Water water everywhere, but not a drop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday, my husband and I visited my father in law at the Veteran’s Hospital in Ste. Anne de Bellevue to find that the sink in his room was covered in a plastic and he was drinking from a bottle of water and not the usual hospital issue container.

 There was a boiled water advisory on the entire West Island, my husband informed me. Pointe-Claire, Baie D’Urfe, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, everywhere but Dollard, which gets its water from Montreal.

 My father-in-law’s room on the 10th floor overlooks Macdonald College and especially the farm, where cows are sometimes seen grazing. The building has great views on every side,with the view of the Ottawa River and St Lawrence (St. Laurent)..Water water everywhere, but not a drop.. A metaphor for a problem that is looming large and on a planetary scale..

 Well, in Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf  I add a bit about the water at Macdonald, for Flora did not mention it in her letters. It was her father Norman, who had contracted typhoid in 1896, who mentioned that he was afraid of the water on the railroad in Northern Ontario, so he walked around parched all time. So he claimed. As he didn’t drink alcohol, I have to wonder how he managed, especially in the heat of summer. Perhaps he waited until he found a stream and filled up a canteen or something. Well, it’s better he didn’t drink alchol, it dehydrates.

 Anyway, as I’ve mentioned on this blog, clean water was an issue on the Island of Montreal in 1910.

 Macdonald College, founded in 1907, first got its water from the river, but by 1911 that place was getting its water from a well! You see, there was a typhoid epidemic in 1909!

 Laurentian Spring Water capitalized this event with ad campaigns such as above. My husband’s grandfather, the father of the man we were visiting in the Veteran’s, was the President of Laurentian Spring water.

 I am also writing a book about Montreal in 1927, that is all about water. Milk and Water, where I have my own grandfather, Jules Crepeau, the Director of Services, meet up with my husbands grandfather and argue over the ethics of selling water!

 There was another typhoid epidemic in Montreal in 1927, traced to milk.

 Now, I live in Vaudreuil, a section that has had problems with drinking water in the past. I’m not scared about water, I don’t particularly like drinking water out of plastic bottles, as I fear the plastic leeches out and might promote breast cancer.

 But we are about to be hit with a big one time water bill. They are putting in a new water system. They say they have to: Mandatory government regulations after Walkerton.

 

 

 

When the Prince of Wales Visited Montreal

Here’s me in front of H. Dandurand’s car, the one that is supposed to be the first in Montreal (around 1900, I guess..it’s more like a carriage, isn’t it?)

This car is on show at the Chateau de Ramezay museum across the street from City Hall, where the picture below was taken in 1927, with the visits of the Prince of Wales (Prince de Galle) and Prince George and the Baldwins. A big crowd was on hand, which according the the Gazette included street urchins taking in the pomp and ceremony  from vendor’s wagons in Bonsecours Market. Street urchins, what a cute name. They don’t call them that anymore.

That event  happened about 40 years  (one week off) from the day Charles de Gaulle, a guy with a lot of gall, proclaimed VIVE LE QUEBEC Libre from a window at City Hall.

I wrote a play about 1967 in Montreal, Looking for Mrs. Peel, www.tighsolas.ca/page3.pdf.pdf

I’m writing a play, I think a play, about Montreal in 1927, when the Princes Visit and my grandfather has a fight with a prominent English citizen over the basic right to clean fresh water.

H. Dandurand was among the list of mourners at my grandfather’s funeral in 1938. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, was fired by the city adminstration (well, by Camillien Houde) over the Montreal Power and Water scandal, (I have a quote in a newspaper with Houde saying he wants the clear ‘the clique’ from City Hall…and then later in 1937 he was  run over by a Montreal Constable  while he was collecting a HUGE life pension. Hmm. He died a year later from accident related disease, bone cancer. No more pension for my grandmother and her kids.

Camillien Houde has a huge street on the Mountain named after him: Mederic Martin a little bridge, Dandurand a street in Rosemont and my grandfather a street and park in Ahunsic (north of TMR). Small thing.

In the early 80′s, while my husband and I were searching for our FIRST computer, and the ONLY place selling them was located in an area we didn’t know well, despite the fact we lived in an apartment in TMR. Anyway, LOST (No cells of GPS’s back then) I looked up to see where we were and we were at JULES-CREPEAU street! A street named after my grandfather! What a coincidence.

Water Water Everywhere… and not a drop of common sense

There is an ad from a 1909 Montreal Gazette, which I can’t show you due to copyright.. It is an ad for Laurentian Spring Water, the Robert White Company, 636 Craig Street East. It says, if you are concerned with you health and if you don’t want to drink germ-laden tap water, buy Laurentian. 4 cents the half gallong.

I know a fair bit about this company, because it belonged to my father in law’s family.

Robert White had a shoe company, and while drilling for water to enable tanning (or something) he discovered an artesian well (or something) and started this water company. They supplied bottled water to businesses and more elegant homes.

The blurb above explains why he managed to convince Montrealers that they needed bottled water.

Montreal had a contaminated water supply. (My own grandfather, Jules Crepeau, worked for the Health Department earlier in the century, and then the Clerk’s Office, and later, in 1921, he became Director of City Services and then in 1930 lost his job over some scandal to do with the Montreal Water and Power Company. Talk about “all things are connected.”)

As it happens, I am told, this Mr. White had a useless son, so he took in a nephew, Thomas Gavine Wells, to run the business. This Thomas Gavine Wells married a first cousin of General Douglas MacArthur, Mae Hardy Fair and they had 3 kids, one of whom, Thomas Gavine jr. married the daughter of Marion Nicholson of my Flo in the City novel, pictured above, being written about on this blog.

In 1909, Marion was in Montreal, working as a teacher. Her sister Edith was also in Montreal, but I have no clue what she was doing, so in my book, I make her a tutor to the daughter of Jules Crepeau.

Norman Nicholson, their father, is in the the woods near La Tuque, working on the Transcontinental Railway. He is the only one who talks about drinking water: he doesnt trust the water on the railroad. He`d rather go around parched. Hmm. (He did get typhoid in 1896 in Richmond.)

But I will have Marion and Edith discuss this water business. You know today, so many people go around with water bottles, taking continual sips, but I am not a convert. My friends tell me how important it is to drink lots and lots of water, saying that our bodies don’t know when we are thirsty, but I think that is a load of malarkey. I think bottled water is the biggest hoax in the world and my instincts, which I do trust, tell me that drinking water out of plastic bottles is dangerous. (I hate the taste.) I trust my body to tell me if it is thirsty, too.

(The other day, some young counter girl at the grocery made me purchase a plastic bag (as per usual) and was trying to imply, in a patronizing tone, that these same plastic bags were bad for the environment. I just pointed to a mountain of plastic bottles in the aisle and said, “Gee, amazing. These bags that I recycle as garbage bags (saving me from buying those more heavy duty bin bags manufactured by DOW or some other evil entity) are terrible for the environment but bottled water, which is a huge money maker for the grocery stories, is OK. I sense some consumer age BS going on here.”

I just came back from Lesvos Greece, where it was 104, so I did drink a lot of water. Tap water and I have never felt better. (And I had an ear infection from the airplane.) Not only that, these people used plastic bags for their groceries, but they also had FAR FAR less refuse than we have here in NA. A couple of small bags per family, from what I witnessed. (My brother had ONE small bag a week.Imagine! Here at home we fill up two recycle bins a week… Why?.. they eat mostly fresh produce in Lesvos… It’s a no brainer: what we need to do to help the environment is to eat only from the meat and vegetable stand. But it’s the over-packaged convenience foods that make the money for the grocer. If they could sell ONE pea packaged in 24 oz of styrofoam and 10 yards of celluoid or is it cellulose (plastic) wrap and charge us 50 dollars for that one pea, they would. Packaged lettuce leaves, anyone?? (Oops! I buy that Mea culpa.

My argument: If a person needs to guzzle water in Canada in 75 degree temperature, how much MORE water does her body need in 104 temperature. Let’s face it, we hardly exert ourselves at all these days, compared to, say, in 1910. And we don’t have to walk about in corsets and shirtwaist suits. So, if a person needs to guzzle water by the gallons to be healthy, why did they not die from dehydration back then?