Tomaž Vrhovec

We write everything down. It is a joke about us and the joke is correct. Water readings, who came, what the weather did, what we ate, who could not come and why, when the pump was serviced. Four languages of it.

The reason is not reverence. The reason is that in 1988 there were five of us and no money, and when the society asked what we had actually done for the watershed we could not say. So we started writing it down, and now when anybody asks anything we can answer with a date.

What it costs: an hour a day of somebody's life, every day, for thirty-seven years. And a certain habit of mind, which I notice in myself. I have caught myself at a funeral thinking about how it would be minuted.

People come and think the writing is the practice. It is not. It is the bookkeeping of the practice. The practice is standing in cold water in November with a rake.