Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [30]
“Howard Dearborn says his well is dry,” I say.
“Maybe he pulled his pump up,” Hastings says.
The phone rings, and the president of the water company mollifies a customer without water. “He put in his pipe wrong,” he says to me. “It’s always freezing.” Then he gets back to the pond. “I think this is sustainable, and I think Lovewell is fine. I’m an environmentalist, but I’m a realist. I believe in cutting timber. No one complains about trucks hauling wood or mills making money.” Lumber trucks don’t haul twenty-four hours a day, of course, and not year-round. “The water is just like air here,” Hastings continues. “When you pump and it’s still bubbling up on top, there’s still plenty. Yes, we’re taking it away, but the brook hasn’t changed how it looks.”
After leaving Hastings, I drive a short distance down Portland Street, park opposite the pumping station, and watch empty tanker trucks pull in and, twenty minutes later, pull out—loaded for plants in either Poland or Hollis. I try to make sense of what’s going on here. I realize the town is small, and its political and family dynamics unusually tense. But it isn’t normal for a private water company to sell unlimited quantities of water to a shareholder (John Hastings, that is) who then flips it to the largest food company in the world. It’s unusual, to say the least, that the lawyer hired to negotiate the deal with Pure Mountain Springs is Peter Hastings, Hugh’s brother, and that Pure Mountain Springs operates without a permit from the town. Sure, some of the income from that company goes toward maintenance, but it seems to me a hell of a conflict of interest. Even more galling is that townspeople have absolutely nothing to say about it. So many of the deals were made without public scrutiny.
I contemplate Fryeburg’s inch-by-inch struggle to curb Poland Spring: two different moratoriums (one on new water-pumping operations and another, recently proposed, on new water-trucking operations), the approval and then denial of the tanker station permit, the prospect of a new water ordinance that will keep any new pumpers from drilling into the Wards Brook aquifer. The proposed rule sounds protective to me, but Dearborn swears it would set in stone the pumping of current operators—Pure Mountain Springs, the Fryeburg Water Company, and the WE Corporation (Jeff Walker and Rick Eastman’s setup on Porter Road), which are already, he says, taking way too much.
Jim Wilfong, a former assistant administrator for international trade at the Small Business Administration under the Clinton administration, offered me some perspective when I phoned him later on. “This is what a water war looks like,” he said. The endless meetings, the legal challenges, the tiny changes in rules. He linked Fryeburg’s troubles to privatization issues on a global scale. “The question is, are we going to be involved in this discussion or do we leave it up to a multinational corporation? We won’t understand Nestlé’s full intent until it’s too late: do they want our water just for bottles? Here in the U.S., not just in Fryeburg, we’re seeing how difficult it is for citizens to look after their rights, to say, ‘This is how we want our community to look.’ Once we sign up with Nestlé, there’s no way out.”
I wait for a water truck to finish its turn onto Portland Street, then head south to visit the cofounder of Pure Mountain Springs. We meet in Eric Carlson’s Woodard & Curran office, in Portland, because the hydrogeologist isn’t particularly welcome in Fryeburg. He says the hostility there has taken him completely by surprise.