Why protect rivers when we have bottled water?

Conspiracy theorists take note.
I recently heard a radio talk show host advising holiday shoppers to stay hydrated.
More needless advice dispensed by another celebrity know-it-all, was my first thought.
Then I recalled the television commercials for a pill that promises men the ability to take longer drives with fewer pit stops all the while throwing back bottled water like guys used to drink beer.
As if the growing oil crisis isn’t scary enough, now I hear a shortage of clean water looms on the horizon.
Well, no kidding.
We’re told to drink more water all the time and warned to take it with us everywhere we go. Sales of hydration systems – Camel-Baks and the like – are booming.
Admittedly, I’ve joined the trend. I carry water with me while hunting and always keep a bottle or two in the truck and boat.
I never used to. There was a time when I took great pride in my ability to go without.
And I never carried water in the backcountry. Giardia be damned. I’ve quenched my thirst from tea-colored pools while horn hunting in the spring, drank from the Yellowstone River in the summer and sucked water from holes through the ice on late fall hunts.
Not anymore. Now I drink spring water from somewhere else out of a petroleum-based plastic bottle. I’m beginning to suspect the same folks who brought us $3-a-gallon gasoline are behind this water shortage.
Until recently we would have balked at buying water by the bottle. It flowed from the tap relatively cheaply.
Now we hear tap water’s not good to drink.
Bottled water is a hot commodity in the little northern Montana prairie town where I live now, but I suspect it’s even more popular in trendy Bozeman where gin-clear mountain streams feed into the city’s water supply.
Apparently though, no one there really cares if that water remains clean enough to drink since nearly everybody in Bozeman is quenching their thirst out of a bottle. An effort under way to make the Gallatin River the best-protected waterway in Montana outside a national park or wilderness area keeps meeting with more opposition than support. Wealthy landowners, developers and realtors are fighting the effort to protect the Gallatin.
From my point of view, seated comfortably on the grassy knoll, I suspect more than a few of those folks just might own stock in Exxon-Mobile.
In the meantime I’m making a switch to water flavored with hops and barley. I hear it even comes in a can.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net