NOTABLY, MANY OF THESE BATTLES STIR in the medium of water itself. The parallels between the efforts of a city to divide swampland into solid ground and watercourse and those of its residents to retreat from a sweaty, humid afternoon only to drink pitchers of iced tea in an air-conditioned, dehumidified interior are striking. In both, the enemy is a soupy environment; to live, we separate something dry and something wet from the undifferentiated muck. From this perspective, Houston's rich population of refineries and chemical plants begins to make sense culturally as well as economically.

In one telling, the story of this city is the story of successive generations of settlers fighting battle after battle to redirect, reappropriate, redistribute, and refine inconvenient dispositions of life-giving fluids.

The war cannot be won.