chlorine in 1920—one of the most important advances in public health—dealt a near-lethal blow to sales of spring and mineral water in this country, but it set the stage for their comeback, based largely on snob appeal, sixty years later.

United States pays the lowest tap-water rates, an average of $2.50 per thousand gallons.

“Well number one,” he says, also known as Evergreen Spring on the Poland Spring label.

The fate of Lovewell Pond might not interest the average person slapping down two bucks for a bottle of Poland Spring at a concession stand, but the issue of who controls water—Howard Dearborn’s ultimate struggle—may in the long run be even more important than how many barrels of oil are burned to quench the nation’s thirst. We can live without

for eight glasses a day, about forty-nine cents a year. Buy that water in bottles and you’d be spending $1,400.

Drinking too much water can, though, be dangerous. In January of 2007, a Sacramento County, California, woman trying to win a Nintendo Wii on a radio program drank almost two gallons of Crystal Geyser without a bathroom break. She left the radio station with a headache, didn’t win the Nintendo, and died that afternoon in her home.

Between 1990 and 1997, U.S. sales of bottled water shot from $115 million to $4 billion,

(The word rival is from the Latin rivalis, meaning “one using the same stream as another.”)

In Fiji, as in Fryeburg, nothing’s simple.