What the Ranger didn't say was perhaps more important than what he did say.
It's safe. Nobody has ever had any trouble in drinking it. It's clean. Pure. Glacial. Stone washed.
He didn't say that there was risk, all the same. No diarrhea inciting Girardia, but risk on some other level altogether.
He didn't say that you can't drink this water on this walk and remain unchanged. He didn't say that you will never see the world the same again. He didn't say that this water might seep down into your soul. He didn't warn that this--this water is different precisely because it is wild water.
And the stuff wild water is made out of, no-one can be sure.
This water runs free spirited. And if you bathe naked in it your free spirit might meet the free spirit of this wild water.
This wild water nobody controls. Nobody has poisoned it with chlorine or statins. Nobody has blasphemed it into a box the way the Christians sometimes do.
This wild water is different. In what ways, nobody can really say.
All that can be said is that dipping your cup in this stream and drinking will be more than wetting your palate. You drink this water and you might baptize your soul, in the goodness of the ages mysteriously held here in this water after much of nature's embrace has dried up from other places. Nobody can explain this. But, it might be, that you came all this way across the ocean just to drink this water from this stream, in this tiny moment on this walk. That might be it. And the sense of the Divine kindness in that just might overwhelm you. And don't you ever count on being the same after that.
