Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [78]
But still, I wonder, why? Why spend five years and one hundred thousand dollars fighting Nestlé? Dearborn could be enjoying a glorious retirement, tinkering in his shop and puttering in his boat, his airplane, and his snowmobile. “I’m stubborn,” he says. “I started it and I want to finish it.” But Nestlé, I worry, might finish Dearborn. He isn’t in great health, and it doesn’t seem that too many young folks are ready to take his place. Who would write and mail the newsletters, pay the lawyers, and hire the independent scientists? His son, who lives in Ohio, doesn’t want his house, and there are no grandkids to swim in his pond, even if it were weed-free.
As I drive out of town, I remember what Dearborn had told me about his arrival in Fryeburg, fifty years ago. “I couldn’t get a septic system because the code-enforcement officer wouldn’t come out,” he’d said. “I couldn’t buy hardware in town, I had to contract out for electrical work from Portland.” Why? “Because I’m an outsider, a flatlander,” he shouted. “I had to drill my own well. It cost me ten thousand dollars to get water.”
I think about that well, and I realize it wasn’t that long ago that Hugh Hastings, the consummate Fryeburg insider, had stood on Dearborn’s deck and pointed out the land he owned, and Dearborn had granted him access to property on which he would drill another well. Then Hastings had turned around and sold that water to Pure Mountain Springs, which sold it in turn to Nestlé. What had seemed such a simple gesture, providing a path through the woods, turned out to be the beginning of the end.
Chapter 9
SOMETHING TO DRINK?
MORE THAN A year after my first visit to Lovewell Pond, a part of Fryeburg is still struggling against Nestlé. And the company, like a rebuffed lover in denial of reality—or like Jake Gittes, the detective in Chinatown—won’t let go. Poland Spring opens a small office in downtown Fryeburg and in early December runs ads inviting locals to stop in for coffee and “straight talk” with Mark Dubois, who has inherited the infamous Fryeburg situation from Tom Brennan. (Brennan has been promoted to senior natural resources manager, and his purview now extends from the Northeast through the mid-Atlantic down to the Southern states.) Finding business slow, Dubois offers free cases of water to the first fifty visitors who can answer a trivia question correctly (who said, “Ask not what your country can do for you”?).
Infuriated, Howard Dearborn organizes a Boston Tea Party, offering ten dollars to the first fifty who show up at his place to dump their Poland Spring bottles into Lovewell Pond. The Saturday-afternoon event draws about forty-five people including two crashers from Nestlé who try to distribute information countering Dearborn’s claims. A few townsfolk sternly tell them, “You’re not welcome here,” but they don’t quit the property until Dearborn gets in their face, shaking one of them by the shoulders. “This is my pour,” he says in a steely tone. “Hold your own pour on your own land.”
The following Monday, Nestlé appeals the planning board’s decision on the tanker station. Fryeburg’s board of appeals rejects the challenge, and the case moves, once again, to the courts. “It’s not over,” Mark Dubois says. Regarding the end of the pipeline from the Denmark spring, he adds, “There are four points to a compass.” Translation: Nestlé will find a way to get that water into trucks, perhaps from another property at the pipe’s end.
The New Year brings startling news: Nestlé, after months of secret negotiations, has purchased Pure Mountain Springs—its assets and its land. While Tom Brennan hopes eliminating the middleman will “get a rational dialog going” in Fryeburg, some fear the deal will only consolidate Nestlé’s control of the Wards Brook aquifer, a key step on its way to building a local bottling plant. “They’re working every angle,” Jim Wilfong says. “In a few years they’ll control all the springs: that’s the end game.”
For now, the only constants in this town are the gleaming tanker trucks