In the Field – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
I never drank much water throughout the day in elementary school because our breaks were few and far between, and I didn’t want to have the discomfort of needing to leave the classroom on a regular basis. I followed much the same model through my high school years and into my time as an undergraduate, only really bringing water or tea with me to class when I was sick or if I was having lunch in the back of the room (I was a triple major, double minor for most of my college years after all).
Things began to change when I moved to London and found myself in a sort of limbo between feeling like a resident and constantly being on the move from one place to another in that city. Having classes in different buildings several blocks apart; I started getting bottled water here and there. It wasn’t until I started my doctorate at Binghamton that I got a reusable water bottle to carry around with me from my office to my classes and just in general daily use. With the start of the pandemic a few months later, it became ever clearer that drinking more water than I’d traditionally done would help offer some protection from COVID-19, and all the other illnesses that I tended to catch seasonally from colds to the flu to occasional stomach bugs.
Today then, unless I’m home where I still drink out of a glass, I’m always carrying a bottle of water. This is something that I first really learned about over the summers when I was little when my parents and I would go out to a dude ranch in Pike National Forest. On our daily rides into the mountains everyone was encouraged to carry water. I usually carried an old fashioned round canteen, a style that I kept using by and large through my scouting years. It’s only been around the advent of the pandemic that I’ve stopped relying on hallway water fountains or vending machines and instead always carrying my own water with me.
This speaks to me of a normalization of things that once were reserved for fieldwork, travel, or moments when domestic answers to big questions weren’t as helpful. In the last few years, I’ve begun to buy more shoes of different styles, snow boots which inspired the hiking boots that I bought at first for a trip to the high desert of the Colorado Plateau and now wear when necessary, on muddy and icy days. I see it in how gym shoes and athletic clothing is now fairly ubiquitous as everyday wear.
The boundaries which our society developed between compartmentalized situations and uses have slowly worn down, we’ve become less formal in many respects. All of this sped up with the pandemic when our domestic and public lives intersected in a time of work from home. These boundaries were helpful, I for one want to keep my work at my desk and save time every day to spend beyond its confines, yet there is also so much we can learn about ourselves if we allow the compartments of our lives to intersect and inspire each other.These days, it’s hard for me to leave home in the morning without my travel bottle in hand, filled to the brim, ready to go for the first bit of the day. I drink a lot of water now and have seen many of my allergy-related illnesses that I’ve experienced diminish in ferocity. Cheers!
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 