When the great glaciers of the last Ice Age were busy covering Canada, and a goodly portion of the U.S, with a gigantic ice sheet miles thick (this was back a few years) they found time for some playful pranks. One of these was to shear down through many layers of rock and sediment in a line about twelve miles long and 300 feet deep and, acting like a giant garden spade, roll all this debris over and dig a trough just big enough to contain Lake Wabamun. I lived on the north slope of this shovelful and was thus raised in a land of natural springs which flowed from every layer thus cut through. My early and continued fascination with flowing water should therefore be no surprise.
If I dump a bucket of water where I now live it will flow into the Sturgeon River system and eventually join the North Saskatchewan River some 50 miles east. If I go just over half a mile south and dump the water it will flow into East Pit Lake, out of there to Wabamun Lake, down Wabamun Creek some ten miles and into the North Saskatchewan flowing eastward to join the South Saskatchwan, roll through the Prairie Provinces and Lake Winnipeg and thus into Hudson Bay.
If I take my bucket twenty miles west of here the water I release will flow into the Pembina River and north to join the mighty Athabasca, thence to the Peace-Athabasca delta, Lake Athabasca, the Slave River into Great Slave Lake and from there down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean.
Look, there's still some water left. Let's take it another 150 miles west to the Alberta/B.C. border and start it down the Fraser River system, north to Prince George, then south to join the Pacific Ocean at Vancouver. We'll go little further west, then south a tad and put the last drop of water into the Columbia River system (the dammdest river in the west) and let it flow into the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon.
Clouds and rain and snow and hail and streams and ponds and lakes and oceans and great rivers, and springs and great oceans underground and icecaps and icebergs and permafrosts. The waters of the earth and its environs are many and varied and free and held and hot and cold and clean and dirty and always and ever on the move. From the oceans to the clouds to the continents to the oceans in a never ending cycle powered by the sun. Where water pauses, life flourishes, where water does not go, neither does life.