Water Runs Downhill

 

Phil Burpee, Columnist - Let us take a moment to celebrate plumbers. Ever since the first tentative agriculturalist dropped a few rocks in a stream to divert a trickle of water down towards her favourite patch of wild barley, humankind has toiled, sometimes modestly and sometimes grandly, over the business of trying to make water conform to its needs. And water is, in its benign state, the most compliant and malleable of elements. For, although it rests in its magnitude to a depth of 10 kilometres in certain parts of the Ocean Deep, and rushes in stupendous grandeur down its great river courses, it will also sit patiently in a small glass waiting to be tipped down my gullet. Yes, patience is the name of the game here, because water offers one implacable and immutable truth - it will rejoin itself somewhere farther on down the line. It will, in due course, run on down to the sea. And, as the poet has observed - the sea refuses no river.

Water. I've looked at it sideways into the roiling green mass of twenty-foot ocean waves from the aft deck of a heaving little converted trawler. I've felt it pushing against my eyeballs as I kick against the current in a mountain river, watching the trout dodge and dart, and looking up to see the rippling image of the clouds swirling and twisting on the underside of the surface. I've nearly drowned in it, soupy and ominous, and thrilled to the sensation of crabs crawling across my feet as I touch down in the muck on the other side of the channel, nearly spent of breath and buoyancy. I've watched it from above, winging along in a plane, stretching faceless and inscrutable to the distant horizon and beyond. And I have exulted in it on my face, falling from the sky, tasting it on my tongue so sweet and poignant, and watching it as it joins the ground, on its way to swell the vascular systems of the plants we depend on for our nourishment and our very lives. We may live those lives on the dry land, but we never really left the sea from which we have come. It is most of what we are. The electrolysis that defines our metabolisms and our consciousness occurs in it. We cry it - taste a salty tear and you are brought back to the source. The sex we lose ourselves in for pleasure and/or progeny never left the primordial ocean  -  seed is still cast in the brine, and we begin our lives afloat in the salty waters of our mothers' wombs. If we don't drink water, we soon die. Without it there is only dust.

But the plumber  -  ah, the plumber. I've done my share of this arcane trade over the years - enough of it to have developed an abiding admiration for the fellows who keep our water moving. Because the thing is that a lot of the hydro-engineering that takes place in our homes, especially the older ones, happens in the Stygian pit. I couldn't count how many times I have found myself drag-assing through the mire in some godforsaken crawl-space, made wet, cold and clammy by the spewing problem at hand, peeling back the clinging, dusty webs from which hang the pallid, long-leggedy, twitching spiders that call such gloom home, scrunching beneath sagging joists and drooping wires, edging ever-hopefully forward in the dim light of my flashlight towards the hissing serpent far off in the murk that is the leaky pipe in question. Or perhaps it is a drainage problem, and instead of struggling with the propane torch and the solder, risking imminent immolation, it is a matter of dallying with some sewer pipe, gamely trying to get the pieces cut and assembled before the free-radical molecules gushing out of the solvents in the yellow ABS cement begin to alter my brain function, until I start to get punchy and giddy, and somehow feel as though I should be making a speech or something, or singing, or toasting somebody's health. Beyond a certain point, you can be pretty much guaranteed that the work will look like the proverbial monkey-puzzle, and I will have conspired, in my delirium, to arrange for water and poo to run uphill - which, of course, it will not do. And therein lies a great philosophical key. For nothing so teaches as the fundamental forces of Nature. Water runs downhill. It may seem a simple little toss-away statement, but it is far from that. It is nothing less than a thoroughgoing metaphor for our very existence.

Ocean tides sweep around the planet following the Moon. Womankind has set her fertility clock to this cycle. A flood of water precedes our coming into this world at birth, each broken water a tide in itself washing up on the shores of a new life. It is always the fluid of our devotions. People are baptized in it. Priests ceremonially sprinkle it on supplicants, and thus seek to render the moment sacred. We may immerse ourselves in it when leaving the sweat lodge, giving those burdens of pain and regret and misfortune away to the cleansing current, whence it will be absorbed, transmogrified and forgiven by the only power sufficient unto the task  -  yes, the great Mother of us all. For water is her manifestation, and the flow of it is her eternal gesture. We may say that we 'drink in' beauty. Or that we 'wash our hands' of such and such a thing. Or perhaps we might be 'borne on a rising flood' of wonder or curiosity, or even outrage. Water is the thing that not only cleanses, but always carries and flows and flows and flows. It flows from the high to the low, and then gathers up in clouds, only to fall, so that it might flow again. Water runs downhill.

So, against all this the plumber may seem a prosaic figure  -  merely tinkering with our petty needs so that we can wash the dishes or flush the toilet or shampoo the mini-van. Not so. The plumber is the only tradesperson who truly and viscerally understands the profound immutability of this most compelling of elements. The nail-banger or the sparky or the tin-basher or the shingle-doofus or the board-slinger or the grease-monkey may all pursue admirable and necessary trades  -  but none of these must grapple with such a sublime and persistent reality. For no-one but the plumber can truly realize that you simply cannot, under any circumstance, fool water. It will not be fooled. It will, when all the foolery of the day is done, do just one thing  -  it will run downhill.

In our lives, we all too often choose to create artificial structures, both physical and allegorical, that seek to deny the inevitability of movement and change. It's understandable, given the prospect of the oblivion that awaits us, each in our turn. But the true foolishness of this is that every time we turn on the tap, we are offered that most frank of lessons. There is no stasis. Everything flows. The plumber knows it well  -  water runs downhill.

Phil Burpee
December 3, 2011