Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [3]
The epicenter of Maine’s water wars is Fryeburg, about an hour to the north of Hollis. “So what happened up there?” I ask Brennan, for the third time. We’re sitting at the conference table in the bottling plant, which was built atop a former potato farm. The alarm out in the woods had, we just learned, been an electronic glitch—a relief to everyone. Now Brennan glances at me, and despite his efforts to stay on message, to stay upbeat, I can sense the man’s fatigue. “Yeah,” he says, with a downward cast of his eyes. “The infamous Fryeburg situation.” He sighs. “It got complicated up there.”
Fryeburg sits along Maine’s western border with New Hampshire, a mere fifty-two miles northwest of Portland. The road in between passes ugly strip malls and tourist motels, busy marinas, and tiny towns with faded Main Street banners. Though Fryeburg, population three thousand, sees up to one hundred thousand canoeists and campers playing on its stretch of the Saco River in the summer, and twice that many visitors descend in October, for the eight-day Fryeburg Fair, the place has done little to attract the out-of-season day-tripper. Unlike neighboring towns to the east and west, Fryeburg has no bookshops, T-shirt stores, moose paraphernalia, or cappuccino joints. Instead, it has the Jockey Cap, a combo gas station and grill where older gentlemen sit on hard chairs reading the daily newspaper and the gossip flows all day. Near the town center is a small supermarket, a culinarily depressing place. When I tell a local I bought an egg-salad sandwich at its deli counter, he physically recoils. The main drag features a bank, a few utilitarian stores, a smattering of private offices, and the Fryeburg Water Company, whose unprepossessing appearance, on the bottom floor of a two-story frame house, belies the company’s position at the red-hot center of Fryeburg’s multimillion-dollar water woes.
Fryeburg is old, established in 1762, and a little inbred: the same dozen names show up on buildings, parks, cemeteries, hills, and rosters of elected or appointed officials. I meet men who own mountains, miles of lakefront, and vast swathes of forest handed down by land grants from the governor of Massachusetts. I hear about strangers showing up in town to buy property and the water that flows under it. Before long, Fryeburg seems like Chinatown, the movie, to me. Everywhere I turn there is intrigue, there is someone with a heated opinion, with “water on the brain,” as Jake Gittes, the character played by Jack Nicholson, puts it. I hear about hydrogeologists drilling test wells on the q.t., about dummy corporations, secret planning-board meetings, tape recorders at public meetings that stop at convenient times, notes that go missing, and appointed officials suspected of shilling for outside corporate interests. I meet the man who provided access to the spring that fills the tanker trucks of Nestlé.
And that, admits Howard Dearborn, was a big mistake.
When I first meet Dearborn, he is eighty-eight years old. His hair is snowy white, he wears oval, wire-rimmed glasses, and he dresses in timeless L.L. Bean fashion, his red-plaid shirt tucked into high-waisted chinos. A retired engineer, Dearborn lives alone in a sprawling split-level home amid a grove of white pines and beech on the shores of Lovewell Pond, not far from the center of Fryeburg. Though Dearborn has lived here for more than fifty years, locals still consider him an outsider: he’s “from away.” He sold the company he founded here, Dearborn Precision Tubular Products, fifteen years previously, and has filled his time since then running a private foundation, inventing mechanical tools,