As a rule, in my past, I drank water in altered form. The straight water from a bottle or the tap just didn’t interest me as a viable way to stave off dehydration or quench my thirst. My list of preferences has tea at the top. Iced tea, and especially green tea. Which, in spite of all the hype about green tea (and blueberries) and the positive effects of antioxidants, which I have consumed regularly for years, at my advanced age of 70, I don’t look or particularly feel any younger. Plain water was at the bottom of my list.

I have tried many types of water. As a kid, we drank water from a cistern, gathered from rain, and funneled into the cistern under the front porch. It was the only water I knew back then, and it wasn’t thrilling to drink. And after we got hooked up to the municipal water system, and broke through the wall to use the cistern for storage, I looked at it, and thought, ick, I was drinking water stored in this dank smelly reservoir? Thank goodness for Kool Aid.

Then I lived on a farm, with a manual pump for irony tasting cold water that left orange stains on everything. Sitting in a bathtub of iron water, I would get out smelling like I had rusted.

At my school in Africa, I would walk 7 km to the “river”, which was a muddy creek really, and dig a hole in the sand near the muddy flow, and dip water that seeped into my hole with a rusty soup can and fill my 25 liter jug to lug back to my house at the school. It was only slightly less muddy than the stream. And full of bacteria from the animals and humans whose waste washed into the watershed, so I had to boil it. And boiling wouldn’t change the mud content. Some of the mud would settle out in the bottom of my water jugs, and would require vigorous shaking when I tried to loosen the deposits to “clean” my jugs. Even Orange Squash, the African version of Kool Aid, did not hide the muddy flavor very much. Straining it through a t-shirt made it look less brown, and certainly stained my t-shirt, but it still tasted muddy. I got giardia twice during my tenure, both times from accepting a cool drink of Orange Squash from a family who had not boiled their water.

Once, I went with a group of Peace Corps volunteers to an island off the Mozambican coast, Inhaca Island, which was a tropical paradise. But there was a sign near the community well which advised boiling the water, or treating it with iodine. It tasted bitter and icky. But my friend Mary had brought along pouches of Crystal Light, which we came to call Cholera Light, which made the water, if I may use the word lightly, palatable, though just barely. “Hey Mary, toss me a pouch of Cholera Light, I just finished treating this water.”

Once while driving across Mexico, I was heading for Guadalajara, and came out of the desert above a river, on the other side of which was the city. As I wended my way down towards the bridge crossing the river, I caught glimpses of the river through the trees, and it seemed to reflect the sunlight very brightly. On the cliff on the opposite side was a small waterfall, that fell maybe 100 feet into the river. As I got to the bottom and crossed the bridge, I saw that the reason that the river seemed so bright was because there was white foam covering the surface. On both sides of the bridge were houses and people living on the river bank. I saw women washing clothes in the river. Then I was across the bridge, and winding my way up the mountain on top of which Guadalajara, a city of 6 million people, was perched. Near the top, at the point where I had seen the waterfall, I turned into an entrance hoping to be able to go and see the waterfall. It turned out to be the city’s sewage treatment plant, and the waterfall was a pipe spewing the effluent from the plant. That was why there was foam on the river. And all those people downstream were bathing in and drinking the river water.

Back in Austin, where we have clean treated water, it still isn’t thrilling to drink. So, I mostly drink green tea from the grocery store. The water is not bad, just mostly meh.

One day, a couple years ago, I had been sweating profusely building a garage in the hot sun all day, so I went to the nearby store to get a bottle of water to rehydrate. They were sold out of all the cheap water, and all that was left were some pricey bottles of Fiji water. In spite of always trying to reduce my carbon footprint, and thinking of the fossil fuels needed to ship that water to Texas from Fiji’s pure artesian wells, I reluctantly bought a bottle for only 3 or 4 times the price of Ozarka or Dasani. I sat in the shade on the side of the garage, and drank that bottle of Fiji water. It was the best tasting water I had ever drank. Mostly bottled water just tastes wet, which is not really a flavor. But this elixir was wonderfully cold and clean tasting. If clean is something that you can actually taste.

A couple weeks ago I saw some Fiji water in the grocery store, and got to wondering if it had really been as delicious as I remembered, or had it been just that I was hot and thirsty that day, so I bought a bottle just to see. I brought it home and stuck it in the back of the fridge. Then yesterday, I got home from work parched, and after a day of successive hot flashes, needed something to bring me back to life. I went to the fridge to get some tea, and saw the Fiji water hiding behind the tea and milk. So I took it out and opened the bottle, while settling in on my back porch to listen to my little waterfall and write a story for Facebook. I was about 20 minutes into writing, and remembered that I was thirsty, so without thinking about it, absently reached over and took a big drink from the bottle, and had the same epiphany as I had the first time, this was the best tasting water I ever drank. I polished off the big bottle of Fiji water in no time.

The only other water that even approaches Fiji in taste, was a bottle of water I bought in Whole Foods last year that claimed to be 1000 year old water from a glacier. It was pretty good.

I get my news mostly from BBC online. I read and see pictures of places where the water resources are hideous, like in India, drinking the sludge of the Ganges river. Or China where you are drinking Yangtze river water that contains other peoples fecal matter and laundry detergent from washing clothes in the river upstream. And I just can’t justify drinking water from an island on the other side of the world, that uses fossil fuels to bring it to this side. And the truth is, Fiji water might just be water bottled by some guy named Herb, sitting in his bathtub in the Bronx, in shorts and a wife-beater t-shirt, filling the bottles with a rusty soup can. You can never tell.

Don’t waste water. It is a precious and diminishing resource.

Fiji water,  I can’t justify the human cost of drinking it. But it is delicious.