Real Americans use drinking fountains.
At the heart of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh is an enormous atrium, a prime spot in the center of which is occupied by a grand, cast-iron drinking fountain. The drinking fountain, one sign explains, was the very first in the whole of Scotland.
Scotland’s first drinking fountain is much like my first visit to Florida in that the word “first” might just as well be followed with “and only.”
I cannot explain why there are no drinking fountains in Scotland. It seems like the sort of place that ought to have them. The tap water is of such fine quality that the locals brag about it. There is, generally speaking, a great national interest in public health and welfare. The public restrooms are adequate and clean. A drinking fountain anchors the largest space in the nation’s grandest museum. A normal person, then, would expect the Scots to have at least one functioning drinking fountain, but there is not one to be found.
I spent a term in college in Scotland and found that the lack of drinking fountains had a significant detrimental impact on my experience. Sure, it was easy to travel and every inch of the place is unbelievably beautiful, but this is no use when every person in the country is condemned to either schlep a water bottle about at all hours or to live a life of constant, agonizing thirst. Of course, there is a third option to purchase bottled water, but I would sooner die of heatstroke with a smile on my face and a song in my heart than pay for water.
Restaurants in Scotland — and in most of Europe, for that matter — are little help. It is customary for bottled spring water to be served with meals. The tepid contents of the bottle can be poured into and subsequently consumed from what an American would recognize as a comically small juice glass. This does little for one’s thirst.
The bottles of water consumed during the meal make a later appearance on the check. The only way around this is to ask for tap water. If I had spent all of my money on bottled spring water, I would not have been able to travel in the first place.
In some countries, tap water labels the requestor as unsophisticated or cheap, and waitstaff will occasionally deny the request outright. For a brief, glorious time, I knew how to clumsily ask for tap water in six languages, which I feel gives the waitstaff an authentic American interaction of dealing with an intolerable customer and handing out free water.
Free water is one of the best things the United States has going for it. Our politics are regressive. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Our health care system is out of control. But, more so than perhaps any other nation, we can drink water for free. We can sit down in any restaurant and, before the first words to the waiter are even spoken, great glasses of ice water are plunked down on the table.
Best of all, drinking fountains are plentiful. The New York Parks Department reports that they turn on “thousands” of drinking fountains every spring. There are wonderful, glistening drinking fountains everywhere from elementary schools to the halls of Congress. A drinking fountain is a moment of architectural empathy as if a building or a park itself were offering a cool drink of water. When we all have drinking fountains, we can see bottled spring water for what it always has been and ever shall be: a bastion of wretched European extravagance — the reason we got out of dodge 245 years ago and spent the better part of last weekend eating red meat and making a great deal of noise.
As we return to public spaces in the post-pandemic world, we find that the drinking fountains are out of service. “To protect everyone’s health,” the signs say. I am no epidemiologist, but I do not see how, in this time when most people seem to have given up on precautionary measures altogether, the nation’s drinking fountains will somehow lead to the next great surge in illness. Still, the fountains in so many places show no signs of reopening.
At the risk of sounding like the sort of person who believes the whole world is conspiring against him in petty ways (even though I decidedly am just that sort of person), I think that The Powers That Be seemed just a little too eager to shut down all of the drinking fountains in the first place. In my old office, the drinking fountains were removed entirely within weeks of the beginning of the pandemic. Around the country, even as the whole world pushes for “reopening,” drinking fountains sit disconnected from the water supply, many without even a sign explaining the matter. The bottled spring water market, one has to suppose, is doing quite well for itself. There is little pressure from Poland Spring to bring the nation back to its previous glory.
Wednesday was the hottest day in New York since 2013. My parents were in town and I took the day off of work to visit Ellis Island with them to see where my great grandfather arrived in this country from Lithuania via Antwerp in 1910. We had the authentic experience, arriving at the place on a crowded, boiling hot boat.
There are, in the main building on Ellis Island, two drinking fountains adjacent to the restroom. I was pleased to find them until I saw the horrible sign above: “The fountains are out of service. Water is available at the cafe.”
It is fortunate that I already live in this country. Had I seen such a sign after a weeks-long ocean journey, I would have thrown up my hands in exasperation and been on the next boat right back to Antwerp.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Fireworks Safety” from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
This film remains our nation’s greatest use of taxpayer dollars. Each year, the good folks at the CPSC blow up a bunch of plastic dummies on the National Mall to… uh… keep the public informed about important safety matters. There is something profound and beautiful about watching a bunch of bureaucrats make a great deal of noise and blow things up while cloaking it in the austere and dignified name of product safety.
“The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth” by Tim Alberta in the Atlantic.
“A Michigan Republican spent eight months searching for evidence of election fraud, but all he found was lies.”