 |
Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday, April 17, 2000 Volume II Number 16
|
FOCUS - The Source
One of the most basic, fundamental necessities of life is water.
Between fifty and ninety percent of all living things - plants, animals, and humans – consists of water. Blood in humans and animals and sap in plants provide the essential transport system for nutrients to move throughout the organism to provide life-sustaining nutrition… and then remove toxins before their life-threatening properties can take effect.
It’s no wonder then, that we arrange our lives to be close to a plentiful source of cool, clean water. We need it. Lots of it.
It’s only been two hundred years since we dropped the label “element” when we refer to water. Before 1804, water was considered one of the four basic elements, like fire. A basic building bock of life itself. And of course, it is. Our ancestors considered water to be a single uniform entity. But in that year just two centuries ago, the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier proved that water was not an element, but a compound consisting of hydrogen and oxygen. Today, we all know water by its chemical formula: H2O.
Water is so common. And so fascinating.
From my driveway out front, at just the right spot, on just the right kind of day, you can see the Pacific Ocean twenty miles away. Even that little glimpse of the sea from my front yard recalls the excitement of my early years. I remember the first time I put my foot in the cold waters of the Pacific at age twelve. And the taste of that salty water on my tongue. Before that, as a little boy, I had seen the great expanse of Lake Michigan from the waterfront shoreline of Chicago. And even that fresh water of the Great Lake, the sight of endless water, no visible land on the other side – wow. But to stand somewhere on a Southern California bluff, and look out on the grand Pacific – and imagine the faraway Hawaiian Islands and Tahiti and Japan and Singapore and Australia somewhere out there, over the curvature of the earth, the surface of the water somehow, miraculously, following that curve… the sight of all that water transported my imagination ‘round the world.
* * * * * * *
We are familiar with water in all three of its states. It’s a simple function of temperature. Ice. Liquid. Steam.
Water in its sold state is harder than steel. When Britain’s White Star Line launched it’s newest luxury liner for first class transatlantic travel, the finest engineers designed sixteen airtight compartments in her hull. If any four were somehow pierced or punctured at sea, the forty-six thousand gross ton vessel would remain afloat. Thus, the engineering marvel was dubbed “unsinkable.”
When the Titanic encountered water in its solid state just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the iceberg just ninety-five miles south of Newfoundland ripped through five of those air-tight compartments. One too many. When the radio of the California, another ship crossing the Atlantic, passing just a few miles from the fatally damaged Titanic, received the late night report via Morse Code SOS SOS (Save Our Ship), the distress signal went unnoticed. The radioman was sound asleep and off duty. The California sailed on past, and of the 2,220 people on board the sinking ship, 1,530 died in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
Ice harder than steel.
Water in its steam state is equally powerful.
Long before the properties of internal combustion were harnessed in the cylinders of the gasoline engines of today, vessels powered by hot water crossed oceans and locomotives crossed continents. Steam engines, they were called.
On Saturday mornings, sometimes my dad
would wake me up in the pre-dawn hours to join him for a day of work down at
the plant. We’d be in the car at
sunrise, and headed down to the train station on Main Street.
We stood on the platform in the cold morning air and I’d look way down
the track, down 
the
parallel lines of steel rails that came together way off in the distance,
wondering when I’d catch my first look at the giant steam engine pulling
passenger cars into our little Mid-Western town.
We’d check the big round face of the station clock, powered by weights
pulling chains and gears against a swinging pendulum.
Right on time, there came the train around the bend.
I’d look up at my dad. He’d
smile and nod back, “See, just like I told you.”
Then we’d hear it. The
screaming steam whistle. It was an
alarm clock for the whole town. And
the monstrous black pot-boiler would roll by just a few inches from the
platform, and this curious little boy looked on as huge metal spoked wheels
turned, and long rods pushed great pistons and released hot steam, and white
clouds of smoke poured out of the stack skyward, and the sweaty fireman stoked
the fire shoveling new black coal on the hot flames keeping the pressure high
for the coming departure, and great brake pads squealed slowing the massive
train to a stop. Right on the
money. On time and in place.
Talk about surround sound and powered sub-woofers.
You didn’t just hear it. You
felt it.
“’Board!” Shouted the conductor. That was shorthand for the clearer signal, “All aboard!” I was ready. I ran up those steps and grabbed a window seat. As the engineer opened up the valves, releasing hot, expanding steam into the locomotive’s cylinders, the train lurched forward. The engine pulled its heavy load down the tracks out of our little town of Wheaton towards the big city of Chicago. And I could feel the pulse of the steam exploding outward, chug-chug-chug in accelerating beats as we rolled faster and faster clickety-clack down the tracks.
Water in its gas state – steam. Exhilarating.
(I didn’t know then. In those early nineteen fifties, these grand steam locomotives were phasing out. After a hundred plus years of transportation service on the steel rails, their modern counterpart, the magnificent heavy diesel engines, would soon replace them.)
In its liquid state, water matches our moods.
It can be tranquil and placid.
Like the isolated Northwoods lake on a quiet sunny summer afternoon. It can be playful and the source of joy. Like the mountain brook, dancing and jumping down the rocks, spilling, cascading in rhythmic musical patterns, collecting in pools where minnows play and fish swim against the current and butterflies flutter and wild animals sip.
That same water can get angry, too. Terrifying and destructive. Like the heavy rains over a vast mountain range, where water flows increase, finding ravines and valleys, twisting and turning as gravity pulls it downward, one creek joining another, then rivers meeting rivers, doubling and tripling waterflows, then becoming a torrent. Water levels rising. Floodwaters gaining speed. Pulling down bridges and embankments, then riverfront houses and barns and marinas, tossing boats and cars and buildings and picnic tables and livestock around like matchsticks.
Water in its liquid state can be either pleasant and relaxing or abusive and devastating.
* * * * * * *
The cycle of water is never-ending. It is forever evaporating. From the vast oceans and lakes and streams and plants and swimming pools. As it rises ever higher in the atmosphere, it cools and then condenses. It transforms into fluffy white clouds. As it condenses further, the clouds darken, and eventually the water in the air becomes so heavy it forms into little droplets. Rainfall showers the land with a refreshing drink, loosening the soil, transporting nutrients and then joins forces with the sunlight that follows, stimulating growth in abundance.
Excess water flows back into brooks and creeks and streams and rivers, down to ponds and lakes, underground following natural subterranean channels, filling up water tables giving life to the earth. And then evaporating once more to be filtered and cleansed high in the sky only to return to the ground again as rain.
All of this in yet another Circle of Life.
* * * * * * *
In the Middle East, some of the most fascinating archeological sites are called a “Tell,” as in Tell al-Obeid. Archeologists, such as those commissioned by the British Museum in the nineteen twenties and thirties had a preference for tell sites because they turned out to be treasure troves of antiquity.
A tell was the site of a town or even a city. Through time, these cities would build up to their prime as a commercial and cultural and political center, and then encounter some calamity – perhaps an invading army, or a terrible storm or flood, or a devastating fire. The site might be left in ruins for years, maybe hundreds of years, before another city was built on the same site.
Generation after generation of artifacts and tablets and story-telling were buried layer upon layer becoming an innocent looking mound which would later attract curious investigators in search of history who would later call it simply – a tell.
Through time, what drew people back to rebuild on those ruins? Not the history. Not the culture. Not the weathered foundations, or crumbled columns or walls. Or the prospect of buried treasure.
It was the water. The source.
Towns and villages and cities were all built and rebuilt and rebuilt again around a supply of fresh water.
* * * * * * *
Some of the most intricate and complicated and awe-inspiring feats of engineering involve the supply and delivery of fresh water.
It might be said that the history of civilization can be traced along the lines of aqueducts and pipelines and cisterns and reservoirs. As early as 2500 BC the Romans developed an astounding system for the delivery of continual, fresh water. Eleven aqueducts extending three hundred fifty nine miles (thirty miles of which supported by carved stone arches) delivered fifty million gallons of water to the city of Rome every day.
That was four thousand five hundred years ago.
Chicago, like most every major world-class city, has a central park. The centerpiece of the park is a magnificent, oversized, opulent sculpture. Made of stone. But it is a living thing. My mother called it her favorite sight. On a sunny day in the heart of the city, set back from the shoreline of Lake Michigan, surrounded by manicured gardens, roses and hedgerows and lilacs, is Buckingham Fountain. It shot sprays of water gushing high into the air. Streams of water spouting out of the mouths of lions and the pitchers of maidens and the mouths of frogs lining the perimeter of the pool, water spilling in great cascades over the sides, circular waterfalls in perfect symmetry, drowning out all the intrusive noises of the city streets, filling the air with a fresh cool scent and the roaring sound of rushing water.
As a little boy, I remember thinking – what a colossal waste of money.
Now I know that Buckingham Fountain is a colossal celebration of water.
* * * * * * *
The source. That’s what we need. We need to know where to find it. Without water, we waste away to nothingness. We can survive the absence of food for a while. But not water.
We call the absence of water drought. Drought can lead to famine. Either one we call disaster.
You are a leader. Today, on this Monday morning, people will come to you for help. Advice. Guidance. Clarification. Direction. Counsel. They come to you with a need. Think of it this way. These are thirsty people who simply need a drink of water.
What will you give them? The old iceberg? A piston full of steam? A break in the dam? A flash of lightening, the roar of thunder and a cloud burst?
Let's hope not.
If you do it right, they will leave your office or hang up that phone like one who came thirsty, but just finished off a tall cool drink of clear, clean, refreshing water.
Their need is met. Somewhere in the conversation they say, “Aha. I get it now.”
Don’t leave them thirsty today. Don’t blow ‘em off with ice or steam. Give them that part of you that shows you listened, you cared and you can help.
Now one more question - where do you go to get your satisfying quota of refreshment?
Let me offer a suggestion – The Source.
When He met the Samaritan woman at a water well in the center of town, He told her, “Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst again.”
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
The words of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of John (14:4)
The Source is the title of James Michener's novel about archeology in Isreal
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
|
|