Waterwise

Recently I was asked to comment on the matter of the direction water drains in different hemispheres. Having been to Australia, you'd think I'd have an answer to the age-old question about whether it does, indeed, spiral differently. It's a reasonable assumption, especially since I know that I did in fact check while I was there. Unfortunately, I can't remember the answer.

This is in part due to faulty memory, but more due to there having been something of greater fascination to fixate on: the toilet itself. You wouldn't think, right off the bat, that there'd be much to notice. It's not like going to rural areas in a second world country and encountering interesting things like servicios in which you are kept company by large insects and the amphibians that eat them. Nor is it like going to a country known for its innovative and high-tech bathroom technology like Japan. If you're an American, you go to Australia not thinking anything about the toilet possibilities except the direction the water swirls down the bowl.

So I was surprised when I encountered my first Aussie toilet and discovered that it had two flush knobs to choose from. True, the surprise was small -- any traveller who passes through airports in the Western U.S. soon becomes accustomed to odd flushing mechanisms, from foot pedals to wall buttons to infrared beams to timed flushes -- but the experience stuck with me. You see, the two buttons -- one usually indicated with a half circle and the other with a whole one -- offered the user a choice of flush volume. Press the half-circle button or knob, and a small amount of water flowed into the bowl. Press the whole-circle one and a great gush of liquid rocketed around and down. Fascinating.

And practical. Australia is not a country with tons of water to spare, and it knows this. It's hard to ignore the reality of an arid existence when massive fires rage out from the interior on a regular basis, and all the dominant vegetation are pyrophilic. It's a country with a great desert in its continental heart, so massively dry and inhospitable to casual human visits that airplanes typically route their paths around the interior along coastal periphery rather than directly across (as from Perth to Brisbane), so as to avoid disaster should a plane have to make an unexpected landing in the back of beyond. It's a place where its signature natural feature -- Ayers Rock or Uluru, as the Aborigines know it -- experiences maybe four or five rain storms a year -- in a wet year. (Amazing things those storms -- I was lucky enough to be there when there was one. I was soaking wet at the end of my circumnavigation of Uluru, but I felt exhilarated and incredibly privileged to have experienced it.) It's thus not surprising that Australia is the home of innovative "green" architecture copied around the world (seen those airfoil-like canvas "wings" offering shade lately? Australian) and things like those two-button toilets. Australians face the fact of their nation's aridity every time they use the loo and have to decide, half-circle or whole?

Contrast this with the attitudes of most Americans in the arid Southwest. Lawns and pools abound, water gushes exuberantly from fountains in dust-dry Las Vegas, tender lettuce soaks up moisture in the hot desert sun, and Californians up and down the coast whine about toilet-to-tap reclamantion programs while fantasizing about salination plants and glaciers from Antarctica as a form of aquatic salvation. Southern California is no less a desert than Australia; there's a reason why the same gum trees under which an old hobo went "waltzing Matilda" thrive alongside the fire-loving chapparrall in the hills east of Los Angeles and San Diego. But unlike Australians, the majority of Americans don't feel dry in their collective guts. Perhaps this is the legacy of a settlement pattern that ran predominantly east to west, humid to arid, green and lush to olive and dust. Certainly the Spanish colonists who formed the Californio community harbored no illusions about the character of the environment they were settling; familiar with the dry olive-orchard hills of their native Spain, they were the source of many of our common labels for western land forms: arroyo, mesa, llano, canyon... They knew a dry land when they saw it. The westward pioneers did not. They had no names for the dry world they beheld, and dreamt up hallucinatory oases of green grasses and lush orchards when they looked to the future. Their children built the Hoover Dam, and Vegas, and continue to live the life of Riley on nature's dime. As our precious water spirals down the drains, cool and unnoticed, perhaps we should reflect on the lesson offered by those Australian toilets:

Half-circle, or whole? How much do you need, really? It's something to think about every day. Every single day.

Note: I can cite great lists of books and articles on these topics if anyone's really interested. Just ask, and I'll email you a bibliography.

Comments

[wolfangel]

My friend did her MA in Australia, and she had a lot of trouble getting used to the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" ethos. (And no trouble changing back once she got here.)

[Rana]

*grin* I was pretty prepared for that sort of thing (we have family friends who lived in an area with an iffy water supply and the yellow/mellow, brown/down equation was often in force). What I _wasn't_ prepared for is that, due to some strange health code, all Aussie bathrooms apparently have to have open ventilation at all times. Brr! (No surprise that bathrooms and toilets are usually different places!)

Australian reader here. I had no idea the dual-flush system was an Australian invention. I can say, though, that on my first visit to the US, I stayed in an American friend's house. One morning, he turned on the tap to fill the kettle, but then stood chatting to us & forgetting to fill the kettle while the water ran down the drain. My partner & I were seriously shocked by this. I had to restrain myself from reaching over & turning off the tap. Here, we turn off taps while brushing teeth etc, & are often prohibited from watering gardens between 8am & 8pm (on pain of fines). Cars are washed on the lawn, to catch the run off. We've added pipes to our house to recycle the "grey water" into the garden.

But about "open ventilation" - not to my knowledge, & I've lived in just about every Australian city.

[Rana]

Hmm. Well, all the Australian houses I was in were quite breezy in the loo. But they were older houses, so maybe that was it? In any case, fact-checking is always good!

RE: the dual-flush -- I don't know if it's an Australian invention, but it's the only place I've seen it, so I assumed.

[yami]

I saw some dual-flush in Denmark, come to think of it, but for some reason didn't find it remarkable. Not compared to the centrifuge in the laundry room.

This essay is a very good counterpoint to one I read last night: The">http://californiawriter.blogspot.com/2004/08/return-of-natives-in-los-angeles.html">The Return of the Natives in Los Angeles. I expect a Hegelian synthesis of the two to appear in my RSS reader by the end of the week, from a third and entirely separate source... hoorah for the internet!

[Rana]

Yami, you might check out this book -- the author makes a similar point, that pre-contact indigenous land use practices encouraged a lusher, grassier semi-arid environment than the more-barren one that came after European settlement. The book talks about other things too; I really liked it, and it's a fun read for Southern Californians to boot.

Lawrence Hogue, All the Wild and Lonely Places: Journeys in a Desert Landscape.

[yami]

Another for the library list! Thanks Rana :)

[Jay]

To address the simpler issue, I asked an Australian at work about the direction thing. He said that the opposite direction was a myth -- the spin of the Earth is enough to affect weather patterns but isn't large enough to affect local things like water flow.