I used to have no problem with tap water. I grew up in Cincinnati with parents who, at dinner, filled a pitcher straight from our kitchen sink. In St. Louis during college, I subsisted on campus water fountains. I later moved to New York, which boasts “the Champagne of tap water” and claims it to be the secret ingredient in its bagels. During a two-year stint in Montana, I went on long hikes and sipped stream water, shockingly cold and straight from the glaciers, but other than that, I drank from the tap.
And then I landed in Los Angeles, where everyone I met used a filter.
My office had water delivered in five-gallon jugs. I was told this was because of sediment in the tap water. A few months in, I called a plumber because the gush from my kitchen sink had dwindled to a drip, and he said there was a buildup blocking the water’s path. I asked him directly: Was the water safe to drink? He shrugged. He’d be cautious, he said: No one really knew what was in those pipes.
I freaked out. What if I’d been poisoning myself? What irrevocable damage had I done to my body or mind? Everyone in L.A. — at friends’ homes, at the grocery store, in public parks — seemed to fear the tap water. So I bought my first Brita filter.
This was not the only anxiety I developed. Thanks to warnings from seemingly everyone around me in the city, I began to worry about things I never before considered threatening, like dust (could cause cancer), anything with seeds (could cause cancer) or certain planetary configurations (responsible for all other misfortunes). If I put my purse on the floor, or oriented my bed the wrong way, it was endangering my energy! Maybe I’d been lulled into a false sense of security about everyday life.
One Tuesday this January, I awoke to a terrible headache and ash outside my door. The wind grew so strong that doors slammed open and branches broke off trees. Fires were decimating the Pacific Palisades to the west and Altadena to the east. No one knew how toxic all the smoke was or when the fires would stop. And then, the Department of Water and Power accidentally sent out a bulletin telling residents in my area not to drink the tap water without boiling it first. Officials retracted the message, which was supposed to be for other neighborhoods, but I became more paranoid than ever. I bought bottled water. Then I started worrying about microplastics.
But I didn’t like this version of myself — a person who distrusts her own environment.
In those weeks that the fires ravaged L.A., while I watched powerlessly as tens of thousands of homes were wrecked by untamable forces, I started to rethink my received notions around tap water. Part of the local concern over water does feel justified: Lead was found in the water in the city’s Watts neighborhood a year ago, and there have been severe cases of unclean water causing public-health crises elsewhere, as in Flint, Mich., in the 2010s. But these cases are rare. And, I realized, fixating on the risks of anything too much can put you in an isolationist mentality. As I huddled in my hermetically sealed apartment while fires wreaked desolation outside, I suddenly worried less about what was coming out of my faucet and more about my tenuous connections to the outside world. I used to be a person who dove right into their physical surroundings with enthusiasm and curiosity; why had I been so quick to give that up?
So after the fires were contained, I returned to drinking tap water. It became an act of rebellion against a city that had scared and confused me, a city in which I never quite fit in, anyway. Understanding my own cultural discomfort this whole time made me feel more relaxed.
Tap water is great. It’s incredible that we’ve worked out a system in which anyone with a faucet can get it. It is cheap and plentiful, and it connects you to the ecosystem around you — the shared resource pulling you into contact with all the other plant and animal life around. It might taste better in some places than in others, but whenever you drink it, you are reckoning with some sense of home.
Having spent two years in a mild hysteria over tap water, I no longer have my old, unthinking faith in it. Sometimes I miss that naïveté. But in its place, I have something better. The whole ordeal encouraged me to ask questions and engage others in dialogue instead of trafficking in superstition — to make up my own mind. Instead of simply relying on the warnings of others, I did my own research, learning that tap water is subject to more regulation than bottled water; the most recent survey of L.A. tap water showed it to be compliant with the Environmental Protection Agency’s measures. (Although this study was conducted before the fires, so it doesn’t account for the weakened quality of water in burn zones.)
Drinking tap water feels to me like a kind of civic duty too, because it means consuming the public resource that an ostensibly well-intentioned government system — and not a for-profit bottled-water company’s marketing firm — has worked hard to offer its citizens. I don’t judge anyone who wants to use a filter or get their water from other sources, but I maintain that tap water is unrivaled in its price, abundance and evocation of community.
Recently, I moved out of Los Angeles and landed in New Mexico. Upon my arrival, I filled up a glass straight from the sink and relished my first big sip.
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