Back to Maine Exiles Message Board
Continuation ----- Won't You Help To Sing These Songs Of Freedom? by Chris Cooper
We have a considerable history of allowing or encouraging
corporations to extract such wealth as they wish from our woods and rivers on
terms they and their friends in our legislature have deemed reasonable. As the
fish have run out and the forests been reduced from great timber to a big
scrubby woodlot of two by four spruces and chipping-fodder hardwoods, we have
embraced ski resorts and second home developments.
Along the coastal plain where most of us live Wal-Mart is king, as it is
everywhere in America and increasingly elsewhere. Our small cities (all our
cities are small ones, mercifully) are indistinguishable from those anywhere in
the nation; we eat the same “nuggets” as they do in Oklahoma City or South
Bend, denying the chicken even the dignity of retaining its natural form.
Whatever we don't like or appreciate or approve of, whatever we fear, we believe
comes to us “from away.” In this regard pretty much everyone agrees that the
worst offenses to “The Way Life Should Be” are generated in the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts. Opinions vary on what is odious or threatening. The twisted
little twits who dreamed up the Christian Civic League are awfully exercised
about homosexuals. (Homosexuality may have originated in Greece or California,
but it is taught in liberal colleges in Massachusetts. And probably Vermont.)
The rampant development some of us object to is imported by Maine businessmen,
but they usually need Bay State partners, bankers, or idea men to work our
governor (either party and the occasional independent equally obliging) and
legislators for tax advantages, “enterprise zones” and groundbreaking
photo-ops (does anybody ever use one of those short-handled chrome shovels after
the show is over?)
We blame our summer bad air days on Ohio power plants. This is true, as far as
it goes, but the Hummers cruising the Maine Mall parking lot on a crowded
shopping Sunday and the motor homes dragging mini-SUVs down Route One all the
hot, humid, congested tourist season may give some contribution.
I suppose I'm as glad to be here as anyone. Except for these little and
little-read essays, I keep to myself, avoid eye contact, properly use the
popular adjectives Christly and friggin' and the mild expletive son-of-a-whore.
But I've seen more beautiful places than Sabbatus Street in Lewiston; I'd rather
swim in the Gulf of Mexico than the Gulf of Maine; and I've said and written and
apparently do so here today again that God will someday split the earth and
sunder Lincoln County's shire town for proclaiming itself from letterhead to
masthead to Route One billboard, “Maine's Prettiest Village.”
If we are unusual, if we are different, if we dare proclaim ourselves better,
our differentiation and transcendence do not lie in our landscape or
architecture or popular culture or cuisine. Look at a map. Maine could as
sensibly be a province of Canada. We should be in the Atlantic rather than
Eastern time zone, and would be, were our legislators not timid (like
legislators in all other states of the union). In our isolation, our distance,
in the time it took to travel here from there, we held close to traditions and
institutions that were abandoned, co-opted, over-ridden or superseded in more
accessible, better connected, wealthier regions.
I live in the town of Alna. We have only this year been subjected to our first
request for subdivision review, a milestone that I hope is not the undamming of
a flood. At least ours is not a typical affair of ten or a hundred lots promoted
by some builder or corporation. For whatever cold comfort it may grant us, we
are petitioned for a mere three or five lots by a couple of locals whipped into
a desire for profit by their attention to the high prices asked in the real
estate advertisements, much as some of us get all twitchy whenever the Megabucks
or Powerball pot rises to some preposterous scores of millions which would ruin
us were we to win.
But I was twelve years First Selectman here some years ago, and I taxed and
spent and counted dogs and tractors and regulated alewives and drafted warrants
for town meetings. I pounded cold patch into potholes and salted frozen culverts
past midnight below zero with my road commissioner Austin E. Trask. I watched a
conservative chicken farmer develop into a capable, empathic welfare
administrator in the person of Theodore B. Ross. Both of them now are gone and
much of their town may go, too, and maybe they're better for not living to see
it. After voters could no longer endure me as chief administrator and tax
assessor they began electing me town meeting moderator. I know something about
what makes Maine different.
We will survive some subdivision. We are changed, but much endures though those
new among us bring suburban expectations to our hard granite, thin soil, cold
swamp community. Some of them harden and stiffen and toughen and cast off enough
of what they came from to become firemen and selectmen (or at least planning
board members) whose first thought is to protect and secure the vestiges and
traces of our austerity and clarity and proportion and sense.
And now the wave heaves up the next new idea. All the towns are doing it.
Jefferson did. Wiscasset likely will. It's as inevitable as the adoption of the
state fiscal year because school superintendents crave uniformity, as certain as
the fact that towns abandon March meetings and give up their rural schools. But
this last alteration in the way we were will pull the final solid locking pin
from our foundations; we'll have crossed a threshold, forever changed, reduced,
homogenized, made unremarkable.
Some persons, proponents say, are intimidated by raising their hands to vote at
town meeting. The urge is to decide all issues in secret paper ballot, by
referendum. Well, let me tell you about the Maine town meeting, you poor persons
who've never enjoyed one. The moderator reads the article cobbled up by the
selectmen. He warns if a vote one way or the other will effect something other
than a casual reader might anticipate. He proclaims such rules of debate as he
wishes to enforce and directs would-be speakers to seek his recognition before
engaging.
Most articles pass uncontested. New residents ask annoying, predictable,
sometimes stupid questions. “What's an alewife?” Good ideas are often given
short shrift, poor ones passed. But at least here in Alna in the thirty years
I've been part of the machinery, we've only allowed one or two borderline awful
proposals to ripen into law and we've ridiculed dozens into oblivion.
It is true that some persons are sometimes uncivil. A couple residents have
pushed their rampant egos too far forward in recent meetings, but meeting and
moderator have found ways to ignore them or diminish their harm. Annoyance we
must suffer as a corollary to free speech and open government. We expect Iraqi
citizens to brave bullets and bombs so they might vote for crazy clerics and
lapdog candidates nurtured by occupying forces. Can't we trouble ourselves to
suffer bad behavior from our coarser or dumber neighbors when all we're expected
to do is to drive to the meetinghouse a few times a year? No one has ever died
or been beaten because he or she said the wrong thing or voted in an unpopular
way at an Alna town meeting.
I don't doubt some persons sometimes are intimidated. Some of us are obnoxious
louts. Others just talk too much, too loudly, too long, too often, too
forcefully. But everywhere you go, every newspaper you read or television show
you can't escape, every bumper magnet that intrudes, we see and hear that
Americans love freedom and democracy. Good. Great. One of the burdens of freedom
is putting up with your neighbor. Another is standing up to him, face to face,
idea to idea, in a public meeting. It might make you nervous; it might make you
cry. You'll get over it. You'll be better for it. So will he. And if you can't
confront a blustery buffoon from West Alna or some arrogant retired
industrialist who's recently secured a waterfront compound in Sheepscot and
intends to instruct the natives in their proper roles in his life, how can you
hope to fight the forces arrayed against every one of us by Dick Cheney and Karl
Rove and Exxon/Mobil?
Austin Trask always sat in the back row at our meetings. God, how I'll miss him
every meeting for the rest of my life. Our town is poorer than many of us may
imagine without him. He built and plowed our roads. He was our fire chief. He
was our Santa Claus at Christmas and our barbecue chef in our short summers. He
had an opinion on everything that came before the town. He more than once stood
to decry the intent of an article I had drafted, an idea I promoted. Some may
have found him intimidating; I found him astonishing. An idea that would wither
before his objection deserved to die. Any that survived his attack was better
for the trial.
He could change his mind, although not all of a sudden. He was conservative in
the sense the word used to have. (Hell, he changed his mind about me, the young
guy from away, from New York who landed on the Rabbit Path in 1975 and found his
future among these alders.) He wasn't the only valuable, interesting iconoclast
in our little town, not the brightest among us, nor the best educated, and he
was far from the smoothest. But he, or his type, was and is the most necessary.
He thought before he spoke, and when he did speak you never doubted he believed
what he said. There was never any shading or spin. He had no political
philosophy, belonged to no school or party.
When Trask didn't like an article he said so, directly. When he recommended an
article pass, he urged it “for the good of the town.” This was not an empty
phrase, floated by a politician; it was a challenge. Kill open debate at Alna
town meetings and he'll be back from the dead to tell you you're a fool and a
failure and if I'm your moderator I'll suspend the rules so he can do it.
Well, I'm over my limit again but my editor will grant me the space because
somebody needs to warn Wiscasset off its dangerous course, and our readers
beyond the Piscataquis, where town meetings are a long-gone memory, will want to
read this dispatch from the puckerbrush and agree that the slant of northern
light and smell of balsam fir and salt air and the echo of aggressive opinion
around the balcony of the old meeting house makes us, still and sadly, unique.
___________________________________
Chris Cooper has lived in Alna, Maine since 1975 and attended
every town meeting there for the last thirty years. He was First Selectman from
1977 through 1989, has held a few other municipal positions of no great
authority, and for several years has moderated town meetings, welcoming therein
humor, vulgarity, dissent and brave use of the English language in pursuit of
insight and entertainment. Dullness and tedium he has tried to gavel into
submission and retreat. Mr. Cooper receives complaints at ckc2@prexar.com.
A slightly shorter version of this essay was published by The Wiscasset
Newspaper on 27 October, 2005
**********************************
To read more of Chris Cooper's essays, click on the links below:
The Wiscasset Newspaper --
Click on Cooper Commentary in the left column
Lincoln County News -- Click on Gardening in the left column
To petition to be included in Mr. Cooper's weekly email deliveries contact him at ckc2@prexar.com
***********************************
Back to Maine Exiles Message Board