Re: the good news (water and salt too!)

Just an interesting side note story on the situation surrounding acquafers. The small rural town I grew up in was named after the native americans (what some call 'indians') many moons ago. When they named the town, it was not a town as most of us have come to know the term. It was merely a stopping off out of the way place where water came out of the ground at the junction of an underground spring & above ground; the water came out of the ground with such ferocity that they named it 'roaring spring', the roaring once claimed to be audible for miles distant. Over the intervening years of "progress", the natives are long gone, the spring was logn ago dammed (to be clear, not damned, but literally dammed, somebody built a dam around the spring to contain it). I suspect that others along the way have been flirting with damning it. More about that in a moment. A small collection of factories grew up around the water that flowed over the dam from the now partly-contained spring. During the intervening years, the modern town to this day remains a rural hick town (my term), or "city" to the nearby farmers and Amish, with consistent population of 3 thousand, surrounded by similarly small-sized small, rural, farming towns. Along the way, the area of the spring and dam were fashioned into a small town park, replete with all kinds of big fish, bubble-gum-machine-like-fish-feed-dispensers, and an increaingly mammoth flock of ducks who've gradually migrated to the dam and have since refused to leave. About 15 years ago, the family that is one of the few relatively wealthy/entrepeneur types of families that have long held this town as their Camelot, diversified by turning their now gone Sawmill into a retail water-bottling outlet. One must admire the genious; no finished product to expend great effort and expense in manufacturing to finished state, just bottle and affix a price tag to what nature has long provided to flow literally right out of the ground. Okay, to be fair, they do put the natural water through a series of costly processes, to include UV, and RO, before selling it.

When one thinks about the way this world has been progressing for many years, it can easily be seen that there are a precious few natural resources that in and of themselves are the most precious; sources of food and water among the short list along with air and shelter. I'll leave "clothes on one's back" as optional. It can also be seen that our government, by and large, and in all it's glorious manifestations, agencies formal and not, has bee progressivly putting forth great effort to accrue to itself greater and greater control over natural resources that, while once seemingly infinite, have over the years been put into a much more finite view.

About 10 years ago, the town was all abuzz with the scuttlebutt produced when various minions of various agencies government county, state & federal (EPA among them) brought to the surpervisors of said town the great need for them (the minions) to conduct a series of tests too far complicated for the people to understand, but the basic idea for the people to grasp was that it was of chief importance for the minions - as directed by their handlers, to identify the source of the water that had been feeding the spring for time imemorial. I had been off living & workig in places far from home during that time, so the info I got was a different kind of second hand compared to what the government wa providing into the 'vine and scuttlebutt for the locals to digest. The gist of it seems to be, far-flung bands and teams of apparently authorized government agents assembled and subsequently fanned out in ever increasing circles radiating outwards from the town, conducting, apparently, all kinds of fancy, complicated "scientifc" tests, that included the injecting of dies into the ground here and there, attempting to solve the great national mystery - from where does the roaring spring get it's water?.

The story that I got upon moving back closer to home is, apparently, when it was all said and done, the minions would not reveal to the people what the full results of their tests were. Instead, they pretty much packed up and left town as quickly as they came, leaving in their wake what seemed like afterthought commetns to the effect "well, we're probably still not sure, so as far as you little town folks are concerned, take it on our advice that we officially don't know where you're water comes from, have a nice day". It was in the intervening years (the past 10-15 or so) that lore of the spring now includes tell, of an officially unidentified source, telling that the spring is likely fed from underground channels that bring water from as far away as Lake Erie. During the same intervening years, the country/state/federal minions have been quite confident in justifying their approval & renewal of license for the corporate quarry located just outside town to dig deeper and deeper so that they can continue to profit from deep-sourced Limestone. Apparently the grade of Limestone to be profited from and already in copious amounts, unharvested, at and near the surface, is not as good. The general theory worried about by the hick town folks is, maybe nobody really knows where the source of water despite all the grand efforts to scientifically search for it, maybe they don't really know how deep that source may be or how far away it may come from, but the minions and the quarry seemed content & intent on finding out "by accident", state-sponsored & approved accident at that. Tweet