Well Without Water
April 15, 2025 at 03:30PM
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Before I became the insufferable type of person who knows it takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, I was a twentysomething state prison inmate, listening to the sound of a running faucet.
Picture a medium-security prison dorm in upstate New York: a long room with a high ceiling, filled with rows of sloppily painted cubicles, each one just big enough for a metal bunk and an oversized locker. Handmade mousetraps rigged with peanut butter bide their time on the buffed linoleum. An industrial fan mounted in one corner blows the sick-sharp smells of sweat and floor polish around the room. The correctional officers’s desk sits on a platform next to the only doorway, which leads out to the dayroom, the two phones, and the bathroom.
Prison bathrooms often have what folks inside call “heinie hiders”: partitions that don’t rise even to an inmate’s shoulders when seated on the freezing, stainless steel toilets. But we had it pretty good at Livingston. The bathroom stalls were almost normal, except for doors two feet too short. Anyone walking by could look down onto the toilets—for security, of course. Hang a state-issue towel from a stall’s top bar to make up for the shortfall, and a man could almost believe he was in a typical public restroom. From there, he was only a quiet moment away from imagining he was (just think of it) in private.
Most bathroom sinks at Livingston had metering faucets with stout knobs you had to press to keep the water running. But the last sink in the row, the one furthest from the open doorway, was Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)-compliant. That sink was mounted closer to the floor and had big faucet handles that widened at the ends like butter knives.
Whatever time you’re reading this, whatever year, somewhere in America—all over America—a faucet is running in a prison bathroom, to hide the sounds of a man masturbating. He’s in the Boom Boom Room: the handicap stall at the end of the row, spacious enough to drag a plastic chair in behind him, as a desk for his magazine and anything else he’s brought. The stall closest to the sink, with the big faucet handles and the tap wide open.
I’ll be the last to judge whoever’s in there, which is among the reasons why I never considered turning off the faucet. I knew many men inside who had been in prison longer than I’d been alive—me a skinny, pale white boy with a head of thinning brown hair, white-knuckling my way through a two-year baby bid. After waking from one too many wet dreams, flushed and throbbing in a dank warehouse beside 60 other men, the static of flowing water sounds like dignity.
As a child, my anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder were so pervasive that my mom nicknamed me Fret. I was afraid of elevators and teenagers and bacteria and airports. I pet our dog an equal number of times with each hand, avoided stepping on sidewalk cracks until I’d ruined my posture, and pushed the off button on electronics that were already off until the word off had worn away completely, making it all the more necessary to check. I clung to my rituals as a bulwark against things I couldn’t understand or control: my family’s slow implosion, the heart condition I was born with. The rituals are the promise never kept or outgrown—that if I could just execute one well enough, it would solve something outside my buzzing mind, in the real world.
Prison is where someone with OCD goes to be driven insane, the illusion of agency flayed from daily life. The CO’s phone would ring and an officer would call a last name, sometimes mine. During the long walk to the front of the dorm, I’d panic-cycle through the countless things I might be about to learn. Maybe they wanted me down at medical, or the visiting room. Or I was on the draft to a different prison. Perhaps my appeal had come through and I was going home, or my sister was dead, or this was all a dream. As I watched one foot land in front of the other, I’d notice the linoleum squares on the floor, how the partitions dividing the cubes didn’t line up with the square edges. If that’s not the kind of harrowing detail you expect from prison life, this essay is not for you.
Prison is where someone with OCD goes to be driven insane, the illusion of agency flayed from daily life.
Every morning at Livingston, I passed the dorm bathroom with a sleeve of Pop-Tarts in hand, on my way to get in line for the overworked toaster, and that one faucet was running. I walked by a few hours later, headed to the library or to watch football in the dayroom, or off to my job mopping floors in the education building, and it was running. My bladder would rouse me in the night, and before I hooked my shower sandals from under my bunk, I’d lie in the dark and listen to water sigh through the cinder block.
One day I was in the library, following my routine of looking through the latest issues of National Geographic, which was running a multi-issue series on food and the environment. An article mentioned that it takes an average of around 450 gallons of water to produce 1,000 calories of beef. I scribbled notes as I read, felt that one muscle under my right eye start to twitch, and my missile systems lock on. Then I shuffled back to my dorm, to the bathroom, and watched the water pool in the ADA sink.
In Lisbon, across the street from St. Mary’s Cathedral, there’s a former prison— now a museum—that was built in Roman times. The Portuguese call it the Aljube, from the Arabic al-jubb, meaning “prison”—or, as the museum also translates it, “well without water.” The experience of prison has never been described so perfectly: to stand at the bottom of a deep hole, looking up at a sky it should be possible to reach, stuck in a dark place that will soon run dry.
It was easier to fret about the ongoing climate tragedy—about anything external, no matter how bad—than to let my attention lie fallow, occupied only by a hyperawareness of myself, in prison. But contrary to cliché, reading can entrap the mind just as easily as it can free it. I read about food waste and fracking, mountaintop removal, and the annual death toll from air pollution. I read about the hundreds of prisons that stand within a few miles of a Superfund site and learned the names of those built atop landfills, toxic ash dumps, and former weapons storage facilities. I read about animal agriculture and its impact on land use, animal welfare, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Somewhere in America, not far from the man masturbating in a prison bathroom stall, a cow is being dragged down a processing line and dismembered while fully conscious; another is being skinned alive. Somewhere else, thousands of acres of forest are on fire, perhaps uncomfortably close to dry casks of nuclear waste we don’t know how or where to store.
But proximity is powerful, and of all the environmental crises that could serve as the poster child for the Anthropocene, the crisis I couldn’t shake, the one I could almost quantify, was that bathroom faucet. I always returned to water, the numbers looping in my head: more than 220,000 gallons of raw sewage from the California Men’s Colony dumped into a creek, 800,000 gallons unloaded by a prison in Alabama. More than 30 gallons of water to produce a glass of wine, 1,800 for a pair of blue jeans, 40,000 for a car.
And then the day came and I was released on parole, my mind broken and obsessed, the faucet still running, still close.
I transferred my parole to California, my home state, vibrating with all the data I’d ingested. Every weekend, I’d drive the San Marcos Pass into the fire-scarred Santa Ynez Valley to visit my cousin, my only friend in a county I couldn’t leave without my parole officer’s permission.
Each time I crested the pass, Lake Cachuma whimpered into view, more a puddle than a lake. It was only 10 percent full at the time, the high-water line etched on the rocks like an indictment, 90 feet above the water’s surface. This was 2015, nearing the end of the driest period yet recorded in California’s history. Lake Cachuma had retreated such a distance that campers were told it was no longer safe to launch boats. During good times, the lake provides around 80 percent of the district’s water. By 2016, that number would fall to three percent. Local officials would announce that if something didn’t change within the next two years, the lake would no longer supply any water at all.
Perhaps there are parts of the US where climate change still seems invisible and abstract; California isn’t one of them. It’s a place of blithe and painful ironies, the California grizzly bear on its flag extinct since 1924—a paradise battered by earthquakes and droughts and fires, practically begging us to leave.
And then the day came and I was released on parole, my mind broken and obsessed, the faucet still running, still close.
I moved into a one-bedroom apartment I couldn’t afford, rented in the name of a family member without a criminal record, and started sending job applications: overnight clerk at a gas station, dishwasher at a restaurant, assistant at an antique store. Nothing.
I wanted to volunteer, to do something peaceful and positive that might lead to paid work, but I felt ashamed around people, afraid they’d smell the shit stink of prison on my skin. When I searched for ways to help animals instead, I learned that the local animal shelters didn’t allow felons. Just how worthless had I become, I wondered, if I—a white man of privilege, convict or not—couldn’t even give my labor away for free?
I began jolting awake in the middle of the night, animated by terrors. Sometimes I wouldn’t fully regain consciousness until I was standing in the apartment’s drab living room in my underwear, thinking I could hear the snake hiss of the Livingston faucet, almost louder than the drone of my own problems.
The sight of Lake Cachuma, the sound of that faucet—my own personal hauntology of water. The two were trying to tell me something: Climate change, the water crisis, they weren’t external issues after all. I needed to take on that guilt as well, make up for them somehow. Perhaps there was a routine that could cleanse the shame, anxiety, and pain coursing through both what was left of my life and the wider world. Maybe all it would take was water.
The writer Roy Scranton once flippantly remarked, in response to a research letter on the four highest-impact things individuals can do to reduce their carbon footprint, “the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide. . . . If you really want to save the planet, you should die.” Around half of those incarcerated in the US have a diagnosed mental illness, and more than 90 percent have exceptionally high rates of lifetime traumatic experiences. In the initial weeks following release, a formerly incarcerated person is 13 times more likely to die than a member of the general public. The two most common causes are overdose and suicide.
Within weeks of my return to California, my original post-release plans (a job, a social life, getting back in shape) had been abandoned, in favor of a plan that seemed more useful and realistic: I would give away or sell most of my possessions. I would live the most low-water lifestyle I could. And then, after my parole expired—after I had scaled my life back and back and back, shrunk my water footprint down as small as I could—I would kill myself.
In the initial weeks following release, a formerly incarcerated person is 13 times more likely to die than a member of the general public.
Everything I owned in prison fit into two plastic trash bags. A bulging property bag was a liability, paid for with either vigilance or violence. I had two pairs of green pants, two green button-up shirts, three white undershirts, three pairs of underwear, a pair of boots, and rubber shower sandals, all state-issued. I grew to love the sparseness of that life. I loved how, when I left, I didn’t leave a trace.
Owning nothing had been my way to refuse comfort and insist I didn’t belong in prison. Now I discovered I didn’t belong in the real world either. Perhaps the solution was the same. Almost every consumer product has a hidden and outsized water footprint; I had memorized most of them. If I sold what I could and donated the rest, I could recoup some of the waste that was me.
The Swedes have a word for this: döstädning, or “death cleaning,” a practical way to ease the burden on those left behind. I emptied drawers of old clothes. I sold the subwoofer I’d installed in the trunk of my car as a teenager, scolding myself for being so showy and insecure. I made all my computer passwords identical, exactly as you’re not supposed to, so it would be easy for my parents to access my accounts once I was gone.
I made purging trips to my dad’s basement, where most of my stuff had been stored while I was locked up. It felt like I was sorting through someone else’s things, squinting at a life reanimated through its small artifacts, some of them damaged by a plumbing problem that had soaked the basement a year earlier. “He graduated high school?” I thought, incredulous, as I leafed through one of my own yearbooks amid a smell like low tide, examining the happy scribbles of friends who had stopped talking to me. “Good for him.”
Everything had to go. Even my body became a walking yard sale. I emailed the UCLA Living Donor Program about donating one of my kidneys, but the staff decided my congenital heart disease posed too great a risk. I was told the complications could be life-threatening, which I found hilarious. I shaved my head instead, just as the prison barber had at intake. Then I kept going and shaved my entire body, as if prepping myself for the electric chair. I didn’t want to live, or to die, with a single hair that knew threadbare prison sheets or had registered a breeze in the yard.
But I wouldn’t kill myself until my parole was over; I didn’t want to give the state the satisfaction. By then my body would be whittled down by clean, efficient living, as desiccated as Lake Cachuma—ready for a green burial in one of those mushroom suits I’d read about in prison, the ones filled with spores that break down the body’s toxins, preventing my remains from polluting the soil. I’d thought of everything.
The majority of home water use takes place in the bathroom, so that’s where I started. I scaled back my showers to once a week and only flushed the toilet when the need was overwhelming. I wandered my dark little apartment doing calculations on a loop. How many gallons of water does the Livingston faucet waste every hour? How many choices would it take to refill Lake Cachuma? How many choices until I am good?
Eating animal products is incompatible with a low-water life. In addition to generating up to 15 times more greenhouse gases than vegans, omnivores drive demand for a system of animal agriculture that severely pollutes fresh water. More than half of the average American’s water footprint—over 657,000 gallons per year, the largest in the world—is the result of food choices. Investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten has calculated that, if Americans avoided eating meat just one day per week, it would save water equivalent to the annual flow of the Colorado River every year. The water crisis in the Western US would be solved.
A lover of double bacon cheeseburgers all my life, I swore off animal products. I didn’t know how to cook and have always hated salads, so twice a day I ate spaghetti tossed in olive oil out of a dented, stainless steel mixing bowl.
How many gallons of water does the Livingston faucet waste every hour? How many choices would it take to refill Lake Cachuma? How many choices until I am good?
Becoming vegan was the one thing that could make me, a felon on parole, more of a pariah than I already was. One recent survey found that people prefer vegans only slightly to individuals who use drugs. People resent it when someone’s choices morally outflank their own; they feel judged, which is exactly what I hoped for. I thought I was leveling the moral playing field by becoming the most ethical of us all, a water conservationist extraordinaire, with as many reasons to be self-righteous toward others as wasteful, hypocritical would-be employers and former friends felt they had in dealing with me.
But then one morning the blanched gray bedroom carpeting began to darken and swell. The water’s creep was imperceptible until I placed a pen at one of its borders, to mark the annoying asymmetry of the spread. I stalked the growing puddle like a bystander watching someone drown while management arranged for a temporary apartment. Maintenance tore up the sopping, spongy mess to find the water’s source, a burst pipe perhaps, but I knew the source was me. I hadn’t done enough. I needed to go further.
It didn’t take long to move units. By that time, I had almost nothing left.
The COs used to tell us inmates that if we simply didn’t exist, the world would be a better place. Now the science—to my suggestible, sputtering mind—seemed to support that. My death would be good for the earth, the one thing I could offer that might be considered useful. I’d been a loser even before ending up in prison—expelled from school twice, attempted suicide once—but now my life had truly bottomed out. I was a waste of time, potential, resources. Clearly, I could never do or be good enough in life to deserve the space I take up. I wasn’t even allowed to pet shelter dogs. The only way to escape the negative and finally get myself back to net zero (especially since no one wanted my kidney) was to die.
I’d navigated the rapids of suicidal ideation before, mostly as a teenager, but this time felt more grounded, evidence-based, fully seasoned. “We are no longer frightened of nature,” writes John Jeremiah Sullivan in Blood Horses. “What frightens us is the idea that we have triumphed over nature, and what that triumph will mean in the long run, when we understand, too late, that we were nature, that our triumph has been a suicide.” In trying to shrink my footprint to nothing, I saw myself as breaking away from this pyrrhic triumph, this mass suicide, in favor of a smaller, quantifiable, more intentional end.
The water cycle is a beautiful, continuous, highly efficient system. I fell in love with water partly because the thought of it helped soothe my obsession with zero-waste processes. I needed to make myself into a system like that. I am, after all, made mostly of water. The last drops I had left to give were me.
Once incarceration picked open a scab on my mental health, as my brain increasingly fixated on water, I followed that issue to the larger climate crisis and its parallels to the carceral state. Both are a futureless form of selfishness. The people who enable these systems of oppression don’t care what comes next, and only the most “radical” advocates are willing to push for effective solutions. Almost none of us are willing to make choices about how many children to have or whether to fly on airplanes with our carbon or water footprints in mind, but we’re happy to continue recycling—an activity so ineffectual by comparison that we shouldn’t even bother.
Likewise, few of us actually want to dethrone America as the prison capital of the world. Returning to the much-cited incarceration rates of the early 1970s would mean releasing four out of five Americans currently incarcerated, of whom more than half were convicted of what we call a “violent offense.” In a country deeply committed to countless forms of racial, environmental, and structural violence, who among us is truly interested in reckoning with what violence is and who commits it, with accountability and who should carry their fair share?
Almost none of us are willing to make choices about how many children to have or whether to fly on airplanes with our carbon or water footprints in mind, but we’re happy to continue recycling—an activity so ineffectual by comparison that we shouldn’t even bother.
Industry and government place responsibility squarely on the individual. The Keep America Beautiful campaign, with its classic, heart-wrenching TV ads (“People start pollution. People can stop it.”), was funded by industrial polluters looking to shift blame and isolate each of us in our guilt. The phrase “carbon footprint” wasn’t thought up by environmentalists; suits at the oil company BP coined it in 2004. Only YOU can prevent wildfires! claimed Smokey Bear 14 years later with the wag of a furry finger, as the power company PG&E burned down the town of Paradise, California, in an inferno of smoke and irony, and incarcerated firefighters were paid $1 an hour to douse it in water the state couldn’t afford.
All of this is part of the same personal responsibility narrative as America’s super- predator-fearing, “do the crime, serve the time” tough talk—one that diverts blame from root causes and conditions, sidesteps the need for fundamental change, fosters hate for ourselves and one another, and is simply bullshit.
Right before my parole ended, someone I’d met years earlier took pity and offered me a job at $11 an hour. That gave me enough positive inertia to lie to the owner of a wild horse sanctuary, nestled in a valley not far from the federal prison complex in Lompoc, so I could finally volunteer with animals. I arrived before sunrise on the weekends to muck out empty stalls and wrestle hay bales. The mornings were so still that I could hear the low thump of hooves against the churned California soil. The spacing between the hay flakes I flung into the huge enclosures was uneven, but I didn’t mind.
I rubbed my calluses against my dusty jeans and showed them off to the horses. I marveled at and mourned their quiet dignity, those fierce and powerful bodies steaming in the early light, reduced to hiding out at the sanctuary, safe from Bureau of Land Management roundups but never to be free again.
I left California later that year, not long before the rain returned and Lake Cachuma began, for a time, to refill. I found a sublet in Chicago, met my partner Sonja at a dinner party, and chased my niece around my sister’s living room. The end of my parole had come and gone, and I was still alive. There was no singular, magic moment. Somehow suicide became one more thing I never got around to after prison, taking its place on a long list after meditation, world travel, and pet ownership.
Instead of delivering the prosocial death I’d fantasized about, my water obsession trapped me inside my own logic. I can’t redeem myself and prove that the planet’s resources are precious by dying, just as the carceral state can’t prove that violence is wrong by inflicting more violence. Water is, first and foremost, a sustainer of life. If all life on earth is worth honoring and conserving, if all of this is precious, that must include me.
On my best days, I hardly think about the water crisis now. I’m relieved to have other things to care about. As a parolee, I would’ve railed against my current self as insufficiently radical, on a slippery slope toward apathy. But I’m worth the bit of space my life takes up, and living with churning, obsessive thoughts—of the planet’s death and my own—has taken me as far as is useful. Call me a felon and a mediocre climate citizen, but I’m done feeling ashamed, just in time to keep that shame from killing me.
In 2022, The Intercept mapped the risks posed by accelerating climate change to 6,500 active and former sites of incarceration across the US. Three of the six facilities in which I was imprisoned are at an elevated risk. Luckily, the carceral state is on the case. The latest recommendations from the National Institute of Corrections urge prison administrators to implement a “green corrections” system of rooftop gardens, solar energy panels, and even wastewater recycling. Carceral logic will always reform itself to fit within the container provided. It’s like water that way.
Livingston was found to be particularly vulnerable, rated a severe flood risk. I picture the drain in the ADA sink backing up, water spilling down its sides. An entry in my prison journal begins, The water is brown this morning, even from the drinking fountains. . . . I remember men writing grievances to Livingston’s administrators, their cramped script insisting the prison’s water was contaminated, convinced water was going to set us free.
Years later, the state budget did what water couldn’t. Despite an outcry from locals who savored the jobs, Livingston was shuttered in 2019. The men living there were transferred to other prisons, still isolated and out of sight.
I used to worry that people might notice my less-than-daily shower regimen, but nowadays I just hope that keeping my head shaved makes it harder to tell. I still compulsively shed any possessions I perceive as clutter. When confronted with a nice spread, I still eat myself sick, fearing it will go to waste, urged on by memories of lockdowns without enough food. I remain a smug vegan, ready when someone quizzes me about protein while they decide whether to ask the only question they really want answered—why exactly was I in prison?—as if they have any right to know.
Navigating a society that erases any sense of value from the lives of system-impacted people, I still wonder how many choices it’ll take until I am good. I’m still not sure what constitutes, for me, a life worth living. And yet I still nurse the belief that my choices, if I were to add up each one, have left behind a slightly shorter trail of harm than yours. Me, a felon. Can you imagine? But I forgive you; I hope you forgive me.
I remain a smug vegan, ready when someone quizzes me about protein while they decide whether to ask the only question they really want answered—why exactly was I in prison?—as if they have any right to know.
Even if carbon emissions fall to zero tomorrow, the inertia of our past choices is too great; the planet will still suffer. The superlatives are tiresome: the driest, the hottest, the longest, the worst. Climate journalist David Wallace-Wells sometimes uses the word “sub-apocalyptic” to describe Earth’s best-case scenario. Apparently, our new ideal is just shy of human extinction.
At two degrees of warming—inevitable, no matter what we do—water scarcity will affect an additional 400 million people worldwide. To prevent catastrophe in the American West, the US Department of the Interior has urged seven states to drastically reduce their use of water from the Colorado River, the most vital water source in the region. Reservoirs around the country are often so depleted that dead bodies, thrown into the depths decades ago in hopes they’d never be found, have resurfaced.
Al-jubb: our prison. Our well without water.
My mind unspools more fixations; Sonja tolerates each one. Every few weeks I follow her around our apartment like a cat, watching her dust. Something about the sight of a person dusting gives me the same pleasing, tingling physical sensation as a scalp massage. My latest compulsion is to replace everything in our apartment with what the product recommendation website Wirecutter says is the better version—the perfect version, freeing me from the need to think about buying a surge protector or trash can or skillet ever again—so I delight as Sonja dusts our Wirecutter-approved bookshelf speakers and our Wirecutter bedside lamp. She stands to one side so I can watch as each surface is wiped clean.
Every night, I do a sweep of the apartment before bed—the typical OCD circuit. I touch knobs and locks and all four sides of a particular window frame in the kitchen, make sure everything is in its place, and listen closely for a moment. Then I circle back to our bedroom. Last night, Sonja was already fast asleep on her back, both hands above her head as though signaling a lifeguard.
Before I eased into bed, I turned on Wirecutter’s upgrade pick for a sound machine and rounded the dial, searching for the right water sound: rainfall, waterfall, brook, ocean. I chose brook. Only the water at first, but then the complexity began to build, until I could almost believe the sounds were real. A gust of electronic wind kicked up and trees at the water’s edge began to sway. A bird cried out, then a frog croaked. Somewhere, the tap was wide open.
Michael Fischer is a nonfiction writer, storyteller, and senior manager at Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement, where he helps build robust education and employment pathways for currently and formerly incarcerated people. He is a 2025 Haymarket Books x Mellon Foundation Writing Freedom Fellow and a 2023 Right of Return Fellow, among other honors. His writing appears in the New York Times, Salon, The Sun, Lit Hub, Guernica, Orion, The Rumpus, Brevity, River Teeth, and elsewhere.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/15/well-without-water/
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