full fathom five

Winslow Park

Here's the view from Winslow Park, a summer campground whose owners graciously open their gates to dog owners in winter.  We can run our dogs there without leashes, and dog owners have taken to meeting every morning at the point at 8:30 for a dog playtime and confab.  We're surrounded by water on three sides. 

Across the water, below, is South Freeport.

And here, above, are benches facing out to the water.  Some are memorials, as we'll see below.

  Our dog Cody looks for playmates, but we've come late today, and the road coming up to the point is encrusted with ice, discouraging the usual visitors.  My husband and I had to put ice-grippers on the soles of our boots in order to make it here.

Being alone at the point gives us time to read the memorial benches for the first time.  The words above on the pale, top line are: "Forever young, spirited, beautiful, and loved."  And the bottom line reads: "Still waters run deep."   

    The bench's words below are clear.      

Memorials inspired by the sea are always especially haunting and poignant.  They all share the spirit of the first one I ever saw, atop a hill on Butter Island overlooking Penobscot Bay.  It's a marble bench dedicated to the memory of the island's owner, who bought up many islands in the bay for preservation, so that sailors and hikers can enjoy them forever.  On the bench's back is a line from Tennyson's Ulysses: "Come, my friends.  'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." 

Environmentalists' puzzle

My husband and I were passing our favorite little glen on our morning walk the other day, and in the middle of the sweet little outdoor room made from huge boulders on three sides of a little mossy streambank, was an empty liquor bottle.  My husband shook his head, said "How can they do that?   

   

I didn't bother to tell him my theory, because it's so tired after years and years of invocation every April at Pownal Pride Day.  That's our yearly town spring-clean up day, when as many residents as I and my Recycling Committee have the courage to cold-call and assign roads to, get out and pick up roadside litter.  And every year the same profile emerges: from what we pick up on the roads, litterers are smokers, drinkers, fast-food eaters, and old tire-collectors.  In that order.  We find mostly cigarette-butts and cigarette packaging, then beer cans and liquor bottles, and then a bit less frequent are the McDonald's and Burger King wrappers, with the styrofoam cups.  Some of the drinkers mix coffee-brandy drinks in their cars, because we find occasional stashes of  coffee-flavored milk-cartons interspersed among small airline-sized coffee brandy bottles.  Occasionally we'll find salad ingredients - usually ready-made packaged greens still in their original bags, with almost-full bottles of dressing, all in a plastic grocery sack that's usually floating downstream.   

   

 

For the ten or so years I've been organizing Pride Day, this profile of the litterer has not varied.  And here's the judgment I've made, in answer to questions like my husband's  Why do they litter?  Because people who don't care what they put into their own bodies are not going to care about the environment.   

   

   

But I know that's harsh and glib.  People are more complex than that.  Some of them are addicted, and can't be expected to think rationally about where they throw their butts or beer bottles.  Others don't value nature.  They don't think about deer or coyotes or foxes cutting themselves on broken glass, don't feel a lilt in their chests when passing a beautiful mossy glen, don't think piles of tires choking off a stream or plastic bags caught on tree-branches or weeds look bad.   

   

 

Or maybe it's political.  Maybe people want to be free to do whatever they want with their trash.  When I first started on the Recycling Committee in 1994, some residents called us "The Gestapo" for trying to get people to sort and recycle their trash to reduce the waste-stream.   

   

 

What do you think it is?  I'm asking because I've run out of ideas about how to get people to care about the environment.  I'm considering resigning from the Recycling Committee because I feel stale and useless.  The littering problem has worsened, recycling rates are flat, and landfills are expanding.  Anyone have any ideas?                   

Lost Library

A few nights ago was our annual Town Meeting, which is when all interested residents convene in the gymnasium on hard metal chairs and vote Aye or No on about 36 warrant items on how much property tax monies we need to raise for what.  It starts at 7pm. and usually goes on till midnight, the gym dwindling from about 200 to 50 diehard citizens over the course of those five hours.  It goes on that long because after each warrant is introduced and seconded as a motion, there's a discussion-period prior to the vote. 

As is probably true in any town, there's a contingent of folks who are dead-set on not appropriating a penny more on taxes than the year before; and on the other side, people who accept the reality of rising fuel costs and other factors beyond our control that raise the cost of town services.  These factions argue back and forth, and it takes a strong moderator to keep the wranglers on point. 

Last night, a new warrant item came up late on the agenda, at about 11:30 when most people had gone home.  It seemed like a no-brainer: we have no town library, so the neighboring town has offered membership in its beautiful new library to all our residents (1500 or so) for an annual fee of $4,000.  That's a little over $2/year per person, a bit over $6 per taxpaying household, compared to the present individual membership fee of $45/yr. for out-of-towners. 

Unfortunately, the champion of this issue - although very smart and good-hearted - didn't note the dwindling and tired audience, and started off the discussion period by reading a prepared speech.  She used the classic debating trope "I'm not here to tell you about......" to catch our attention.  It did, but it only works if used sparingly (especially at 11:40 on a weeknight!).  Unfortunately, she went on for ten minutes in this form, presenting all the statistics about how early exposure to books makes kids better learners, etc.  After about twelve of these wonderful things that she wasn't here to tell us, the moderator cut her off, saying we took her point and had to move on.  He asked her to wrap it up, and she launched into her childhood in a poor mill-town where books saved her life.  People squirmed in their hard metal chairs; the road-crew and trash-hauler guys in their plaid jackets and John Deere hats started heckling her from the back of the gym; and I tried not to think of Steve Martin in "The Jerk" saying, "I was born a poor black sharecropper in the south..."  I turned to my husband and whispered, "God, she's killin' it!"

The moderator mercifully held up his hand and said, "I'm sorry, we've got to move this discussion along."  The library advocate waved her papers at us, gave a last, "So vote for that magic library card," and sat down.  The fiscal conservatives were suddenly on their feet, hands raised.  The moderator said "One at a time, I'll try to get to everybody."  The first said that our school kids already had access to their school libraries, and that we shouldn't throw money where there's no demonstrable need.  The way we've always funded things, another said, is when a need arises.  A third said that the present user fee is the fairest way to fund something like this that isn't a glaring necessity, like road-plowing and repair, fire-protection, etc.  Individual library cards purchased by those who use the library is the way to go, rather than sticking all taxpayers with the cost of something some of them may never use. 

A woman retorted that she didn't have any kids, but had always been willing to subsidize school costs for others' children because an educated populace benefits everyone.  She said libraries do the same thing.  I thought of internet porn sites that kids log onto in libraries, and hoped that the fiscal conservatives weren't awake enough to sense it.  They didn't, but they went on to win anyway.  The vote was 34 to 27 against appropriating tax money to join the library.

The next warrant was for a $4,000 appropriation to throw a 200th birthday celebration for the town in 2008.  Some of the same arguments were made against it, that we didn't need it, it was a frill, etc.  But it passed, just barely.  Go figure. 

So now my husband, bless his heart, has mounted a campaign to raise the $4,000 privately to join our town up to the library for an experimental first year.  If it proves that a good percentage of our residents use the library (and it will be an easy matter to track this on the library's book- and video-check-out computer), that will be the ammunition we need to prove a demonstrable need for this service at a future town meeting.  So far, in just three days, we've raised pledges of $1300.  So it looks doable.  Wish us luck.         

Flying wallets

The other night I was at our town Budget Committee's first meeting of 2006.  I'd been tapped to join the committee last Spring by its chairman, who must have been desperate in the wake of three longtime members' resignations.  Never good at number-crunching anyway, I'm finding municipal budgeting totally abstruse so far.  So I'm sitting there the other night pretending to peruse the latest spreadsheet while racking my brain for Roberts Rules phrases like "I second the motion," in hopes of making at least some small contribution to the proceedings.  I also wanted to move things along, because with Town Meeting coming up in March, and us having to formulate (and eventually defend) a small book's worth of budget-requests for the taxpayers to vote on, our now weekly meetings are running about three and a half hours each, which is tough to take on weeknights.

While staring at the spreadsheet, I felt eyes boring into me, and looked around to see brown eyeballs gazing out of the walls.  All around us hung new-agey paintings from the local arts group's Christmas sale.  These were the ones that didn't sell, and you could see why.  They were all variations on the same theme, by the same artist.  On narrow floor-to-ceiling panels were outlines of tree trunks with women's faces where you'd expect knots and limbs.  They had bulging eyes and long, witchey hair that merged into feathers of owls, suggesting, I guess, that we're all one, rooted in the earth.  This would have been okay, but the panels were all monochromatic - strokes of a boring brown on ivory; and they were repetitive.  Kind of like the budgeting process.

Around the main table under a harsh overhead light, sat eight or nine of us committee members, plus the three selectmen who govern our town.  A few feet from our table was a smaller table we'd set up for visiting Public, where the Road Commissioner now sat, and A., one of the committee members who had just resigned before I came on.  A., a self-employed woodworker, was there ostensibly to ride herd on the Road Commissioner, whose budget request each year is one of the town's biggest expenses.      

After about an hour and a half of wrangling about money to salt the roads, pay snowplowers overtime, ditching dirt roads, plugging potholes, etc. with A. objecting that the committee "spends money like water" and "rubberstamps anything that crosses your desk," we took up a new topic.  One of the selectmen reported that a neighboring town would give our residents membership to its beautiful new library for $4,000 per year.  Since that would be a little over $2 apiece for our 1500 residents, compared to the $45 annual fee now charged to individuals, this seemed like a sweet deal.  The selectman suggested that we recommend to appropriate it from property tax at the upcoming town meeting.  We took a vote, and passed it.

Just as the chairman announced this, A. at the Public table slung something at us.  It glanced off a selectman's head and landed in the middle of our table, A.'s billfold, splashing credit cards into our laps.  "Just take my wallet!" A. seethed.  "You might as well just take our money now."

The Chair called for order, said to calm down.  A. came over and picked up his credit cards, apologizing to the selectman he'd clocked.  "But no one even asked for library privileges!  This is a completely unnecessary expense."

At our meeting the following week, A. told us at the start of the meeting not to worry, that he'd left his wallet at home, as D., one of the town's most active volunteers, handed around an official-looking document with footnotes from the state administrative statutes and municipal association.  It was signed by D.'s husband, our town's official moderator for Town Meeting.  He warned that allowing unlimited public input to committee meetings, as we had last meeting, could be in violation of state statutes against "false public hearings."  The statute says that if we're voting on something, and the public is allowed to give input and thus possibly influence the vote, we could be seen as performing the function of a public hearing, and that we should bill it as such and give the entire town adequate notice and access.

We hashed this over for about an hour, never saying that the whole issue was about A. and the wallet-slinging.  We decided that it's not in the proper spirit of our town to discourage the public from committee meetings.  But we voted to limit public comment to periods well before and after we vote on issues, so the public can't be seen as a lobbying influence.

A few days later I ran into D. and her husband at the store.  D. and I stood in the wine aisle talking about the wallet-slinging, and D. fumed that A. and his conservative buddies sit in the little gazebo on slats that they built to stand in for the town's recently closed coffee-shop.  "Every morning they sit up there in that Think Tank and carp about how this town is going to the dogs; they just work themselves into a frenzy!" she said. I said it could be that or the glue A. uses in his one-room, unvented woodworking studio (I'd noticed a new facial tic in A. the last few months).

Whatever it is, people get more upset about taxes as we approach March's Town Meeting.  And I'm thinking that until I'm up to speed enough to know what issues and personalities I'm dealing with, maybe I should wear a football helmet to budgeting meetings.