The Ashokan Reservoir photo © Chloe Annetts 2025
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
How easily a hand becomes a fist, Margaret Atwood wrote in The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, which was prescient. How confident are any of us that when we are threatened with death, our basest, most animalistic impulses will not engage? Under siege, altruistic impulses and learned values thin and vanish. If our family needs water and food to survive, we push ahead of the line with our tin bowls.
But I am not writing about a war zone today. I am writing about my own, small town in upstate New York. On Thursday night we were instructed to begin boiling contaminated water for drinking, brushing our teeth, even washing and rinsing our dishes. The mad rush for bottled water began. And the hoarding. Remember the shortage of toilet paper during Covid? How many of us shared our bounty if we identified a stash? How did local, state and federal government manage the shortages? They didn't.*
I started boiling water to fill the Britas—they do not filter bacteria—and our water bottles immediately. I put a bowl of boiled water on the bathroom sink. I hadn't figured out dish washing and rinsing. Boiling water for daily use is arduous and it didn't take long for me to feel exhausted. Early Friday morning, I set out early in search of bottled water. I bought a half-gallon at Stewart's and then headed for another small shop in my hood—My Market—to buy some well-priced apples and red peppers, and to checkout their bottled water if we didn't get the all clear soon. Shoving me aside were two women stacking at least five gallons of water on the counter. Their focus and aggression were startling. When I suggested that they halve their purchase so that neighbors might benefit, they brushed me off. "It's for two families," one of them said dismissively.
How spoiled we are, I thought, to have clean water in abundance at the flick of a tap, or to be able to access and pay for bottled water.
"Don't you have the Ashokan nearby?" a city friend asked when I told him about my conservation-conscious town losing its bearings.
The Ashokan. Now that's an interesting piece of New York City and New York State early 20th century history. Eleven towns were obliterated to create the Ashokan; descendants of those families still remember becoming refugees. More than a billion gallons of water from the Ashokan and other Catskill reservoirs have flowed into New York City every day since 1915.
Water is a finite resource, temperatures are rising, rivers and reservoirs are running dry, climate change continues unabated. Flood, fire, drought, water borne disease. I am not an expert on reservoirs, aqueducts and viaducts, but it is obvious that they—and we—are interconnected and interdependent whether we want to be, or not.
*The laws regarding the obligations of government are entangled with politics and the privatization of essential resources. I will leave it to a legal commentator to disentangle local, state and federal legislation.