The Allure of Water
Our love affair with two hydrogen atoms coupled with one oxygen atom, in all its forms
“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.”
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot
Science suggests we emerged from the sea? Of course, this is hotly debated depending upon your personal beliefs.
As fetuses, we live and grow in a maternal sea of amniotic fluid for nine months before we transition to terrestrial life. Yet we come out as a baby, crying and sometimes resisting; we fight to keep that warm liquid blanket that protected and nourished us.
If most people were asked to describe their idea of a perfect home, it would likely include being near a body of water. Who wouldn’t want to live on the ocean, watching the waves lapping the shore, or having a home on a river? Waterfront property, despite the risk of flooding, is nearly always more expensive than a landlocked parcel of real estate. We often center vacations around being near a body of water, though not everyone wants to go to a beach. People come here to Pocahontas County to ride bicycles on the Greenbrier River Trail because of its namesake, a beautiful river. Some prefer hiking up to a mountain lake, while others find their personal nirvana wading in a mountain stream, fly fishing for trout.
We construct dams to create lakes. We scoop out the soil to make a pond on our property, and others build swimming pools. It’s tempting to think that humans leave the womb only to keep searching for what nurtured them as fetuses; after all, we humans are composed of 60% water.
Colleges introduced the waterborne sport of crewing (rowing) in the late 1800s, and it continues today. Whitewater kayaking is now an Olympic sport, and long-distance swimmers demonstrate their prowess and endurance by swimming the English Channel. People by the thousands float the Colorado River down the Grand Canyon every year, while our nearby national park, the New River Gorge and Gauley River, are famous worldwide for their Class 4 and Class 5 rapids.
Water offers us so many sports and unique experiences; imagine life without surface waters – pretty dull, to say the least. We cannot resist the challenges, and beauty water offers; we have a primal need to be near and in it.
Even when winter comes, we venture out on the ice to skate, fish through holes augured in the ice, and play hockey. We find great pleasure in skiing through powder snow down a ski slope, yet another form of water. For years, I participated in ice climbing, where we even had a name for the ice that our axe and crampons bit into best: “plastic,” or “hero” ice.
Many of our mythical and sometimes real monsters are associated with water: Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster, Jaws, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even the “huge fish” that swallowed Jonah. There’s a creepiness to what might be lurking in the depths of water; even as an experienced diver, I often felt that fear.
So, where did all of this water come from, on a planet that was once a ball of molten rock? A portion of the Earth’s water likely came from outer space in the form of asteroids, meteorites, and, to a lesser degree, comets. More recent research has provided evidence that our molten planet formed water through chemical reactions between a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and molten magma. Over millions of years, Earth cooled, and water vapor in the atmosphere condensed into rain that filled the low basins to form our first global oceans.* Mountains arose and streams and rivers formed on every continent.
I, too, chose a life where water mattered beyond drinking it. In my childhood, I lived in several states, but, like most children, I always sought out the local streams, ponds and lakes, where I gathered crawdads and pollywogs. A few years later, I fished, ran trotlines and hunted ducks over bodies of water.
As a teenager, I knew that I wanted to work around water, and I made that dream come true. My first job with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources was surveying a swampy area in northeastern Ohio to create a waterfowl habitat. From there, I went to Rocky Fork State Park in southwestern Ohio as a park ranger, where, when given a choice between equestrian or patrolling by boat, I chose the latter. The state then sent me to basic and advanced SCUBA school to perform underwater duties such as dam maintenance and underwater recoveries, including drowning victims.
In 1973, a new law enforcement group within the Department recruited me: the Division of Watercraft. After initial training, they sent me to Yorktown, Virginia, to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Boating Safety Detachment (BOSDET) school.
In this job, I became all too aware of the dangers of water, as well as its joys. Watercraft Officers had two main jobs: preventing boating accidents and reducing injuries and deaths. We accomplished these goals through enforcement and education. Watercraft Officers had jurisdiction and enforcement authority on all state waters, including private waterways. Patrolling this broad range of waterways required everything from canoes to a 32-foot Inland Seas cruiser replete with a flying bridge.
One example of the Division of Watercraft’s success in reducing deaths on Ohio’s rivers is the spike in drownings in 1972 following the release of the film Deliverance, which, unfortunately, inspired many inexperienced paddlers to get out on the rivers without adequate whitewater paddling training.
There were more than 70 canoe-related drownings, most of which involved either acute hypothermia or attempting to paddle over lowhead dams and getting caught in the hydraulics at the base of these small dams. Through a combination of intensive education, enforcement of current personal flotation device (PFD) requirements, and demolition of portions of lowhead dams to neutralize the deadly hydraulics, the death toll was dramatically reduced.
We love water, but it does pose a hazard for those who do not respect it.
Watercraft officers worked on Lake Erie out to the Canadian border. Among the Great Lakes – Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Lake Ontario – I repeat, Lake Ontario – Erie has the distinction of having the highest density of shipwrecks per square mile. Lake Erie is also the shallowest of the Great Lakes, and sudden storms can quickly churn up the lakebed, creating massive, unpredictable waves.
When we think of famous shipwrecks, we generally think of the Titanic, the Lusitania and Shackleton’s Endurance, trapped and crushed by heavy pack ice in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. Yet, there was the equally tragic shipwreck of the American Great Lakes freighter, the Edmund Fitzgerald, on Lake Superior, November 10, 1975, that took the lives of all 29 crew members.
Gordon Lightfoot immortalized this maritime disaster in his epic, haunting song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” For those of us who have seen so many needless drownings, this song serves as a reminder that water, for all its beauty and joys, can, and does, take lives every year.
A story based on Homer’s Odyssey tells of a sailor who grew tired of life at sea and wants to leave piracy and scurvy behind to be a landlubber. At the next port, he abandons his ship, carries an oar over his shoulder, and walks inland. When someone finally asks what he’s carrying on his shoulder, the sailor drives the oar into the ground and settles there for the rest of his life.
It’s a bit ironic that I now live on a mountaintop, rather than on a body of water. However, I do have my vernal pool that so many amphibians depend upon.
Here’s wishing you smooth sailing,
Ken Springer
[email protected]
A special thanks to my former Watercraft colleagues, Mark Reed and Larry Simonetti, who have a combined time of 60 years working out of a boat. And a special “Ahoy there” to salvage diver Captain Dave Lowe, the legend of Subic Bay in the Philippines.
*National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
