlesnakes about, and the hotter it was, the more they liked to come out and socialize.

Our local pipe band, however, didn’t show the slightest sign of minding the heat or worrying about snakes. Mainly elderly and middle-aged men, they proudly marched up and down the dusty sidewalks under the blistering afternoon sun, looks of great concentration on their faces. The sight of our elderly next-door neighbor, Mr MacDougall, with his hairy old-man legs and, to our silly minds, mini-skirt kilt, was too much for us kids to bear. We would run giggling and shrieking back into the house where our mother, fully aware of what we were laughing at, fiercely admonished us. Hush up! Stop that right now! Shame on you! Those men and their pipes were culture. Didn’t we know that our very own ancestors had dressed just the same? We snickered and bit our lips at the thought and tried to avoid each other’s eyes.

The MacDougalls were as sad a blight on our lives as we must have been on theirs. They were grumpy and no-nonsense; Mrs MacDougall frequently let my mother know that her own approach to child-rearing had been largely drawn from the Old Testament -- Proverbs, in particular. I was a reasonably well- behaved kid, but certainly less so than Mrs MacDougall’s rigidly brought up offspring. During my more spirited moments, I used to catch her giving me looks that clearly said Oh my girl, if you were mine . . . Decades before Hilary Clinton and her It takes a village to raise a child statement, Mrs MacDougall was determined to be part of the village that raised us. She kept an eagle eye out for our misdemeanors and watched our comings and goings with keen interest. For the most part we managed to steer clear of her, but when she came over to visit our mother, the strain of having to behave ourselves exhausted us.

Mr MacDougall was fiercely proud of his Scots ancestry and his own name in particular. He had a huge, dusty book that he frequently pored over: the Book of Clans, and could trace his own ancestors back to Robert the Bruce’s time. My mother once timidly mentioned my father’s and her own Scottish ancestry. What were their names? Mr MacDougall wanted to know. My mother didn’t know much about her own genealogy, so she started with my father’s side, the McKaigs. Mr MacDougall disappeared into his house and came out with his Book of Clans. McKaigs! he said scornfully. Didn’t even have their own clan! A bunch of worthless poets and philosophers! My mother could hardly have been more thrilled.

Years after I left my hometown, I went to Scotland and saw the real Highlands. All my life, I had felt cheated. Growing up in the heat and dust and pollution, I had longed for cool, green, rainy countryside, a land of waterfalls and rushing rivers. Someone had shown me a photograph of Inverness once, and I had been stunned and filled with envy. So the first time I entered the Highlands, I was prepared to find a difference so staggering that my sorry little hometown would shrink into a pitiful nothingness of overheated exhaust and decomposed granite.

Instead, I was gob-smacked: I was home! Okay, there was no smog, no sagebrush and no tumbleweed. There were no stucco ranch-style houses, no taco stands, no palm trees, no tangle of billboards, no signs in Spanish. And admittedly, there were waterfalls and twisting rivers and sheep grazing in fields, all things you would never find anywhere near my hometown. But geographically, the Highlands of Scotland were the Highlands I grew up in. The shape of the mountains, the rocks, the austere beauty. I was astounded at the similarities and felt like weeping with nostalgia and homesickness.

When our car had stopped in the midst of spectacular scenery to let a flock of sheep pass from one pasture to another, I suddenly heard the familiar whine of bagpipes. And from nowhere, a pipe band suddenly emerged. Mainly elderly and middle-aged men, they marched proudly down the street, looks of fierce concentration on their faces. Other tourists might have found it exotic. But to a Highlander like me, it felt just like home.