We drink water, wash and bathe in water, use water in our cooking and cleaning, and put it to many more mundane uses. Yet there is beyond that a spiritual element in our relationship with this versatile material that can be solid, liquid, or an æthereal mist or invisible airborne vapour. In my life, as in all our lives, water has been with me since birth, in my home and community and in nature. While at home and in the community water was mostly taken for granted as part of everything, it was outside that context that water has drawn me to its larger natural and man-made incarnations.

I grew up in Alberta, Canada’s second most western province, always near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, with the Rockies visible in the distance. Much of each summer was spent camping in the mountain ranges of Alberta and British Columbia, travelling as far west as Vancouver and as far north as the Cariboo country, where my grandparents had homesteaded and my lumberjack uncle operated a sawmill. Life in rural Alberta and our summer roving brought me in contact with a great deal of water with varying depths, both physical and philosophical.

I once read that Alberta has the most sunshine in Canada but also the most rain (also later read that B.C. has the most rain with Alberta possibly a close second). When I lived there, the plentiful rain was called liquid sunshine. What I noticed then and do now is not the rain but the water on the ground, the ponds, lakes and other bodies of water.

The water tower in the farming town of Coronation needed to be filled from somewhere. With scarce water resources, the town had dug an open reservoir fed mostly by rain, a rectangular pond the size of several football fields. Water was pumped from there through a treatment plant and then up into the tower. In the summer, kids would swim in the reservoir, which was much deeper than a swimming pool. The alternative was farmers’ dugouts, rectangular water-filled pits about the size of two Olympic pools and shallow enough that a twelve-year old could stand on the bottom. These clay-bottom pits were intended as watering holes for cattle, so the bottom was a mix of wet clay and manure. We kids didn’t mind.

In the prairies, the lakes are shallow. We went swimming at the beach in Sylvan Lake, a tourist town with a population of about about 500 in winter and 5,000 in summer. An adult could walk many metres toward the lake’s centre and the water would still be waist-high. For a kid it might reach his chest. During the summer, my aunt and uncle would take us to the beach at Hamilton Lake to watch the hydroplane races. The lake seemed shallow enough that an adult could walk all the way across. When one of these powerful boats would flip over or stall, the driver would just get out and walk to shore. This was an amazing thing for a kid to see.

In the mountains, lakes are something else. Deep cracks in the terrain created by massive upheavals or ground out by moving glaciers are filled by streams and rivers and by runoff from glaciers high in the mountains further north. While prairie lakes appear blue as the sky above or tawny as their clay bottoms, these mountain lakes are often green as jade or emeralds. Some of them are claimed to be bottomless, and divers have failed to reach the bottom of some. There’s an element of mystery to these deep mountain lakes not to be found in prairie lakes. Walking along the shores of such a lake or on a path high up the side of the mountain and looking far down to the water, one can’t help but sense the spirit of this water.

From our earliest beginnings, we humans have given water a special place in our personal lives and as part of our various cultures. We have animated water through language such as “a body of water” that treats it as not simply one of the four essential elements but a living being. We have elevated water to the level of deity as one who along with earth, personalized as the mother of us all, provides the necessities of life. At some time not so long ago in our history, we discovered that more than half of our body’s composition is made of water and we could not live without that content. Perhaps unconsciously, we had known that from the start.

The new book footsteps in the garden, new and selected poetry by Bob MacKenzie, is now available from the publisher, Cyberwit.net, or at Amazon worldwide.

Ask your local bookstore or public library to order this book for you.