*Warning this is gross in a real way
Where I live has a cistern… I live in the country, the real country; it’s not a suburbia house in a former farmer’s field kind of country. In case you don’t know, a cistern is a big tank in the ground where my house’s tap water comes from. The water gets in by rainwater from the eavestroughs and from a truck… it’s a water truck, and not just a pickup with water in the back splashing around. Every year to two years we get the cistern cleaned… this is where the gross part begins. The cleaner said he found 4 drowned animals: two rats and two squirrels… or four squirrels with two that had tiny rat-like tails. Let me reiterate, this is our drinking water. Our drinking water! For the record, we’re not so country hick that we put dead animals in our water to increase the flavour and organic nature of it: “Hmm, I love them extra minerals… hey, does having dead animals in the water make it a protein drink?” To be honest with four dead animals in the cistern part of me wondered if we had an animal mafia in the area using it to dispose of the bodies: a furry Sopranos if you will. To add to the grossness of this story I was told that when things die they typically empty their bowels… mmm. The cistern is now a toilet. I was drinking from a kind-of-toilet. Of course, as an animal lover my immediate response was, “Oh no, those poor rodents,” until I realized they were flavouring my drinking water and then my response was, “Oh no, those stupid rodents.” When I mentioned the cistern had four big rodents in it to my fiancé, Alyshia, I said it was surprising there weren’t any mice. Alyshia always has the right thing to say: (her) “They’re so small they were probably already disintegrated and dissolved in the water.” (me) “Uh, thanks?”
Fortunately, my family put in a special ultraviolet light for the drinking water in the kitchen that kills any bacteria, which is good… but I don’t just drink from the kitchen sink. When I brush my teeth, like a normal person I spit when I’m done and then take a swig of water from the bathroom tap… the bathroom tap that doesn’t have the special filtration system. I know the bathroom water isn’t as clean, but growing up with it I know my body can handle a little bad water… it’s just that bad water was just “rain water” and not a fur-flesh concoction of rat and squirrel… and who knows how many dissolved mice. It’s also gross because when I was showering to get clean I was actually getting more disgusting. I was showering in rat juice. I was showering with water from a fermenting squirrel bath.
This experience points out that the importance of perspective. For instance, call me horrible, but after Alyshia’s mouse comment she paused, and then said, “Wait, you had me shower at your house two days ago… so that means I showered in rodent water!” Originally I thought this situation was horrible because it affected me, but suddenly, because it was happening to someone else, I found it hilarious. Perspective really plays a factor in how we see situations. It would be easy to blow this out of proportion and be traumatized from this to the point where I never shower or drink at my house again. But clearly it wasn’t that bad… it’s bad, but not that bad because no one got sick or even noticed anything.
It also helps that I now realize the water everyone gets really isn’t that much better. In fact, it’s worse. There aren’t just 4 rotting corpses in the lakes we get our water from; there are who knows how many dead animals and rotting fish killed by toxic industrial pollution in there. Lakes are full of defecation whether from fish, birds or even humans. What we put in the sewers end up somewhere. Sure there are filters, but how good are they? We just blindly trust that everything is working properly at the sewage plant and that the employees there are capable of noticing when something nasty like lady products that have been improperly flushed is all being removed. Now that’s worse than my cistern… oh, sorry for that thought. Either way, our bodies seem to handle it the water we get in our taps, so it can’t be that bad.
This week may you find any holes in your life that need to be fixed like the hole that we had where the eavestrough met the cistern in order to prevent bad things from getting into your life.
Rev Chad, ChadDavid.ca, Learning to love dumb people