Jun. 04, 2005 - 19:13 MDT

TWO LIQUIDS

Twenty-twenty hindsight can often be much too late to do much good, it appears to me. And I think we are in grave danger, maybe not ten minutes from now, but later on, not too much later though.

If we could back up in time and do things different, would we ? Probably not, too much plain old human selfishness and stubborn willful lethargy I think.

As a westerner, living in an arid land where water is precious, thinking about what I have read through the years about how water matters were handled it is pretty obvious that not many of the wheels that spun and spun were thinking much about the future, if any. You know the future is way far ahead of the now, clear out of sight, so why worry as long as the immediate necessities are met.

If those folks way back when had begun to build dams and plan for a normal increase in population and the need for more and more water perhaps things wouldn't be in such bad shape now.

I think it is possible that if enough dams and water handling capacity had been taken care of way back when, the prospect of water shortage wouldn't be so dire today.

The big dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River are in trouble now due to drought, therefore Southern California can be having a grave problem before too long.

it's a cumulative thing, when I was a kid in Denver for a small fee monthly there were no meters on our water consumption, no water cops to see if someone was overwatering their lawns or playing with hoses as we kids used to do in the summer. A water tap in the house could be running 24/7 for all anyone cared. And it stayed that way until late in the game, somewhere in the late 1980's I think. We were in the process of selling our house to move into an apartment when the meter was put on the lines on our street. Then lawns began to show hints of brown, some worse than others. A person could guess that some folks were paying heavy water bills because of how green their grass was.

Our water department here in town tried to sell us the idea of Xeriscaping personal property, plantings that used much less water than lawn and much of the ornamentals. They had demonstration plantings that showed that beauty could be had here without water slurping lawns. They tried for years. Of course for the most part people kept doing their thing as before.

How great it would have been to have a living a genius that the authorities would listen to who would push dams and more dams, water purification and control, back in pioneer days ? But, you know, do enough to make money and satisfy current needs and the heck take the hindmost.

Used to be that a householder could drill a well and use the water for agricultural purposes and lawns and fancy flowers. But our water table in the Denver Basin has been drawn down and private individuals can do that no more.

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Then there is oil from which we get lubricants and fuel for our vehicles. We did have some people with a little sense in government then, or did we ? Was our government just trying to teach OPEC a lesson and disregarding the actualities ?

Our speed limits were cut down to 55 mph and small cars touted, mpg were important then.

That was when ? The 1970's ? Since then our cars have gotten bigger, with fewer miles to the gallon. Civilian HUMVEEs are on the market. My wife Heather has a Saturn VUE, which looks like a SUV -- just a tad smaller though. All wheel drive yet. So we have a behemoth on a small scale, a motor sideways in the front end driving the car and a differential in the rear pushing a bit too. More moving parts and of course more tons to move. Tires bigger and more expensive as well.

Heather has her philosophy on the matter. She is a short lady and shopped until she found a car that enabled her to look over the tops of the smaller cars and see what is ahead. That she can, but we use twice as much gas for the miles traveled, at the same speeds, as near as I can tell. Heh, she bought the car, I buy the gas, oh well.

It appears to me that we as a country are worse off than we were in the days when our cars were big with shark fins in the back and Dagmar's on the front bumpers. HUMVEEs in city traffic -- jeepers.

City street and highway infrastructure seem to be in the process of decay now, AMTRAK keeps losing funding, the airlines bankrupt or nearly so.

Could be that eventually only the rich folk can afford to go anywhere by any means of transportation I wonder ?

Is our country the victim of a disease that could be called AEC ? Addictive Excessive Consumption ? ? ? ?

As long as I drink water enough and eat near properly, until my body wears completely out I know that precious blood will circulate for me. Just worrying about the other TWO FLUIDS . . . . . . . . .

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