Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [35]
“Emily Fletcher should go last,” Wilfong says. Fletcher is sixty years old, the town librarian. “She has credibility, and people will listen to her.” Heads nod.
The group agrees to steer clear of ad hominem attacks and state simply that the proposed ordinance is flawed: the document is eighteen pages long, it’s been posted on the town Web site for only four days, it refers to a section that doesn’t actually appear in any of its pages. In short, no one understands it. What’s more, the town’s most recent aquifer study hasn’t been completed.
“Here is proof they don’t have all the information,” Dearborn says, sounding frail. He’s sitting apart from the group in an upholstered chair, holding aloft the study he commissioned from Miles Waite. Dearborn has had the results for more than a month but he hasn’t revealed them; he’s milking this moment for all it’s worth. “The study proves that pumping hurts the pond,” he says. “I’m going to hold it up at the meeting to show they don’t have all the information.” But what does the study say, exactly? Dearborn shakes his head and says, with finality, “Not until after the vote.” The group looks perplexed.
“What if the ordinance passes?” someone asks.
“Then I’ll sue them for voting without this knowledge. I want to show, first, that they’re corrupt, and then show who is pushing this decision without complete information.”
After the meeting, Dearborn wants to show me his pump. As we walk downstairs, I ask if he had a loose nut on a valve stem, as John Hastings had said.
“I fixed that, but it’s still sucking air.” Dearborn had built the vacuum pump in his basement to remove radon from his well water; now he uses it to take out air. He throws a switch, the plastic cylinder fills with bubbly water, swirls clockwise, then settles when Dearborn turns off the pump. Ordinarily, the tank vents itself. Now, Dearborn needs to sit and watch the contraption until it cavitates; then he shuts the pump off until the well recuperates, then pumps again, repeating until his water tank has sufficient pressure. “Normally you don’t see any air in the cylinder,” he says. “Ten years ago, I had no problem with my water.” He gives me the same expectant look he’d given Miles Waite, out at the well in the woods.
“I’ve studied engineering all my life,” Dearborn says. “I had one year of college and was employing twenty-five people by the time I was twenty-four.” To start his own machining business, which he called the Howard Manufacturing Company, in Berea, Ohio, he’d borrowed fourteen hundred dollars. He eventually renamed this company Dearborn, Inc., and in the early 1960s, founded Dearborn Precision Tubular Products in Fryeburg, where he’d visited on vacations. The company is now the largest employer in town.
We’re back upstairs now, where every electrical outlet and light switch is labeled with an alphanumeric, and Dearborn shows me his entry in a who’s who of engineers, finishing up with “So I do know something of what I’m talking about, Mr. Bergoffen!” In Dearborn’s personal cosmology it is essential to make the connection between air in his pump and Poland Spring’s activities in the Wards Brook aquifer. And to do that he needs to remind the world of his credentials. Though he’d built his own well and his own pump, to say nothing of components for tanks, space vehicles, medical equipment, deepwater drilling rigs, and nuclear submarines and reactors, there are still those who think Dearborn is not only cantankerous but a kook, and his well dry due to mechanical error—his. The very idea outrages Dearborn,