I first noticed the smell in the bathroom. Having just flushed minutes ago, I lifted the lid. Nope, nothing there but a damn near sparkling clean toilet bowl.
Then I refilled my drinking glass with tap water and smelled it again. I brought the glass to my nose and there it was. I dumped out the water, got a new glass and this time filled it with bottled water from the refrigerator, which I had from the last time we couldn’t drink the water since flooding had overwhelmed the city’s water facility.
Even then, I started boiling water and storing it into other containers, but I had to start off with bottled water as a quick-fix until I had my stash of potable water saved up.
Since I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer and had lived and traveled around developing countries, I had a love/hate relationship with bottled water. If I lived in a place where I couldn’t drink the tap water, then I either used a filter, or filtered and boiled the water, or bought the largest container of bottled water I could.
I’d never smelled such a stench emanating from water before; so I immediately put the blame on the construction site adjacent to my apartment complex. Seems as if they’d been working on it for many years, but in truth, it may be closer to two.
The next time I watched the news, the mystery had been solved: zebra mussels had infiltrated the water supply for central Austin and were decomposing. Although the news anchor stated that the officials declared the water safe to drink despite the smell, there wasn’t any clip of an official turning on a faucet and taking a sip of it. Hence, I continued drinking bottled water if I wasn’t going to boil it first.
Fortunately, whatever efforts were made to remove the stench successfully reached my water supply first. Local TV anchors were still talking about the stinky water days after mine had returned to its usual odorless state.
Some may wonder why the fluctuations in water quality don’t cause me to stop drinking tap water altogether. Here’s why I continue to do so: within limits, I want my body to deal with whatever is in this environment, so I’m not always sick in the long run.
Remember the end of Battle of the Wits scene in the Princess Bride where Westley admitted to building up an immunity to poison, which he’d put in both glasses? Within limits, it’s best to build up an immunity to whatever poisons there are around here. Otherwise, my body’s going to react violently every time there’s a shift in the wind.