Don't Drink the Haunted Water

Electric Green

Years ago, I had a pool guy who believed water was alive.

I found him through a friend during the hot, lethargic stretch of a long Phoenix summer, deep in August, when the heat is oppressive. The algae in the pool had bloomed beyond my ability to fix it, turning the radiant blue to an electric green overnight. (It was actually quite beautiful.)

The pool guy believed water was a living entity that carried energy. Mine was merely a little sick. He gently nursed the glowing water back to health, and it quickly returned to the turquoise I had long known. Ever since, I've treated the water as though it's just as alive as everything else in my lush backyard.

The Loyal House

I once helped clean out a relative's home after she passed away. She went to the hospital and never came back. Her house was still waiting for her... robe draped over the bedroom chair, a grocery list on the fridge, and a calendar with appointments written in for weeks she would never see. The rooms seemed to hold their breath, as though the house hadn't yet received the news.

It was a brutally hot afternoon. We were moving boxes and uprooting relics that hadn't been touched in decades. Every object we lifted left a pale ghost of itself in the dust. The whole house felt heavy, as dense with memory as she had been in life.

It had been a long morning, and I was so thirsty. Most of the kitchen had already been emptied, but I found one of the remaining glasses and walked over to the water cooler. You know the kind - the big blue plastic upside-down jug in the corner of the kitchen. As I placed the glass beneath the spout and touched the button, something made me stop.

DON'T DRINK THE WATER.

There was nothing visibly wrong with it. The water hadn't turned black. There wasn't a Victorian child dressed in white reflected in the bottle. Nobody whispered my name from inside the jug. But that water had been sitting in that house before she left it for the last time. If water is alive, if it can be affected by what surrounds it, what had this water been exposed to? Illness? Fear? Depression? Uncertainty? And if it held any of that, what exactly would happen when I drank it?

I stood there holding an empty glass, having a completely serious internal debate about whether perfectly clear refrigerated water could put someone else's sadness inside my body. I was so thirsty, but I couldn't do it.

We're perfectly comfortable believing water can be benevolent, blessed, purifying and sacred. So why does the idea of malevolent water sound so ridiculous?

Above Drowned Land

Which brings me to Butcher Jones Beach. Saguaro Lake isn't a natural lake. Stewart Mountain Dam was built on the Salt River between 1928 and 1930, creating the reservoir we now call Saguaro Lake, home to our favorite beach 🎩.

Before the lake, there was land, which sounds ridiculously obvious until you're sitting in a boat above it. The canyon walls don't end where the water begins. They keep going down, more than a hundred feet in places, into a world we can't see. The Salt River ran through a landscape where people lived, worked, traveled, ranched and left things behind long before anyone tied a boat to a buoy at Butcher Jones Beach.

Moonlight at Jones Creek

The beach is allegedly named for Dr. W. W. Jones, a frontier physician who ranched along the Salt River. One version of how he earned the name "Butcher" is almost respectable: crude surgeries performed on kitchen tables, miles from anything resembling a formal hospital. The other version is darker. The story goes that rustlers would row up the Salt River at night, slip into the water near the Jones ranch, slaughter a steer at the mouth of Jones Creek under moonlight and float the stolen meat back downstream before sunrise.

Some say he ran a sanitarium along the river for tuberculosis patients who came west hoping the dry desert air would save them. Legend says parts of his ranch now rest beneath the lake. There's history under that murky green water. Maybe water doesn't need to be haunted to feel haunted.

Otherworldly Frequencies

My pool guy would say the water is alive. If he's right, Saguaro Lake has been holding its breath for almost a hundred years.

Every drop of water on Earth has been somewhere before, whether rain, river, lake, someone's tears or a blue plastic jug in a kitchen where nobody lives anymore.

Some believe time isn't a line at all. Every life we've ever lived might be happening right now, layered on top of one another, each on its own frequency, like radio stations playing in the same room. If water can hold a memory, maybe it can pick up a signal, too.

So the next time you slip into a lake, or even your own bathtub, remember you're soaking in every life that water has ever touched. Maybe even a version of you.

And when you climb out, a little of you stays behind.

Would you still take a drink?

Sacred Water

The idea of water having spiritual significance isn't something my pool guy invented. Humans have treated water as sacred for thousands of years. In Catholicism, holy water is a sacramental: ordinary water made sacred through a blessing.

Then there's Masaru Emoto, the Japanese author who became famous for photographing ice crystals. He claimed that water exposed to kind words, music and good intentions formed more beautiful crystals than water exposed to negativity. Scientists remain unconvinced, but the photographs are hauntingly beautiful.

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BUTCHER JONES SURF CO.
8175 E. Evans Rd. Unit 13682
Scottsdale, AZ 85267

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