Water

April 6, 2025

A water pipe in my neighborhood broke the other day. My first thought was to be glad that it wasn’t a problem with my own house’s plumbing. My next was that I should probably pick up a case of bottled water from the grocery store. As it happened, I could see the work crew repairing the pipe from the parking lot there. They fixed it within a day. We had to boil our water for another day after that as they flushed the pipes and tested the quality.

My third thought was that it was inconceivable to me that it would not be repaired. An inconvenience, an interruption, I can handle just fine, even if I do not expect it. But I realized that I cannot imagine on anything but the most abstract level that the water would not come back on in a timely manner.

But that’s an awful lot to take for granted, isn’t it? That this system of clean water exists in the first place. That it is reliable and safe, and that outages are exceptional and unusual. That when there is a problem, repair crews are swiftly dispatched with the tools they need to fix it (from what I could see, this job took a fair bit of heavy machinery). That, all in all, there is an extensive network of people and resources ready to make sure that my neighbors and I have certain things we need.

This is much of what civilization is. No. As I write this I realize that it’s even more fundamental than that. It’s what community is. People banding together so that we don’t all have to worry about every aspect of survival. I don’t have to worry about water if Somebody Else takes care of it. And they don’t have to worry about e.g. food if I do that. And that gives us both more time and energy to do other things. Like tell each other stories about what we did that day. But it is not easy to maintain that, especially when it is scaled beyond personal relationships. I do not know the names of any of the people who fixed my water supply; they do not know me. But I am anonymously thankful for them. But there is perhaps a weakness of that community as I just described it. We help each other, in a sense, so that we can forget what we do for each other. And so we do forget, and we forget how much better this is than not helping each other.

Intellectually I know that there are many places where problems like this do not just get fixed and go away. There are many reasons that might be the case, and it is seldom going to be due to a simple lack of community. Right now I am mainly thinking of Gaza and the destruction of all the infrastructure there. But I know that there are many more places where the same is true, including many that I would not think of as “the kind of place where that happens” from my privileged perspective.

I can sense my failure of imagination, my inability to perceive a world really outside of my experience, and the assumptions I make about the people who do live in that world beyond—that is not really “beyond”, not distant, merely not right here right now. That’s why I’m writing this. It’s uncomfortable to think about, and it is the kind of thing that is all too easy to avoid thinking about to avoid the discomfort. I know that I will forget what I am thinking and feeling about this. I already would have if not for the process of writing this.

I’m thirsty now. I’m going to stop writing and get myself a glass of water.