It's not Naive to Visit Evian

KEYS to spring water

I grew up in town that ostensibly has a spring. According to the world famous internet, Belmont Springs Water does, in fact, have its origins in my home town of Belmont Massachusetts. In 1876, a man named George Cotton bought property on Belmont Hill (note: once believed to be the site where Noah’s Arc ran aground by my childhood friend Danny), and the rest is history, at least up until it was apparently purchased by Crystal Rock from (note: blech) Connecticut.

Despite the spring’s presence, I was never a bottled water guy. This is probably at least in part because I was raised by a man who knew something about water. My father, a local government expert by trade, spent a number of years working for the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, an institution best known for being constantly attacked by Jerry Williams on WRKO for three hours a day for 20 years. He was also elected many times to Belmont’s Board of Water Commissioners. (Note: In the finest traditions of New England democracy, we somehow needed three people to do this job.) During one of his first campaigns, when I was 13 or 14, my friends and I dropped thousands of leaflets promoting his candidacy around town that boasted that he held a master’s in “pubic administration.” While this was embarrassing to his teenaged son, it was not, apparently, embarrassing to my father. He was aware of the typo before we started going door-to-door and decided that at three cents a copy, any embarrassment from distributing the 5000 leaflets was well worth the cost. Honestly, this dislike of wasted money probably was another reason we were not bottled water people.

As a water commissioner and planner he knew the water in Belmont was good—so good, in fact, that the State had found it worthwhile to drown four towns while building the Quabbin reservoir from whence it came. (Note: Dana, Enfield, Prescott, thank you for your sacrifice. Greenwich, good riddance.) Thus, bottled water was a wasteful and pointless extravagance. Besides, as a water commissioner, he knew that explaining to the Belmont town meeting that the pipes were “tuberculated” when they needed upgrading would ensure speedy action. (Note: Tuberculation is just a bacteria-based form of iron oxidization, but it sounds terrifying because, well, tuberculosis. It’s like one notch away from saying we have to replace the pipes because they have herpes.)

I think he was a good water commissioner, and for many years I had one of his “MELENDEZ: WATER COMMISSIONER” signs up in my office. (Note: It did not actually say Melendez.). Then I became a fed, and having a political sign in my office, no matter how silly, would have counted as electioneering, so the sign stayed home.

I don’t think he was ever serious about it, but his idea for the town to seize part of the Belmont Spring by eminent domain and start selling the water for the town’s benefit, though almost certainly illegal and definitely marxist, was brilliant. At the end of his tenure, he moved for the abolition of the Board of Water Commissioners and its replacement with a professional public works department, in what I regard as a Washingtonesque rejection of perpetual power. Washington, Cincinatus, Mandela, my dad—short list.

But despite coming from a “spring town” and a “water family” (note: about 60% water, in fact), I have never seen the Belmont Spring, I don’t know where it is, and I’m quite sure that if I showed up at it, they wouldn’t let me fill up a five gallon jug for free. Rich Belmont Hill snobs.

All of which is to say, that Belmont, Massachusetts is not Evian-les-Bains, France. First, I am pretty sure Evian High School never graduated a future Empress of Japan. But beyond that, in Evian, unlike in Belmont, one can go right up to a tiled fountain drawing from the source of the Evian spring and have a drink. Once can even fill up jugs, goat skins, ostrich eggs, whatever, free of charge. The “Cachat Spring” named for the long ago owner of the Spring Gabriel Cachat, became famous, according to the Evian web site, when a Count fleeing the French Revolution stayed there from 1790-1792 and found that once he started drinking from the Evian spring, his bouts of kidney stones ceased.

Try doing that in Belmont

And it really works! Since drinking from the fountain 10 days ago, not a single person in my family has had kidney stones! This is science! (Note: I post this in welcome to my first subscriber who is an obvious anti-vax nut based on his or her other sub stack subscriptions. Dear reader, I want you to know that you are welcome here, however dubious your understanding of the scientific method, not least because if I were to adopt a hostile tone to ever anti vax, nutraceutical curious person in Switzerland, I would lose access to a good chunk of the people here. )

In keeping with this commitment to hard science, and in an effort to distinguish itself from a million other lovely European spa towns, Evian also had a yeti. Okay, it probably was not a real yeti, but how do I know? I’ve never seen a yeti, but I’m pretty sure they exist here because the kids keep talking about them. According to one friend of my daughter’s, our common of Collex-Bossy is in the midst of a legitimate yeti crisis. He was pretty sure it was a yeti that hid my daughters boots at school one day, and the kids conducted a full fledged yeti hunt at my house. And I, for one, think it is terrible that the phenomenon of global warming and or loss of habitat has forced these beautiful creatures from their traditional range in the Himalayan east of the Eurasian continent and forced them into the small cities of Switzerland and France.

The beautiful, but displaced Yeti

Now, this yeti, appeared to be made out of drift wood, and I always thought they were more like apes, but what do I know. I am not a yeti expert. Since there were a few dozen other driftwood animals in Evian, I suppose it is possible that a flesh yeti came to Evian and then was turned into driftwood along with a bunch of other animals by a local wizard. As I said, I don’t know. I am not a zoologist.

Hungry, magical parking garage

The other possibility, I suppose, is that Evian had forsaken a traditional Christmas market in favor of a “buy nothing” approach that emphasized magic, imagination, and whimsy over crass commercialism, which I'm sure had the backing if local merchants. Certainly, this would also explain the roving musicians, who appeared to be ancient Gauls or possibly Visigoths, playing a medieval version of Average White Band’s “Pick up the Pieces” and the pamphlet that said Evian was trying to create a buy nothing mystical experience… which is ironic for a town that built its fortune on selling water. (Note: Respect to comedian Jim Gaffigan for the Evian/Naive bit.)

Regardless, if I’m ranking cities, towns, and regions that share a name with their most famous products, I’ll put Evian about even with Hershey, Pennsylvania, well below Champagne, France but way above Gas, Kansas.