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 OLIVEBRIDGE, NY Water Supply
We are racing snow blocks down the frozen side of the dike. The Ashokan reservoir spreads around us, blinding white. Beyond that are layers of Catskill mountains with bare trees. Above us is a clear, cold noonday sky, 14 degrees. Yesterday there was a high of 45, so the reservoir ice cracks and booms like whales singing. John and I run to the side of the path that tops the dike in a gravely crescent. The packed earth squeaks under our hiking boots. His dark blond hair flops in his face as we grab chunks of snow that piled up by the guardrail when they plowed. Country life is new to John, and unknown to me, like this game. The snow has frozen again in hard lumps we have to kick loose with our feet, or lunge at with our chests, padded with black leather coats. The chunks are thin as pancakes or heavy as watermelons, and we give them names: Breadface, Platypus. We stretch across the hip-high rail and hold our contenders over the drop. We look at each other. John says, "Ready." I say, "Go." The ice lumps skitter down. Mine wins by a hair. "One more time," says John. Some slide down the slope and others bounce. Some go farther than others and skate across the ice. Some explode and scatter, making a sound like chimes of glass. This sound is beautiful. I need more. I climb over the guardrail and sit in the snow, digging in my heels so I don't slide too far. The signs say, "No trespassing for any reason." John says it's okay because it's for "no reason." Punk rock. I kick a hail of snow crust down just to hear it, a mad tinkle like Christmas balls breaking. Christmas is over, and so is childhood, long ago. John and I are in our forties now. We're been friends for twenty years, and the party days are over, but we still run and fling ourselves and pant obsessed with bigger and smoother and more. We yell and sweat our hats off, gloves off. We collapse under the winter sky. I'm thirsty and I remember the Jug. It was white plastic, our family's water jug for years, in the fridge, in the kitchen, in our brownstone apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The jug was always full and the water in there was very cold. We all drank out of it, except my mother, who used a glass. I think the Jug started out in my father's darkroom because it had measurements on the side. It started out clean, but soon there were teeth marks around the rim. Sometimes it grew gray and mossy inside. My mother was disgusted by it. On hot days, my sisters and I drank hard from the jug, with the refrigerator door open. "Wait a sec." I'd lift the Jug with both hands and gulp water, resting the lip of the Jug on my bottom teeth and biting down just a little before I put it back. Then I'd run back to playing on the terrace. Mom used to announce in drama voice: "New York City water is the best in the world." Maybe because the Jug appeared to fill itself, I pictured it as a person. The way my dad said, "The Jug," it sounded capitalized. Three decades later, on this Sunday in February, I ride the bus upstate to visit John, and we are shouting over the frozen Ashokan reservoir to hear the echo. He says it was blocked off after 9/11. I say, "Oh. Because it's New York City's water supply." So this is where it comes from, a place with only mountains and no houses in sight. Just some deer who come out of the woods to eat dried yellow grass that pokes up through the snow. Seven deer, all females. We lie on our stomachs and watch them between the guardrails. John says, "They were afraid ragheads would come and dump..." John has long pauses, so I say, "Poison! Green poison in clear jugs with skull and crossbones on them." He laughs and says, "It was so stupid considering all the streams that run into this." We start walking back to the car. I say, "It's stupid considering Indian Point is much more dangerous. A nuclear power plant built on a fault line right near the Hudson River." We get in the car and he drives around the reservoir, heading back to his house in Woodstock. I tell about the times I got arrested protesting nuclear power when I was a teenager - Indian Point, Shoreham, Groton - and John talks about the times he got arrested for buying drugs. When we drive by the frozen custard stand in Shokan, he wants custard. In the winter. He always wants something. I say, "I want something real." So we don't get it. And then the water jug comes from the '70s and stays in my mind with winter trees flying by inside it. 
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