The Spring

There are few things as basic and satisfying as dipping your cupped hands into the water bubbling from a spring, capturing a small amount of it, lifting it to your mouth and drinking.

My friend Therese and I go for a slow hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Slow in that it’s not a ten-or-fourteen-mile-to-some-high-summit-in-a-day kind of hike. It’s more of a meander, time and miles are unimportant, we get out our cameras and look and listen, take pictures and hang out. We’ve been to this place on the mountain where the water bubbles up, but that was months ago and when we come upon it now I am taken by surprise. In all my travels in the woods, I know of only three other springs. They are very special places, and encountering one is always cause for celebration.

 “Look! The spring!” I exclaim. This essential of life, here, in its most natural, unadulterated form. Water pouring forth, on and on and on. Who knows where this water’s been or how long it’s been underground - could be thousands of years. I completely forget my manners, peel off my pack, and barge right in. Kneeling into the little place, I scoop up mouthful after mouthful. My hands begin to ache with the cold. Finally I look up, drops of water falling from my chin, and there’s Therese standing on a nearby rock, watching me. “Oh! This is delicious!” I say. “Tastes like the Earth… pure… stone…” Therese smiles and nods. “…would you like some?” I ask. (Duh.)

“Yes,” she says. I make way and Therese nestles in and takes a drink. “Delicious!” she says, adding, “it’s sweet!” And we trade places a few times and then fill our bottles and enjoy. We agree, this is the real thing, and visit awhile with this place. Water from the spring trickles down the slope through moss covered rocks to a nearby brook. Sunlight filters through the trees. It’s quite cool in this little glade so a patch of sun to sit in is welcome.

Granted, most of the water we drink has acquired a load of impurities by the time it gets in our glass, so the dozens of ways we purify it exist for good reason. But as we add layer upon layer of complexity to what is simple, for all we gain, there are things, perhaps less tangible which become distant or lost. Out of the built-in connections we have to an ancient past, the simple things in life, if we allow them, touch us deeply. When we encounter and partake of them, the taste is sweet, it is sublime.

Gordon Bunker