Would You Like a Glass of Water?

Cross-stitching, serial killers, zines, poetry, fiber art festivals, political corruption. All topics I talked about with strangers, couch to couch.

“Would you like a glass of water”?

It was a question everyone asked me when I entered their home. I always answered, “No, thank you! I’m fine.” I have a habit of carrying my trusty emotional-support water bottle. I like drinking out of straws, and mine has a built-in straw. I’m admittedly quite attached to it. At the time, saying no didn’t feel like a big deal.

But I started to notice something. Every time I turned down their offer, their face visibly dropped.

I was there because their private well was contaminated with PFAS. We were installing PFAS filters in their homes, and here I was refusing to drink their water.

I regret that decision now.

Saying that I was installing filters in homes is generous. My advisor and a plumbing company did most of that. My job was to interview residents for a separate project on the ways people understand and respond to PFAS contamination. However, installations took at least 2 hours, while my interviews usually lasted around 30 minutes. So, for the rest of the time, I was basically a nuisance. A welcome one, hopefully.

I would much rather sit on someone’s couch than stand aimlessly in their basement pretending I know how plumbing works. So I sat.

It was in that space, where I was no longer a researcher actively interviewing someone and was much more of a stranger sitting in their home, that I had some of the most transformative conversations of my trip.

I learned about how Washington State is apparently a hotbed for serial killers (really scary to hear when in a stranger’s home). I learned about how the paleochannels beneath the region flow and affect the aquifers. I learned what it was like to be a feminist in the 1970s. I learned how to make a zine. I talked about cross-stitching, poetry, politics, art, teaching, families, and whatever else happened to come up while we waited for the sound of drilling and plumbing from another room to stop.

Most of the time I listened to stories that had absolutely nothing to do with PFAS.

Although I collected valuable data for my research during the formal interviews, I often felt like my soul was fed by the conversations that happened afterward.

Community-based research is a hot topic right now. Researchers, myself included, talk about how meaningful it is to co-create research with an impacted community rather than simply entering a community, collecting data, and leaving. I agree with that completely. But this experience made me think about another kind of co-creation, one that is harder to put into a methods section.

There is something beautiful about co-creating a human experience.

To share and laugh and talk about the mundane. To listen to someone explain their latest craft project or tell you about the history of the place they call home. To pet their dogs and wander in their driveway. To walk into someone’s house as a stranger and, a couple of hours later, leave knowing something about the way they see the world.

Research without human connection can become void of substance. We reduce complicated experiences into variables, rows, columns, averages, and themes because that is part of our job. I do it too. There is value in turning experiences into something we can analyze and learn from, but there is also something lost when the people behind those data disappear.

I am grateful that when I look at the names in my Excel spreadsheet, I don’t see numbers. I see a cross-stitcher, a poet, and a teacher. I see the person who taught me about paleochannels and the person who spooked me with stories about serial killers. I see couches I sat on and kitchens I stood in. I see homes filled with love, frustration, humor, and fear.

And I see glasses of water I didn’t take, and the embarrassment or disappointment hidden behind a polite smile.

At the time, carrying my own water bottle felt insignificant. Now I wonder what accepting one of those glasses might have meant. Maybe nothing. Maybe it would have simply been a glass of water. But when you are sitting in the home of someone whose water has been labeled contaminated, whose sense of safety has been disrupted by something they cannot see, smell, or taste, accepting that glass might also have been an act of trust.

Thankfully, I was able to still build that trust, and it became even more important later. A week after my advisor and I left Spokane, a devastating fire broke out. Most of our study participants had to evacuate their homes, and several had their property severely damaged. No one could have seen this coming, but the real connections we formed have made moving through the problem-solving process much easier.

Trying to connect participants to resources does not feel like an obligation but a necessity. I know these people now, and I truly want the best for them. They are not just participants I feel responsible for because they are part of my research. They are people who welcomed me into their homes, shared their stories with me, and trusted me. I hope they feel that I care, because it’s true.

I went to Spokane to study how people respond to contamination, but I left thinking much more about how researchers respond to people. Sometimes connection is built in the smallest moments, the ones that never make it into a spreadsheet or a research paper.

If someone offers me a glass of water next time, I think I’ll take it.

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Rachel Carson National Environmental Leadership Fellow Symone Franks

Symone is a first-year Master’s student at the University of Colorado Boulder where she is a member of the Equal Water Lab conducting research at the intersection of environmental justice, water quality, and emerging contaminants. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Earth and Environmental Science with a minor in Sustainability from the University of Missouri Kansas City. As an undergraduate, she was recognized as Honors Student of the Year for her graduating class and was awarded both the Marion Bloch Scholar and KC Scholar distinctions for her academic excellence and leadership.