From The Road: On Prayer Trees and the Art of the Shower

September 6, 2007

Let us give thanks for showers.
Generous gushers,
Parsimoneous spitters,
Needle-y stingers,

Faced in marble,
Aqua tile,
Fiberglass,or
Concrete block,
Closed with
Curtains of politically correct cotton duck,
Clingy plastic, or
Etched glass doors.

We give thanks for the streams,
The drops,
The squirts,
That carry away our
Detritus, our
Smells, our debilitating
Sense of being unclean.

Perhaps a re-baptism?
Some days it feels like that.

The above is in imitation of one of Leunig's prayers from "The Prayer Tree", one of those books I like to re-read often. I wish I could remember his first name, but Amazon was no help this time. He writes prayers that are poems, giving thanks for singers, teapots, winter, etc., and his illustrations are delightful (he is a cartoonist).

So, here I am talking about water again. The average American uses somewhere between 50 and 100 gallons of water a day, compared with a family in a third world country that carries its water a distance, and which uses around 3 to 5 gallons a day. A family. Something to think about.

On this trip I have experienced all of the above breeds of showers, and then some. One particular variety has a button one pushes to start the water, which flows for 12 seconds, and then shuts off. One pushes the button again for another dose, and so forth. Then there was the one that cost a quarter; one had to guess how long the water would run. Luckily I hurried through and still had some time left, but I can see that rummaging through one's pockets for another quarter with soap getting in one's eyes would be tough.

My worst experience so far has been in a state park, where I arrived at the shower house all prepared, and opened the curtain of the shower stall to encounter a cloud of mosquitoes. That morning I passed.