A Taste Much Sweeter than Wine

I have never been a water drinker. Ever. It always tasted flat, corrupted, even nasty. I would boil it for coffee or boil it for tea, and drink that product, or drink bottled flavored water if I had to. I hate sodas (except as mixers) they taste like sweet corrupted poison to me, acidic and cloying and thick like swampwater.

So it was with amazement that I took my first sip of Niobara water. The Niobara is a river that runs in Nebraska through hundreds of miles of pure sand, which cleanses it of all the tainted residues. It is formed in ice and snow, but its main source is the Ogallala aquifer that runs underneath six states; in Nebraska the aquifer is about 6 feet down and endlessly available in its sandy caverns. Wells on the aquifer in Nebraska never run dry.

Grab a glass of that stuff when you are thirsty, and all of your previous perceptions about water disappear. Cold or room temperature, it is sweet and as pure as a snowflake, untainted by additives and governmental regulations. No metallic taste. No industrial or social corruption. No whitely cloudy cast or yellow or orange tint. Nothing floats on or sinks to the bottom of the glass, even when it sits. It is as translucent as starshine. Dance it across your lips, and they are instantly humidified. Let it roll over your tongue, and you will experience an amazing thing - no taste. None. Water that pours down your throat, that you can feel re hydrating every cell, without taint, without corruption, without that scummy feeling or nagging aftertaste of unknown sediment.

Go out to the river, and stand on a bridge span and look down. Even now, when the melting snows have turned the river into a passionate thundering tumble, look down twenty feet deep and you can see the bottom sand and rocks as if they were reachable. The water isn't blue or green or whitely foaming - it is clear, clear like nothing, like air, like water. The folks who tube down it in the summer say that it is that way even when its dervishly dancing passions have been banked by drought or heavy drafting use for the cattle or irrigation of hundreds of ranches. Clear and pure. No odor at all - nothing to smell.

Elk and antelope, turkeys and mountain lion, raccoon and deer, leave their prints in the mud around the river. Prints as large as my own foot - size 8.5, nothing to sneeze at - or larger. No water snakes whisper in the trees above it or wallow in darkened muddy depths - too cold, too clear. Rattlesnakes make their homes in the bluffs around the falls, big sidewinders that bother no one but the foolishly invasive. Stand next to one of those roaring falls and you can hear the incredible silence like an undercurrent - the animals move quietly here, back and forth, to drink and to depart; even the birds are silent on the river. Ten feet away and their cacophony begins again, but the river seems to be a reverent spot, silent except for its own roaring majesty. Standing next to the clamoring falls, with one's foot next to a huge cat's print, one feels a delicate shuffle along her backbone, a frisson of fear that in this noise that cat could be anywhere, watching - and one feels at sunset the eyes at one's back, watching and waiting for the intruder to depart so that the natural flow of life on the river can begin again.

Out of this Darwinian, prehistoric atmosphere comes the clear cool tastelessness of the purest and sweetest water with which I have ever satisfied a thirst. The absence of corruption, nature in its purest form, and I can put it in a glass and drink it, be a part of it, let it be a part of me.