TRAVELING IN STYLE : WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE

THE WORLD IS MOSTly water. So are we. We were born out of water and can’t escape the stuff, and--the odd hydrophobe apart--we don’t seem to want to. Water fascinates us, endlessly.

One of the simplest of physical substances (a one-two cocktail of oxygen and hydrogen, both common and promiscuous elements), water is also perhaps the most protean--you can’t step in the same stream twice--and the most entertaining. There’s so much to be done with it; we can swim in it, soak in it, skim over it, consume it, watch it play--or just bask in the warm sun down by its soothing side. Thus we love water and are drawn to it irresistibly. Even if we have it just outside the door, we travel miles to see it in an unfamiliar form or a new light. We drink it in.

And why not? The sea is riveting, whether land-bound loch or great unbounded ocean, incongruous or epic. Rivers are the lifeblood of civilization, vital arteries, feeding cities, fueling turbines, breeding creatures great and small and etching character into even the flattest landscape. Fountains, be they salutary or merely decorative, help cool and lubricate our everyday machinery; they are water enticed out of the earth into the atmosphere and made to do good works. A beach is life; our ancestors first touched dry land on beaches, which are the ever-moving edge of water, and we revive ourselves on them. . When there’s water around, we go with the flow.