...nor any drop to drink. That’s the famous old lament from Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Water is everywhere on people’s minds these days.

It is a political issue, as cities including American Canyon, Napa  and St. Helena search with increasing concern for long-term supplies.

It is a consumer issue. For years bottled still water has gained  popularity in supermarkets, but now people are beginning to question why they are paying others to bottle and package something that comes from a tap. Meanwhile, some cities are outsourcing the care of their water supplies, sometimes to disastrous effect. I recently read of political fallout from efforts to privatize water service in Atlanta, and political protest from another effort in a small town in the Santa Cruz mountains.

• Water has been a source of controversy in California ever since, and probably before, William Mulholland worked out the ingenious engineering  and even more ingenious political maneuvering to get water to travel hundreds of miles south from the Owens Valley to the Los Angeles Basin.

• One of the first complicated newspaper articles I wrote was about California water. My editor sent me out to Sherman Island, one of the vast lowland expanses in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, to talk to farmers about the encroachment of salt water from the San Francisco Bay further and further into the estuary.

I don’t think I understood all the issues then — the State Water Project, the changing face of the delta and the bayshore, the various agricultural and urban demands on water and the byzantine regulatory system. The issues remain difficult to sort out today.

• Water is very different from one place to the next. Once, along with friends, I rafted down the Rio Grande River on the Mexico-Texas border. The water was so grainy and silty that bees landed on the surface and floated alongside us as we drifted through the canyons at Big Bend National  Park.

Then the clearest water I’ve seen and the best I’ve tasted has been in the California high country. Meltwater streams in Desolation Wilderness or the mountains east of Yosemite are pure, clear and sweet, with a little  mineral touch. If it tastes that good, why bother turning it into  wine?

• Every day in summer, we see the Napa River at peace. Often, when the tide is coming in it seems as though the water is flowing in the wrong direction, away from San Pablo Bay and from Moore‘s Landing toward downtown.

Then there’s the raging Napa River during the winter floods, with huge metal trash containers and pieces of furniture bobbing past downtown in the whirling flows.