Minneapolis’s Lake Harriet is known for many things—its bandshell and summer concerts, multitudes of strollers, kamikaze inline skaters talking on cell phones, and cyclists shamelessly riding the latest goofy recumbent bike. As an urban lake collecting runoff from treated lawns and storm sewers, it’s not the first place I’d go for drinking water. On any given day, though, there’s a steady stream of pilgrims lining up to fill bottles and jugs at a green pump on the northwest side of the lake, just below the trolley tracks.
Many appear to be in or close to their golden years, so you’d be forgiven for wondering if this is some kind of fountain of youth about sixteen hundred miles north of where Ponce de León was last seen. According to devotees, the water tastes great and is chock-a-block with iron. It is drawn from a deep well separate from the lake’s water supply. Bob, who drives up in a silver Mustang, says he has been getting water at the pump for more than thirty years. “It just tastes good, you know?” At least it’s better than the tap water at his home in St. Louis Park. “If you let it sit long enough, the sediments settle at the bottom of the bottle!” he says with enthusiasm. This doesn’t strike me as a particularly persuasive endorsement.
Pho, a Vietnamese transplant in his sixties wearing a Bahamas sweatshirt, reckons he has been visiting the pump weekly for at least seven years. “It has a very natural taste and it’s very good for coffee,” he says.
For Jane, a dignified, blue-eyed bifocaler from Edina, the well is more than a source of water. “It’s a very interesting place to come because of the people,” she says. “It’s almost symbolic—how deep it is and how people come together around it.”
As the sun is going down, Paul pulls up on a well-worn road bike with a big empty jug tethered to it. He is forty-seven years old, a stay-at-home dad who describes himself as a “refugee from the world of advertising.” He has sideburns that would look good on Crosby, Stills, Nash, or Young. Paul says the water from the pump reminds him of childhood camping trips in Canada where he could dip his hands in the lake and just take a drink. “I keep coming back to this water. Somehow my body knows the difference when I’m drinking other water,” he says. He relates some pump lore to me: Supposedly, it takes so long for water to drain into the deep aquifer that the water presently flowing from the pump may never have been exposed to manmade pollution. That strikes me as unlikely, but we end up discussing a variety of political outrages until it’s dark.
According to Jim Fagrelius, director of operations for the Park and Recreation Board, the pump was installed in 1910 and it pierces 262 feet down to a level of sedimentary rock called the Shakopee Formation. His agency maintains the pump year-round, clearing snow away and chipping ice off in winter. The Minneapolis Department of Health checks the well’s bacteria levels every two to four weeks, and—this may come as a shock to some of the pump’s regulars—the Park Board occasionally treats the water with chlorine when those levels pass a certain threshold.
After all the hype I’ve exposed myself to, the water is a little disappointing on the palate. Although it lacks the chemical or floral overtones of city water in midsummer, it has a distinctive metallic tang that makes my lips pucker and my tastebuds shrink. Still, it is pleasantly cold, and it may be worth getting used to—if not for its rejuvenating properties, then for its social possibilities.
—Dan Gilchrist
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