H2O - O, Oh My!

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It was very strange. I was walking through the grocery story and passed a “reduced for quick sale” cart. You know, where they take a cart and fill it up with stuff they want to get rid of so they can restock the shelves. I noticed that this cart was half full of bottled water. Further along I noticed waist-high displays of more bottled water being blithely ignored by the patrons off in search of cheese or pasta or frozen pizza, or sundry other items for dinner. The soft drink aisle featured your more tony water options in artsy bottles for 5 or 10 bucks a pop. And what is so strange about that, you ask? Well, you see we had just flown into Chicago the day before from our home in Raleigh, North Carolina - one of the recent and unwilling states that bore the wrath of Hurricane Florence. 

In the days before Florence we had come to think of water very differently.  While it turned out that Raleigh, very much in the middle of the state, was lightly brushed by the storm, our grocery store shelves had been stripped of all forms of bottled water several days before the hurricane made landfall.  As a number of old timers predicted, Florence came ashore as mere shadow of the “storm of the century” much ballyhooed by local and national meteorologists. But then we watched in disbelief as our neighbors along the coast and up the rivers were inundated with rains, storm surges, and flooding of biblical proportions. Cities like Wilmington and New Bern, just “a quick run” down Interstate 40, were cut off from the rest of the world. News reports leaked out of people waiting in long lines for drinking water, of ice being bartered like bitcoins. 

I was nudged ahead by another customer, who I noticed, had purchased a single liter bottle of Evian water.  “Sorry,” I said and headed off to the produce section. Later as I was checking out, I said to the young clerk, “You guys certainly have a lot of bottled water!” 

“Yes, sir,” he replied politely, giving me a look that spoke volumes about letting weird old guys out in grocery stores by themselves. I thought about explaining before I walked out, but there were folks behind me in line. Instead as I hustled out, I opted for a quick prayer for the discomforted and dislocated folks back home who were still in harm’s way. Then I hurried back to our temporary comfortable abode to sip, with a new sense of appreciation and thanks, a simple glass of ice water. 

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