Cowboy, take me to Canada

Oh, the woods, how I miss them. To help make myself more complacent, agreeable, pleasant, I have started studying foraging. Now I know exactly how to identify a fiddle head fern and when to harvest it. I also know that you can eat pertinear every part of the cattail at some point during the year. I also know how to make Sumac lemonade. Are you impressed? So now I'm getting ready to stroll through one of the many metro area parks and start identify the flora. Of course I wouldn't eat it. Lord knows what's in the dirt it's growing from, or in the case of aquatic plants, the water. 

Flash back to age 23: I was a young whip snap just out of nursing school and starting my first job at a nursing home. I was asked to witness the destruction of some meds and found there was a whole station devoted to flushing expired and discontinued meds into the sewer. My reaction was "Really? We just dump the meds into the water? What is this, 1895?" I know things are changing and this method is not the norm anymore, but a century of flushing billions of medications into the water system still happened, and I'd rather not get high on Morphine when I was only trying to enjoy some cattail shoots. 

All this talk of contaminated water has got me thinking about a drive I took from Silver City, NM to El Paso, TX a long time ago. I was a passenger so I missed nothing of the scenery, including the filling station in the desert that calls itself Demming, NM. This is where Charles Manson allegedly wants to live, should he ever be released from prison. I don't know what kind of circumstances would lead up to that, but probably something on par with an alien invasion. The point is that as we got closer and closer to Mexico, the highway was lined with cattle farms, and not the lush, green postcard quality farms you see here in Minnesota or Wisconsin. Nope. These farms were all dirt and shit and the cows were skinny and sickly. Here is your slider from White Castle, your 99 cent burrito from Taco Bell, prehumous. If I hadn't already been a vegetarian, that would have done it. And what was that shit river flowing beside the cattle? Why, that was the Rio Grand which came oozing into Mexico in a sloppy brown sludge. 

That was just an observation, and here is another: on a canoe trip in the boundary waters the guide stopped us in the middle of a lake and told us that the water was so clean we could drink right from the lake. So we dipped our cups in and drank. (Don't drink by the shore though, too much beaver shit.) 

So, would I be wrong to say that Canada is amazing, or to run to it Vietnam style? Because the water coming into the US from Canada is clean enough to drink and the water coming from the US to Mexico is liquid shit. I mean, I know that was in the boundary waters and I certainly wouldn't want to dip my cup into the waters of Winnipeg or Vancouver, but on the same note, I'm not going to dip my cup into any water anywhere near the US/ Mexico border. 

I read a quote by Winona LaDuke a few weeks ago and it's sort of stuck. 

The quote was "Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn't make a corporation a terrorist."

 She really seems quite badass and I admire her. 

As much as I would love to be an illegal immigrant of Canada, I live here and I should do something here. I just don't quite know what that is yet. It's percolating.