The push snow scoop and shovels were put away. Three hours to clean out our 420 foot driveway and I had worked up a keen sweat.  Then on the way to the house I paused, and plunged into the water.

The cold shocked me. I collected myself and floated on my back in the fluff of crystalline water and looked up into the blue sky. I thought of the erratic journey of the millions of six-pointed flakes that supported my prone body.

 Like a salmon reading the sea to return to unseen birth waters, the melting snow that dripped from my cheek into the corner of my mouth had a familiar taste. Could it be the home waters of my youth? Indeed, I could be swimming in the North Branch of the Sunrise River, the flow that passes right through my hometown where I grew into an adult.

Try as I might, I cannot taste the same flavor of the waters my buddies and I found in the swimming hole below Boo’s Hill at the outskirts of North Branch. I wonder how many of the thousands of residents now living there know the origin of the city’s title, North Branch, when they scribble it on an envelope return address?

A few strokes more and amazingly I find myself in the sacred waters of the Ganges River in India. But the taste now is hardly holy. This is the same flow where floating funeral pyres cremate thousands of human bodies. Over 30 years ago, 25,000 cadaver- eating turtles were introduced to consume any partially burned corpses. I don’t wallow and frolic in these waters but instead move on.

After those foul-tasting waters I need the ethereal blue water of melting Greenland glaciers. Sadly, it tastes like too much glacial water is in this snow. How long will it be before cities and towns along the seaboards are wading in the glacially fed oceans?

Rolling over I take a few strokes and find tiny sips of the grandest of all lakes: Superior. This is water with a boreal essence; birch, fir, spruce and pine. I taste birch bark canoes that once plied these waters paddled by Anishinaabe and later French Canadian voyageurs. Other subtle, clean flavors of lake trout, herring and whitefish emerge. But like the Ganges, the water of Superior houses the dead and I don’t dwell on the memory of the quick sinking Edmund Fitzgerald taking its crew of twenty-nine. Time to swim on.

I enter the tropical waters of the Amazon River. I can detect schools of piranha, and the faintest taste of the pink river dolphin that are disappearing. With the largest watershed in the world discharging ten times the volume of the Mississippi into the Atlantic at its mouth, I’m convinced I can taste the jungle muskiness of the jaguar that swam across the river.

I swim on; now into the waters of the Colorado River. This taste must be from far upstream, as this over-tapped river is relegated to a mere trickle when it reaches its terminus at the Gulf of California.

In 1869 this mighty river carried John Wesley Powell and his small crew through the roiling waves and surges within the towering walls of the Grand Canyon. I recognize this taste. You see, like Powell, I have been tossed and flung out of a raft in these powerful, latte-colored waters.

Later, in 1878, after Powell was named to head the U.S. Geological Survey, he stood before Congress trying to convince them that the West did not have enough water for human settlement. His plan to slow homesteading, encourage settlement close to water and eliminate irrigation through much of the arid Southwest fell on deaf ears.

Today this same water is pulled out of the river all along its 1,450 miles to quell the thirst of growing cities, vast fields of alfalfa and orchards. In this era of drought and water shortages growing demands on a limited water supply are spawning backroom discussions about diverting Great Lakes waters to the Desert Southwest where clearly alfalfa and cities shouldn’t grow. Now nearly 150 years after Powell made his argument, we are seeing how his words are sadly prophetic.

Swimming on, I need some lightheartedness. Here I feel the energy of cavorting porpoises, penguins and humpback whales. It seems to my untrained eye as if they are all engaged in play. And the sperm whale with its catch of a giant squid has welled up water that has deep tastes from five miles below the surface. What unknown species depend on this water?

I don’t do well in the huge ocean swells and I find calmer, crystalline waters. Sips deliver subtle reef flavors. Corals (not as bold in taste as they used to be), butterfly fish, groupers, angelfish and so many more give this drink a complex nature. It hardly seems possible such tranquility can morph into mighty tsunamis or give us tidal energy to turn giant turbines that power lamps, televisions, computers, heaters and on and on.

All this swimming tires me. Before climbing out of my snowy ocean, I roll over again on to my back and stare into the blue sky. All these waters have cycled through millennia. Changing from solid ice, to vapor and to liquid the amount of water on earth is finite. Every drop of blood, piss, sweat and waterfall has been here before. Each ocean wave has been calmed on a tranquil woodland pond. Every human tear has likely stormed out of thundering clouds in a downpour.

Exhaling geysers of warm breath into the cold air, I resemble a spouting of a whale. Who will taste my breathing? Who will cry tears born from my breath and what life will swim in my waters?

I rest in the cradle of snow and wish I had the perspective of looking down from thousands of miles. Our planet is like a colored jewel with a preference towards large swatches of blue. This is our water. It’s what makes life possible. And like our planet, my own body is over 50% water.

Standing in the shallows of snow, I brush the snow off me and stamp my way indoors. In minutes I am sitting by the kitchen fire to warm up.

Snow is in the forecast. I wonder what flavor stories might be pushed off the driveway?