Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [33]
We look west, over the floodplain, toward New Hampshire’s Crawford Notch, the source of the Saco. The river drains eight hundred thousand acres of White Mountain National Forest before crossing into the state of Maine, and it floods—sometimes rising fifteen feet—every spring. The runoff forms New England’s largest intact floodplain ecosystem, and it’s responsible, in part, for the region’s great diversity of flora and fauna, including its agricultural bounty. Rainwater percolates slowly through the region’s fine glacial soils and returns to streams and springs purified: the Saco receives the state’s highest ranking for water quality. More than one hundred thousand people drink groundwater from its floodplain; from its headwaters in the mountains to its outlet in the Atlantic Ocean, the river slakes the thirst of a quarter million people.
To the Sokokis Indians, Fryeburg’s first settlers, the Saco was “the mythic pathway to the White Mountains, home of the sacred spirits.” Today, this pathway is under enormous pressure from residential and commercial development along its length. The more water pumped from aquifers and streams that feed the Saco, the less clean water ends up in the river, and the more impurities are concentrated. The same scenario plays out across the country: nearly 40 percent of the nation’s rivers and streams are too polluted for fishing and swimming, to say nothing of drinking.
“I’m a person who sees patterns,” Wilfong says as he drives. “I looked at this water issue and I saw big trends. It takes one thousand tons of water to grow one ton of grain. If you control water, you control food. These issues are environmental, they’re economic, and they’re legal.” They are local too: as the West continues to dry out, agricultural production could shift to the East, where crops don’t require irrigation. Fryeburg has plenty of open farmland.
Wilfong points southeast, over the tree line. “See that rise of land? On the other side of it is Denmark. It’s full of ponds. If Poland Spring builds a plant in town to bottle water from Fryeburg and Denmark, we’re going to have seven hundred and fifty thousand extra vehicle trips—including water trucks and employees and service vehicles—a year in town.”
We head down Cornshop Road, past the buildings where Burnham & Morrill once canned Fryeburg’s corn, then turn south, past the Fryeburg Fairgrounds, and into town. “But where would a bottling plant go?” I ask. I had heard that Nestlé had approached two landowners in town, offering them one million dollars apiece just to negotiate. The talks went nowhere, which angered some residents eager for jobs.
“Maybe the old Bailey Manufacturing plant,” Wilfong says.
“Where’s that?” I ask, just as we turn onto Porter Road.
“Here,” Wilfong says, pointing to an abandoned factory on our left. “Bailey made lumber here, which they trucked to Pennsylvania to be made into furniture. Then the company went bankrupt, and that’s when Nestlé came in.” I’m having trouble imaging this industrial area—with its derelict buildings and mothballed trucks—transformed into a showplace like the Hollis plant. It’s easier to picture kids guzzling beer out here than deer nuzzling around mossy springs. But Fryeburg, for all its out-of-season torpor, once bustled with economic activity: sawmills and timber operations, a shoe manufacturing plant, a couple of machine shops, corn shops, and dozens of thriving dairy farms. Now, it has the water-extraction business, which contributes nothing to the town’s long-term economic welfare (though it does enrich the privately owned water company).
Naturally, Poland Spring isn’t wild about the idea of a bottled-water tax. “Wilfong has this idea that taxing our business because it’s growing is going to be the salvation of the state’s economics,” Tom Brennan had said when we met at the Hollis plant. In 2005, Wilfong had proposed taxing Poland Spring twenty cents for each gallon of water withdrawn from the state, to be put into a public trust for economic development. The proposal didn’t succeed, but now