My visits to Hot Springs, Arkansas, begin and end with filling a water bottle at the public jug fountain on Central Avenue. A carousel of spigots pour out the bounty: odorless, pristine mineral water that fell as rain four thousand years ago—when the pyramids were under construction in Egypt—and percolated deep into the earth, only to be forced up a fault line and out of the Ouachita Mountains to the tune of 700,000 piping hot (143°F) gallons a day.
My childhood self, an annual visitor to Hot Springs National Park from my hometown of Little Rock, did not appreciate this miracle of geology. But if the science was lost on me, the fact that the fountains mysteriously emitted swirling vapor, and that I could dip my hand into a trickle on the slope above town and find it magically, delightfully toasty, was not.
