Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [31]
“It’s the age-old question,” Carlson says. “Whose water is it? Well, it’s your right to take it from your property in Maine. I’ve been getting all this flack. People are more emotional about water than trees or gravel or lobster in the ocean. And it’s free! But it’s not any different from timber or oil. People don’t understand this pumping won’t affect the ecosystem. Why don’t they complain about the profits of a gravel pit? The owner just digs a hole in the ground and sells it for ten dollars a yard.”
After drilling well number two, Carlson and Hastings bought five acres of land along Porter Road, uphill from wells one and two. The road starts off paved but quickly turns to dirt as it runs between Wards Brook Pond and a tree nursery on the right, and a collection of abandoned industrial buildings on the left. It continues for miles, up past a gravel pit, a former town dump, two kettle-hole ponds, and forty acres owned by the Nature Conservancy, and behind a tiny regional airport. “I bought the land to protect the basin,” Carlson explains—the town had planned to build a heavy-equipment garage on the plot, and he didn’t want his well contaminated with runoff.
Carlson and Hastings then bought another nine acres up Porter Road and drilled a third borehole. “I own it, but the town uses it for free,” he says. Why? “I didn’t want the water from Pure Mountain Springs and the Fryeburg Water Company to come from one spot. The water company puts fluoride and chlorine into its pipes—I didn’t want to risk cross-contamination.”
Soon, Pure Mountain would buy another twenty-six-acre parcel up Porter Road.
“For a well?” I ask, wincing at the thought of further complications.
“I am thinking about drilling another well,” Carlson says, “but I’d have to go through the permitting process.” He lets that thought hang, then moves to a whiteboard. He starts to draw a graph. Power is on the vertical axis and interest on the horizontal. He draws a point far to the right and low. “It is a sociopolitical nightmare to have someone with lots of interest and no power,” he says heatedly. “They can create a huge amount of problems. So it’s very important to engage those people—to help them understand.” It’s a funny spin, I think, on Margaret Mead’s pronouncement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” An empowered minority, I’m guessing, is the last thing in the world Carlson wants to see.
Before I leave Woodard & Curran, which counts Nestlé Waters among its clients, I ask Carlson if he’ll show me the springs of Fryeburg, over which so much bad blood has spilled. Hugh Hastings had turned down my request, and the spring property is fenced and monitored, so naturally I feel compelled to get in. Carlson says he can’t, but John Hastings will.
I wait in the driveway of a weathered farmhouse near Fryeburg center until a pickup rolls up. The driver lowers his tinted window a few inches and tells me to get in. I sit down next to a large man with calloused hands and no time for formalities. A pipe fitting rolls across the seat as we ride over to the Poland Spring tanker station, no seat belts, through a locked gate and downhill to a small pool of water.
When the truck stops near a wellhead building—the same stone-walled-and-green-roofed design I’d seen in Hollis—Hastings points at a kidney-shaped pool of water. “Well number one,” he says, also known as Evergreen Spring on the Poland Spring label. The pool has cemented stone walls, and Hastings makes sure I notice the sand bubbling up from its bottom—just as Rich Fortin had in Kingfield. There’s some aquatic growth down there too, and a bloom of rust on some sunken stones. According to papers filed by attorney Tom Sobol with the Connecticut Superior Court in June of 2003—in a class-action suit accusing Poland Spring of false advertising—this pool is not natural but a man-made formation, dug below the water table. “It’s a spring,” Hastings says sternly when I ask. It isn’t “deep in the woods of Maine,” like the Hollis