A couple of days ago a public water line broke in front of my neighbor’s house, right here in the middle of Kansas City. The line might be nearly a hundred years old. A good deal of water was pouring out of the street. “Could be a lot worse!” I was told by a city water guy yesterday. The water had formed a little stream along the curb, a rill, one might say. I like the sound of that, a rill—slightly archaic, Britishy. The stream running cold and clear was like a spring branch in the Ozarks, the kind I love to put my feet in. The flow of the water looks just the way a natural stream would look—fluid dynamics-wise—with riffles, Vs, and zigzags in the main current, dams, slow pools, drops, eddies even. From my porch, I saw a glint, a bubble perhaps, heading upstream in what no doubt was one of these eddies. At first I did not believe it. But there it was nudging backward. It was like having a brook in front of my house.
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And that same day, a picture of a swallow-tailed kite was on the front page of The Kansas City Star. It showed up over in Prairie Village, Kansas, just across the state line from here, a thousand miles from its normal range in the southeastern United States. Birders gathered with scopes and field glasses to get a glimpse at this bright, showy surprise, this ornithological epic win, this xeno-gift.
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We live for surprises.
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When no cars were going by my house and everything was quiet, I heard the rill gurgling, a sound that wrinkles in the ear. And that’s when my pleasure at this temporary, not-creek, this spill, this utter waste of potable water, was greatest and the water most beautiful and my guilt at enjoying it most ambivalent. I expected the crew would show up with its back hoe and dump truck tomorrow or the day after, to dig a hole and fix the leak, but I wished hard that it were a natural spring and would go on running forever.
