Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [32]
We take a quick peek at well number two, just downhill, then drive back up to the loading station. Within seconds, a tanker driver pulls in, parks his truck on the cement pad, and pulls a hose from a long steel box. He snaps on purple latex gloves, opens a box at the back of the tanker, squirts alcohol on a coupling, and plugs the hose into his truck. With the flick of a switch, Wards Brook water races in, sounding like heavy rain on a metal roof. After a twenty-minute downpour, the driver unhitches the hose and drives off in a pneumatic whoosh. Within seconds, another tanker starts to fill.
“They just keep coming,” I say to Hastings, but he’s uninterested in discussing the sustainability of the aquifer, or much of anything. “I’m not a talker,” he says. When I ask why Howard Dearborn’s well might have gone dry, Hastings says it was a loose nut on a valve stem, now fixed.
I think Hastings is done with me, but he wants to show me well number three, up Porter Road and down a rutted drive. I see the stone house in the woods, and then suddenly I’m being tossed from side to side on the slippery seat. We’re driving through the forest in a couple of feet of wet snow. “There’s a spring,” Hastings says, pointing to a monitoring pipe sticking three feet out of the ground. Water squirts up in a thin plume. “There’s another.” He’s pretty low-key about these fountains in the forest. I wonder how far and why we are driving into the woods. When the truck gets stuck, he says, “I guess you can get out. There’s the spring for well number three.” Later, I’ll wonder if Hastings had misspoken. According to Bill Black, Maine’s deputy public advocate, this water isn’t technically springwater. If it were, he says, Pure Mountain Springs would be selling that water to Nestlé, instead of leasing the well to the town.
“Can I taste it?” I ask.
“Sure,” Hastings says. He stays near the truck while I walk ahead. Stepping onto the slimy circle of concrete that rings the central pipe, I lean in and sip. Yum. I’m getting used to this stuff.
Maybe the issue in Fryeburg isn’t the aquatic environment; maybe Howard Dearborn is wrong about the cause of Lovewell Pond’s decline. That still leaves the truck traffic and truck pollution to argue with, and it still leaves the issue of economic fairness. How much is Nestlé giving back to Maine citizens who’ve done so much to protect the state’s waters—by regulating industry, investing in public sewer systems, cleaning up oil and gasoline spills, buying land for conservation, and requiring setbacks for development along waterways, among other initiatives? And how can the company be stopped from taking even more? Jim Wilfong is a realist: he knows he can’t run Poland Spring out of town, so he’s come up with another scheme. He and his group H2O for ME are asking the state to levy a per gallon fee on “nontraditional” users of water. The bottled-water tax would fund a Fresh Water Resource Board to monitor and protect water supplies from overwithdrawal.
I meet Wilfong, fifty-nine, at the Jockey Cap, where a steady stream of customers comes in for coffee, a copy of the Conway Daily Sun, and gasoline. Wilfong knows, and greets, everyone. He teaches business management at the University of Southern Maine, and he lives—and farms Christmas trees—in Stow, just north of Fryeburg.
We grab our own coffees and newspapers; then Wilfong and I drive north out of town along the Saco River, past swaths of golden farm fields. Fryeburg may lack the polish of nearby communities, but it is rich in natural beauty: streaked with water and ringed by glacier-carved mountains and hills. Not half a mile from the town’s single traffic light, the farmhouses look honest and plain. Wilfong points out the old course of the Saco, which—way back before state and federal laws prohibited the wholesale manipulation of vast landscapes—farmers ditched, diked, and rerouted to create some of the county’s richest farmland (and to shorten the trip downstream