By Dr. Robert Thorson

Is there a higher power? There is. I found it nearly everywhere west of the Adirondacks during my freshwater journey from Maine to Montana.

The higher power I speak of is the iconic water tower of the Midwestern sky. It holds Earth’s most precious substance in its liquid phase. That’s what our bodies need to metabolize our food, in order to give us energy to be who we are. In today’s environmental age, I suggest that we appropriate them as a religious symbols, on equal footing with less lofty church steeples.

This notion came to me in the tiny town of Glen Flora, Wis., which I drove through a week ago. A beautiful, old-fashioned water tower made of sheet metal and rivets stood higher than anything else around. I pulled off next to a fire hydrant, freshly painted bight red. Between the hydrant and tower must have been some sort of underground pipe. Also between them was the Lutheran Church, with Pastor Dwight Hanson at the helm.

When a local home or building is burning down, firefighters have a choice. They can go either to the hydrant or to the altar to protect the community from hellish conditions. They go to the one fed by the higher power of the tower.

For millennia, human communities have gone to the community well for water and a daily dose of gossip, news, slander, praise and opinion. This still happens in rural villages in developing nations today. But when the population is large enough, and when money for capital investment is available, they switch to an enclosed supply, largely due to fear of contamination.

But there’s another important reason for putting the community water supply high on the landscape. This lets gravity save us the trouble of walking out of homes with empty water jars and buckets, filling them by hand, and returning with them full. Gravity is a power we can count on every second of every day of our lives.

Residents of regions with hills and valleys of considerable topographic relief and with rock near the surface – the mountains of New England, the Adirondacks, the Catskills, the Appalachians, the Superior Upland, and the Western mountain chains – have little need for water towers. They need only to dam up a nearby small stream to create a reservoir, and to do so at an elevation higher than the village green. The main threat they face is dam collapse during floods.

But on the glaciated rolling Plains, former glacial lake bottoms and sand flats of southern Ontario and the Midwest, the soils are usually too leaky to hold water well and the topographic relief is not high enough to provide the pressure needed to run the system by gravity.

Author Garrison Keillor rose to fame as the radio host and inspiration for “Prairie Home Companion.” He understands the place water takes in small towns. In 1985, he published the creation myth of Lake Wobegon, his fictional Minnesota home. In it, the water tower is the highest architectural achievement in town, looming above the grain elevator and the steeples of Lutheran and Catholic churches. Residents do not get their water from the namesake lake that Wobegon borders, as they did when the town was first founded. That would require the physical work of dipping and hauling. Instead, they get it from the community water tank that stands on stilts above the town.

Silver-haired Virginia knows her water supply system better than most residents I’ve met. I found this 70-something woman sitting with her fiance, Ollie, on a park bench in Itasca State Park, at the headwaters of the Mississippi River.

When I asked her to say something positive about fresh water, she replied: “Our well is deep and our tower high.”

I suggest we follow Virginia’s appreciation by giving thanks daily for the purity of our aquifers and the reliable strength of our elevated water tanks, the higher power on which thousands of communities depend.