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  Jeanne entered the lobby and headed for the Parkview Garden Room, the Country Inn’s largest event venue and the most resplendent for many miles. In a rear corner of the room, an actual oak tree trunk, still living, was patched into the wall, a small nod to rusticity. About a hundred chairs were arranged in the center of the floor under strings of tasteful white LED globes. They faced a small stage and dais that, for the moment, were surrounded only by boxes and piles of paperwork. Running around it all was Jill Klein Rone, Jeanne’s good friend of nearly four decades, and Jill’s daughter, Happy. The Rone women shared the same beaming, stage-ready intensity and striking height, the exact opposite of bashful Jeanne. Together they unpacked the boxes and arranged the many dozens of entrants in this year’s Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting, which was to be held that weekend. Jill and Jeanne inaugurated the event in 1991 as a way to keep the local tourism industry from hibernating throughout the cold months, but over the next quarter-century, the event grew into an industry gold standard, the so-called Oscars of Water. The title is half-facetious but there are no other contenders for it. Every year, Berkeley Springs, whose downtown is two lanes wide and a half-mile long, plays host to the most prestigious annual event of a $360-billion global industry.

  Jill and Happy set aside a few bottles for the tasting itself, then left the rest to Jeanne, who brought in the display cubes and arranged them on the parquet dance floor between the dais and the audience seating. She set down the four-wheeled mechanic’s dolly that her husband had bought her years ago just for this purpose, and sat upon it, moving crablike on her heels between the bottles and the cubes. Some of the water came from the springs just outside, while others had been flown in from Canada, South Korea, New Zealand, and many places in between. Jeanne grabbed the most striking ones first, like the towering plastic bottles from Oaza, a product of Tesanj, Bosnia, which featured its Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting gold medal award (from 2000, in the Packaging Design category) prominently on its label.

  Oaza went on top of the cubes, then Jeanne arranged the other beauties around it. She positioned the smaller bottles into a winding barrier wall, leaving space for the pourers to walk in front of the judges’ table. Over the next five hours, she carefully constructed a kind of inverse Atlantis, a small city made entirely of water. The peaks were about 3 feet high, and the wavy ends spread 15 feet across. From above it resembled a Persian tile mosaic, and Jeanne took it in from various angles, making sure it was fit for public admiration. She knew that her creation would be on regional TV by Saturday night, and on the front page of the Morgan Messenger on Sunday morning. As white-shirted hotel employees set up the last tables on the rim of the ballroom and Jill and Happy double-checked the entrants list, Jeanne Mozier circled her liquid sculpture, searching for ways to improve it.

  There was nothing so grand as Glen Burnie or the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Berkeley Springs, but this little village had undergone a history-minded economic and cultural shift of its own in the final quarter of the twentieth century, and Jeanne Mozier was very nearly the sole architect of it. Without her, this place might well have remained the same backwater that Jim McCoy left after the war, just another spot to get gas on the trip to or from Winchester. It was still that hamlet in many ways, from the grungy motel by the 7-Eleven to the Southern Belle diner just outside town, owned by one of Jim’s sisters. But now Berkeley Springs was also a place to go and spend money on a good meal or a spa treatment, or even to see a world-renowned professional competition in a linen-bedecked ballroom. That kind of change doesn’t happen without, as Anita politely called them in the Half Note lounge, growing pains. But it also doesn’t happen without the kind of person who brings maximum effort and vision to every creative task, whether refurbishing a movie theater or aligning bottles on a parquet floor.

  Jeanne drove into town from her home on the Virginia line, but if you enter Berkeley Springs from the north, from Maryland, crossing the Potomac River on Route 522 South, the approach is more dramatic and sudden. The Maryland side of 522, which runs right by the split between Interstates 70 and 68, is all broad hills and scenic woods, but in West Virginia it suddenly flattens: steakhouse billboards, twisted guardrails, and eventually, a looming, rusted-over U.S. Silica plant. Hydrogeology aficionados—and there are plenty in this region—have surmised that the springs’ water owes its purity and renowned flavor to the quartz and limestone ridges that the factory grinds to dust every day. But once you get to the actual Berkeley Springs town limits and the Star Theatre’s cozy red-and-yellow bulbs come into view, all industrial feeling melts away, replaced by what The WPA Guide to West Virginia identified as “an air of peace and unconcern.” For 1 square mile, Route 522 becomes Washington Street, and this dreary section of the mountains turns into a miniature stateside re-creation of an alpine sanatorium.

  It was named for Sir William Berkeley, royal governor of the Virginia Colony from 1642 to 1652 and later the target of Bacon’s Rebellion, the first antigovernment uprising in the American colonies. But Berkeley Springs has been famous for its supposedly curative baths for longer than Europeans have ever known of it. Native tribes traveled from the Great Lakes, the Carolinas, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway to “take the waters” here, and once Winchester and Washington, D.C., were established, it became the first American spa town. According to one long-forgotten Shenandoah Valley guidebook that repeatedly pops up, faded and broken-spined, in the region’s used bookstores,

  In the early colonial times [Berkeley Springs] was a fashionable gathering place for the more sophisticated and venturesome of the east-coast dandies. George Washington and his two brothers from nearby Charles Town often went there, as did the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson, and Louis Phillippe, later King of France, and his two brothers during their three-year period of exile.

  The author, writing in 1972, finishes his brief assessment by saying, “There were card games and dancing nightly at the casino—now long gone.” And it remained so. Even on tasting weekend, the town was dead. I drove in on Friday, February 20, passing the posh private spas, antique shops, and the farmers’ market site between a bank and the county courthouse. It was deep winter, so Jim’s place would be quiet except for regulars, and even they might be kept away by the forecast: Berkeley Springs was bracing for 8 to 10 inches of snow over the next thirty-six hours.

  Downstairs, the Parkview Garden Room was abuzz. A team from the website Water Citizen News was setting up camcorders and struggling with the hotel’s spotty wi-fi; thanks to them, this was to be the first live-streamed International Water Tasting in the event’s history. Other vendors were assembling their displays on the perimeter. A contractor was tightening the bolts on his taste-test rig for a high-end in-home water filtration system, while another man stood by his nonprofit’s “Big Red Box,” a specialized trash can meant for prescription medications, the better to keep them out of civic water supplies. There was even a life-size cartoon rendering of a superhero, Mr. Waterman, who smiled out of a water-drop face and claimed that the cure for childhood obesity was Mr. Waterman-brand Ultra-Premium Natural Artesian Alkaline Water.

  The mastermind behind Mr. Waterman, brand and character both, was Taft Gaddy, a friendly and salesmanly black man who was shaking hands with everyone who so much as glanced his way. I recognized his name from the judges list; like me, he was in Berkeley Springs with two hats on. When I had called Jill Klein Rone weeks earlier to ask about press credentials, she upped the ante and asked me to serve on the tasters panel. She was prepared to flatter anyone who might write about the tasting at all.

  Gaddy suddenly stared in awe across the room, extended a hand, and walked up to a white-haired white man who was walking and talking with a local TV reporter.

  “Are you Arthur von Wiesenberger?” he asked, and the man extended his own hand, which was decorated with a single signet ring.

  “I am.” His graying hair was combed into small waves behind his ears, his bright yellow ti
e matched his gleaming gold cuff links, and his goatee was trimmed as artfully as the Wimbledon grass.

  “This is an honor,” Gaddy gushed. “I’ve been doing this a long time, since 1989, and I started by reading your books. Can I give you a hug?”

  von Wiesenberger flashed a smile like happiness had been invented only for his sake, then brought his admirer in for a brotherly embrace. Gaddy was right to genuflect—this was our godfather for the next two days, the official Watermaster of the event since its inception.

  Born to a Wall Street investment banker and a part-time Hollywood actress, von Wiesenberger grew up an only child with legitimately heraldic roots: his paternal grandfather was an Austrian baron and aide-de-camp to Emperor Franz Joseph. After a childhood in New York, von Wiesenberger relocated with his parents to a family castle in Italy, where he drank local bottled water with every meal. When he returned to America—specifically Santa Barbara, to study film production—he was dismayed to discover that most restaurants served tap, which, even in toniest California, he found unpalatable: too chlorinated, too hard, too tacky on the tongue. He began visiting specialty shops to find the brands he loved in Europe, and drew the attention of Leonard Koren, publisher of the ultrahip Venice Beach monthly Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, who asked him to write a column on the subject. In that capacity von Wiesenberger began reaching out to American bottled water companies to learn about the industry, which in the mid-1970s was still a niche, luxury field. His research led to his first book, Oasis: The Complete Guide to Bottled Water, published in 1978, when he was only twenty-five years old. As the industry grew into the U.S. behemoth it is today, von Wiesenberger’s status grew alongside, until he became the unquestioned expert in the world.

  In 1980, he was asked to plan and participate in the Great Bay Area Water Tasting, one of the first events of its kind in America. He canvassed San Francisco for the most expensive water he could find, then assembled a panel of interested people and relative experts. They drank and rated twenty samples from around the globe, borrowing the practices (sniffing, twirling, stemware, small sips) and even the nomenclature—think “mouthfeel”—of oenophilia, which von Wiesenberger endorses as well. He held events around the country throughout the 1980s—the decade when Evian and Fiji led the bottled water boom in America—and then received the call from Jeanne and Jill, who wanted to hold their own. They needed his gravitas. He obliged without hesitation.

  In 2015, now in his late middle-age, von Wiesenberger remained an in-demand beverage-industry consultant who made regular trips to Asia to help companies identify the most pristine springs to bottle. For weekend getaways he owned a few acres just outside Sequoia National Park in the western Sierra Nevada, site of a rare naturally carbonated spring. But the International Water Tasting was a highlight of his year, and he had missed only three in the past two and a half decades.

  “It’s an important event in the industry. No other tasting in the world has gone on for so long. It’s the benchmark,” he explained to me while two hotel attendees assembled huge standing banners advertising Bottled Water Web, one of von Wiesenberger’s media properties. The banners featured blonde, amply breasted models in low-cut white tank tops holding full bottles. As I leaned on a table littered with tiny giveaway buttons that proclaimed “WATER IS SEXY,” von Wiesenberger thanked me for serving as a judge and excused himself with a politician’s easy smile to grab a quiet booth in the hotel restaurant with the TV reporter.

  After the hotel staff set up a step-and-repeat near the entrance door and the Water Citizen News crew finished fighting over the placement of their webcam, it was time for the tasting’s Friday afternoon event, a four-hour seminar called “Water: Beneath the Surface and Around the Globe.” There were four scheduled speakers, including this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Jack C. West, chairman of the Drinking Water Research Foundation. Years ago, West had developed an exacting set of bottle-quality standards called the IBWA Model Code, after the International Bottled Water Association, which he previously chaired. He was the kind of hyper-professional who might never make it to this section of the Blue Ridge if not for a specialized tourist event.

  In front of a sparse but attentive crowd, West spoke at length about the glories of bottled water and the perils of tap, revealing, for example, that municipal water supplies are responsible for “between 16 and 19 million cases of acute gastrointestinal illness yearly,” a range that, for what it’s worth, is conservative according to the National Institutes of Health. Bottled water, he noted, has been responsible for none, largely the result of cleaner packaging: a sterilized, FDA-approved bottle is pristine, unlike the decades-old pipes and faucet that carry your local water supply.

  As West’s CV and slides made clear, the tone of the Friday seminar was ripe with environmental dread and precious-bodily-fluids terror. The final speaker was Henry R. “Bob” Hidell III, 2013’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner and the chairman and CEO of Hidell International, a consulting firm for beverage and nutritional companies. He was tall and wide and moved as slowly as a submarine, and at the International Water Tasting his reputation preceded him. Throughout the morning I’d heard tell of his legend: he was the foremost water expert in the world; he could divine an underwater spring without any tools at all; his blessing on a new bottling company was a harbinger of future success. Like West, Hidell was an older white man who had the stiff air and raw-chicken complexion of an early-bird dinner attendee, but with his gray blazer, black turtleneck, and penchant for grand philosophical doomsaying, he more resembled a benevolent Bond villain.

  Hidell gave his entire marathon address in front of a single slide depicting a data map of the movement of human populations over millennia. He began by announcing that global warming was causing water scarcity, which in turn was causing “the beginnings of a transit of 2.4 billion people.” He made cryptic reference to his forthcoming book, “a history of war,” that “couldn’t be published while my mother was still alive” for reasons left worryingly unsaid. Of the coming eco-social catastrophe, he warned that “except in our minds, there are no safe harbors.” He explained that he’d reached some kind of Zen plane since, at seventy-five, he’d be dead before his prophecies come to pass.

  By the end of his speech, when the room’s atmosphere was fully pregnant with fear, one audience member sarcastically asked if there was any good news.

  “Let me take a look at my notes,” Hidell mumbled unsmilingly, flipping through a legal pad that he had yet to acknowledge. “No. No, I’m afraid there isn’t.”

  His final suggestion to young people was to “find a rich girlfriend, buy land on the eastern side of Wyoming, watch the Great Plains, and make pretzels or something.”

  “Why not buy land in Berkeley Springs?” came a voice from the back of the room, breaking all at once the spell of unease. Our heads all turned to see who’d provided the relief.

  “Thank you, Jeanne,” Hidell said, with as vibrant a grin as his face could manage. He finally laughed along with everyone, though he seemed to pity us.

  Jeanne stood by the exit, shaking hands and making plain that her recommendation to buy a place nearby was only as sarcastic as we wanted it to be. She was leaned against the button-covered table, smiling broadly as always. After a quick loop around the hall, checking in on the booths and helping put out small fires, she left to attend to other booster duties. The Friday night movie was only a few hours away, and she had a town to entertain.

  A short while later I ventured into the freezing twilight, stopping near the steamy baths to briefly consider throwing myself in after Bob Hidell’s catastrophic assurances. The water wasn’t nearly suicide depth, however, just a small viaduct and a few stone enclosures around the slippery rocks where the springs came trickling out. The snow hadn’t started yet but the air felt loaded with it already. The whole town glowed cobalt, speckled by streetlamps.

  There is no shortage of natural beauty in West Virginia, but it was still ironic t
hat this of all states hosted the world’s biggest annual celebration of water purity. Just a few weeks earlier, in December 2014, a grand jury had finally indicted the former managers of Freedom Industries, which, the previous January, had poisoned the Elk River with 100,000 gallons of industrial coal cleaner. One-sixth of the state population—300,000 people, including everyone near Charleston, the state capital—had only foul, skin-burning liquid in their taps. Two of the Freedom honchos eventually pleaded guilty and accepted a year in jail along with heavy fines.

  Within two weeks of the Elk River disaster, the independent nonprofit West Virginia Rivers Coalition released “The Freedom Industries Spill: Lessons Learned and Needed Reforms,” which chastised the state’s untouchable coal industry as well as shortsighted, regulation-averse politicians and an ineffectual EPA. According to the report, the spill definitively proved that “elected officials, agency heads, and members of the Legislature have made it clear that protecting human health and the environment will take a back seat to supporting lax regulation of industry.” The point was made: by June, the state legislature passed a stunningly comprehensive environmental reform package headlined by new regulations on above-ground chemical storage containers like those that had ruptured and spilled into the Elk River. More than 44,000 tanks fell under the new legal umbrella.

  That’s when the lobbyists swarmed. The following February, legislation was introduced to the state senate that would exempt 99.8 percent of those tanks from the 2014 regulations. (A compromise eventually limited the regulations to 12,000 tanks.) In the same month, West Virginia became the first state to repeal its own existing renewable energy standard, reneging on the self-assigned duty to switch to 25 percent non-fossil-fuel power by 2025.