Emptying The Baskets.

My father was a technician at a water treatment facility. Once in a while, mostly in the late 80's, I would get to tag along and work a graveyard shift with him. What was daily routine for him was in fact a complete adventure to me.

I could just bring my videogames in and play all night or I would do stuff like counting the bacteria in water samples or walk around with gas masks pretending there is a global thermonuclear war.

The most excellent thing was "EMPTYING THE BASKETS". The process of water filtering obviously has to start somewhere. In Levis, this was at a water intake station by the river. The first filtering step begins with picking out the bigger stuff. From there they go on removing visible particles, then bacteria, and anything else that could make us sick, all the way down to the tasty tap water the good people in Levis and Lauzon got to drink.

It started with my father handing me an electric remote hanging from a thick wire coming from the ceiling. I pushed a button which got an engine running. This engine was in fact pulling a huge metal basket from a hole that seemed like a fucking mile deep. For 3 or 4 painfully long minutes, I had to wait for the basket to be up.

The moment I got to see the light hitting what lies in this god given basket of nature's surprises, I started getting excited like a dog hearing the sound of a leach, especially if I could see something moving in there. Once the basket was up we just had to tip it over and empty it's awesome contents on the floor. Most catches prominently featured eel, some sort of shark looking fish found in the St-Lawrence, and countless other life forms I could not properly identify. Then I had to shovel these gasping animals in buckets and dump them back in the river. To me this was poetry.