Stone Cold Panic
Pete sat in his office and stared at his cup of ice and his bottle of flavored water. The brand was Poland Spring. Most people know nothing about Poland Spring and probably don’t even realize it’s a real place. Pete knew all about Poland Spring. He had lived there for three years back in the 1960’s. Poland Spring was a symbol of the transformation of life to Pete and it all scared him to death.
Pete had grown up all around the world and was son to a highly educated and enlightened mother. Along the way she had moved the family to a place called Poland Spring, Maine. The reason for the move was that Poland Spring, the site of an old resort complex in remote mid-central Maine, had been selected as the site of the first women’s Job Corps Center. Pete’s mother had been hired out of graduate school, where she had gotten her doctorate in adult education, to do the heavy organizational lifting of setting up the Center. In those Halcyon Days of the Great Society, it was deemed anachronistically wise to have a women’s Job Corps Center be set up by a woman. So, off we went to the northern Appalachian part of Maine where the air was clean and the water fresh.
Poland Spring was a spot in the middle of nowhere that was turned into a destination by Hiram Ricker in the late eighteenth century. He touted the curative nature of the spring water that flowed from the hillside and was devoid of most minerals. It was sort of an anti-mineral water of sorts. By 1861 Poland Spring had become a destination resort that was touted by its visitors as a recreational and rehabilitation sanctuary for the hoi palloi of New England. This fashion continued into the 1900’s and lasted more or less through WWII, when the era of grand sprawling resorts like Poland Spring waned.
By 1965 Poland Spring was a shadow of its former glory despite there being a TV station owned by Jack Paar located there to capture the direct line-of-sight to Mount Washington to the west. These declining fortunes and large old structures made it a perfect spot for a remote sociological experiment called the Women’s Job Corp. The two things that were left out of the long term government lease were the world-famous golf course (the first 18-hole golf course in America) and the spring house and bottling operation.
The Poland Spring Water Company had been bottling the 8 gallon/minute spring flow for many years and selling it in the curio section of local grocery stores. When Pete moved there as a twelve-year-old boy he could not comprehend why people would pay for water. In fact, the situation was even funnier to him because he could rightly claim that his home tap water (from an artesian well on the house lot) was Poland Spring water and every bit as good as the stuff on the shelf.
That sociological experiment finally failed due to Nixon-era budget cuts and Pete went on after Maine to live in Rome, Italy, where bottled water was a far more acceptable phenomenon. You could have water “con gas” or “senza gas”, but it was still bottled water. Pete always wondered where the springs were that had natural carbonation, but that was just a fleeting thought which did not dominate the mind of an adolescent.
In the years of Pete’s young career, he watched first Perrier and then everybody and their brother pile into the bottled water business. When he saw Poland Spring come on the scene he was only half surprised. Every time he saw or thought about bottled water, his mind always went back to the Poland Spring springhouse and bottling works. Suddenly his mind was exploding with questions. How did an 8 gallon/day spring produce water in these new quantities? When he lived there, Poland Spring water had no carbonation and now the bottle claimed it was naturally carbonated and yet still from that little spring in south central Maine. What’s up with that? And now there are naturally flavored, naturally carbonated natural spring water…still all from that little spring in south central Maine.
There was a time when Pete kicked himself for not seeing the coming trend and jumping on the Poland Spring bottled water program early enough to make his fortune. Now the folks at Nestle, the global purveyor of all sorts of foodstuffs and beverages, owned the Poland Spring Water Company of Maine. These are the same people that brought you substitute breast milk for babies and had the International Baby Food Action Network boycott their business. I wonder whether there is an International Natural Water Action Network in the making?
There should have been nothing scary about bottled water, but we were actually moving beyond bottled water now. Those plastic bottles were now the scourge of the oceans and the landfills. The pictures on the news of mega plastic islands floating in the South Pacific Ocean were the next great eco-disaster. If you want to really kill some fish, drink your water through a plastic straw. Providing the world with clean water in multiple forms was a solution and a problem all rolled into one. Just like petrochemicals were a boon to mankind right up until they were a killer of mankind. Pete wondered where the story went from here. He was getting the feeling that the lifecycle of the world was spinning to a place where the only solution left to mankind was to wipe the slate clean and start over again. That’s a pretty scary thought.
We live in a world where we keep expecting technology to bail us out. It is the solution for economic growth via productivity gains (unless you worry about the concomitant unemployment it breeds). It is the answer for ecological disaster (unless you believe that it caused the climate change and simply cannot do anything to reverse that). Ultimately we are left with the old sci-fi comic book solution of Jor-El sending his son (a.k.a. Superman) to another planet to escape his failing home planet of Krypton. Just hope that there isn’t so much Kryptonite hanging around to do you in.
Pete found that he increasingly worried about things way too much. Worrying about bottled water and getting into a stone cold panic over it was just not a productive use of his time. Luckily, he had emptied his Poland Spring bottle and was on to his Diet Pepsi. At least there wasn’t anything toxic about Diet Pepsi.