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W.A.T.E.R. With Aqua Trouble, Everyone Rations Water. Can you imagine trying to live without it? Impossible. Yet three quarters of our planet, and nearly 75% of the human body is composed of H20. Have you ever been forced to ration, or have a significantly reduced amount of it in your life? I never really had until our water maker stopped working on the boat. It's true that a lot of cruisers don't have the so-called luxury of water makers onboard. But many do. Thank God I married one that does. For those of you blessed souls out there that don't make water onboard, you have my utmost respect. Water maker. What beautiful two words in the English language. What brilliant technology. What normalcy. What convenience … when it works. And when it works, 160 gallons of salty seawater are forced through a series of filters and then a membrane; brine is separated from water, and particulate matter is reduced to a healthy minimum. Voilá, you have 16 gallons of fresh water fit for drinking, cooking, bathing, and cleaning. You always know when it's working, because it sounds like an angry carnivorous beast, masticating yucky seawater into the pretty pristine kind that comes out of one liter bottles. When it doesn't work, there's nothing more annoying, unnatural, un-American and even frightening, then being in the middle of the ocean WITHOUT WATER. How many times in a day do you use water? Think about it. You get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, take a shower, make coffee; you use water to prepare meals, laundry your clothes, wash your car, etc., etc., etc. Face it: you take it for granted. Now for a slight diversion in this story. We recently spent time in the San Blas Islands, home of the indigenous Kuna people. One day, looking for white-faced monkeys, a Kuna friend guided us in our dinghy, far into one of their rivers on the Panama mainland. We never saw monkeys, but what we did see tugged at our heartstrings. These people—traditionally men—go into that river almost daily with containers, both large and small, to obtain drinking water. The women wash their clothes in that water. They often bathe in it. I think we ate rice at a new local Kuna restaurant on Nargana Island prepared with that river water. Think about it. Our boat has two water tanks that hold approximately 180 gallons in all. Compared to the Kuna Indians, that's months worth of fresh water. But think of the average American, or citizen of any so-called contemporary society, and consider the water consumption. If you take a 10-minute shower, you probably use 10-15 gallons or so. You get the idea. Now back to boat-speak. We don't take 10-minute showers on Andanté. We don't even really take showers. We take drizzles. Yes, there are two full heads (bathrooms) with shower hoses, but to keep water consumption to a conservative minimum we drizzle water over our bodies for a couple of minutes. Actually I have a technique for drizzling, but will spare you the details. Let's just say, in the end, I feel relatively clean. Not really squeaky clean, but clean enough. When it comes to washing dishes, there are broad spectrums of styles among the boating community. We each have our own, all in the name of cleanliness, but ultimately, water conservation. When the dishes are dried and put away, I'm confident that they're clean and the water tank gage hasn't plummeted beyond reason. One afternoon in February, Karl and I enjoyed a beautiful motor/sail off Costa Rica, and we were making water (because of the power drain, you need to have the engine on while making water). I went down into the galley and heard unusual sounds coming from the water maker system. It didn't sound like that happy carnivorous beast. That's when it all began. Karl went to the pet water maker and after several attempts to manipulate it, cajole it, coddle it, prod it and pounce on it, he announced that it wasn't working. Wasn't working properly. My already overheated-sticky-glowing body began to bristle. I knew what those three words—"it isn't working"—meant. Water conservation. Bathing in the sea, with thimbles full of water drizzle-rinses; washing the dishes in seawater, with driblets of fresh water for rinsing; cleaning the clothes with itsy-bitsy sink-bowl siphoned rinses. I even imagined thirsty lips floating in a life raft in the middle of the Pacific, looking at all that undrinkable water. That I could handle. Sort of. The hardest part of all would be the boat ... from bow to stern, from floor to ceiling, from aft to beam, and bottom to top … in shambles. Tools everywhere. Floor torn up. Walkways blocked. Galley unreachable. Things would be scattered on every available surface of the already small 400-square feet of space we call home. And nowhere to go to get away.
And the horror began, that evening: the clutter, the chaos, and the nuisance of stuff everywhere. It reappeared, over the days and weeks, each time Karl had an idea of how to fix IT. It escalated, when our friend Chris came to visit for a month, lugging 100 pounds of necessary boat parts for us and a pair of swimming trunks for himself. The project continued with each call to the States for water maker service—earnest troubleshooting which didn't quite resolve the problem. It dragged on with each fresh attempt by Karl and Chris to fix IT. And it reached its full crescendo when Chris's daughter Heather arrived for her two-week vacation with us. Thanks to her, several more boat parts, including one new water maker membrane were schlepped from Seattle to Panama. Thank you Heather. But then, in Portobelo, the four of us were nearly at the end of our patience and tolerance. The guys had been working on IT, the water maker, yet again for hours. Heather and her dad were our guests; this was supposed to be their vacation, a fun time. It was anything but fun! It was nearly 9:00 at night, humidity was off the scale, bugs were everywhere, the boat was torn up, and "stuff" was omnipresent. There was no space for sitting and no place for escaping; we were hungry, miserably hot, dirty, tired, and ready for a solution. Karl poured water into a hose to prime the system, but no one could figure out where that water was going. Chris found a leak dripping below the sink. Meanwhile, I kept thinking about Moses and the children of Israel. If the Great Infinite could direct old Moses to the water in the rock, surely S/he could direct our guys to a solution. And then it came. At closer inspection, that pesky leak was coming from a cracked hose. That crack was at the back of the galley sink locker, and nearly impossible to find, but it was the insidious troublemaker. After all the steps to fix it: multiple failed attempts at a resolution; after poking, probing and prodding; after new pumps, a new membrane, and lots of patience, we made it through those weeks of confusion on the boat. The final step was a simple crack. For all the technical details, you can read Karl's log #40, but ultimately it took a few inches of new ˝ inch plastic hose, and IT was finally fixed. The water maker worked again, and we started dinner. An Opportunity to Help In our lives of plenty, the difficulties of others can appear transparent through our eyes, and we all too often miss moments that can make a difference. Here's one to consider. The Kuna Yala of San Blas, Panama, are in great need; their life is simple and extremely poor by our standards; but they're a tradition-based society of hardworking, family-oriented, generally friendly people. Behind their capitalistic ventures of mola, lobster and fresh produce selling, you see the squalor of their lives, especially so, if you're fortunate to walk the dusty roads of their island pueblos. I say fortunate because we had that privilege. We enjoyed their hospitality, ate their food, played with their beautiful children and photographed their lives. The transparencies and videotape will be outlived by the picture-world in our hearts and thoughts. It was sobering. You could hardly believe what their villages look like. Their homes are made out of flimsy poles with thatched roofs; their bathrooms are public outhouses built on stilts over the water's edge—people's front yards! Their only source of water is the nearby river on the mainland. Each day the men take their canoes up the river and fill large plastic containers with river water for drinking and cooking. The women spend the day cooking, tending to the youngest children, and doing laundry—either in the river, or in huge plastic buckets in their yards. And, they make molas, lots of them! We befriended a wonderful Kuna man, Federico, a self-designated liaison between the boating community and the Kuna people. He was our guide for a few days. We traveled with him up the Rio Diablo in search of white faced monkeys; didn't see any, but we had the opportunity to experience his kindness, ingenuity, charity, humanity—his corazón. No need to run for your Spanish diccionario if that word escapes you. It translates HEART. He had plenty of it. If this man is a reflection of the people he so loves, then they're very special. If you would like to share a fragment of your abundance, these folks would be thrilled to have basic necessities of clothing, blankets, and textbooks (in Spanish), English language books and Spanish/English dictionaries, pencils, pens, crayons, puzzles, etc. for their children. These items can be sent to: Sr. Federico Morales, Nargana (Rio Diablo), Kuna Yala (San Blas), Panama Rep. de Panama. Thanks for walking the dusty streets with us! |
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