Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [90]
As consumers turn away from failing water systems, as good water becomes scarce, and as private companies dig ever more boreholes, squabbling over water will intensify. Fryeburg doesn’t look anything like Cochabamba, Bolivia, where massive street demonstrations erupted in 2000 after a Bechtel subsidiary privatized the water system; or Kerala, India, where villages continue to fight with Coca-Cola over groundwater allocation; or even Groveland, Florida, which is both facing water shortages and entertaining offers from a California-based company to pump and bottle 182 million gallons of groundwater a year—a third of what the town currently consumes. But in asking who owns water and attempting to keep private interests from taking and selling it for outsize profits, Fryeburg is a microcosm of the worldwide frenzy to control this precious resource.
On a late-summer morning, a couple of months after the Supreme Judicial Court remanded the tanker decision to Fryeburg’s planning board, I slid a kayak down a steep, wooded bank and into the Saco River. On this overcast day, only a few canoeists were paddling through the several miles of curves that slice through floodplain forest to Walker’s Bridge, and it was quiet for long stretches of time. The water was just as I remembered it from childhood camping trips: gin clear. Century-old silver maples—some with rope swings—canted over undercut banks. On the outside curves, where the current had formed wide sandy beaches, it was easy to pull out and swim. Drifting along, I was transfixed by the sinuous striations on the river bottom—golden here, purplish black there. I knew by then why the water was so clear, and I knew why Poland Spring coveted it. I knew that when the river overflowed in the spring, it enriched the soil and nurtured rare plants, it fed the farms, and it sustained the soul of Fryeburg.
Thousands of years ago, the Wabanaki Indians paddled this same stretch. Would Lucy, when she grows up, bring her children to swim in the Saco, to delight in its clear water and sandy bottom? There is no guarantee. It’s easy to ask what one or two boreholes in the Wards Brook aquifer can do. But it isn’t just Poland Spring pumping: the town has its well, there’s a well behind the Dearborn Precision Tubular Products plant (so far, not in use), and the WE Corporation has one too. Every gallon of water that thunders into a tanker truck represents a measure that doesn’t seep through the aquifer and into wetlands, another gallon that isn’t diluting the pollutants that run into the Saco from roads, farms, septic tanks, and industry.
If Poland Spring succeeds in building a bottling plant in Fryeburg, the company will need another source of water to feed it, in addition to the Wards Brook gallons: the town is full of landowners with springs. Who knows what will happen next? Or what will happen upstream? A New Hampshire water company recently announced plans to drill new wells in the Saco River floodplain, just over the state line from Fryeburg, to water a housing development. The deal screeched to a halt after local officials, who’d been warily eyeing Fryeburg’s trials, discovered the company planned to pump five times more than the development required.
Several months after my paddle, I talk to Scott Gamwell, who helped organize the fight against the tanker station in East Fryeburg and is now scrambling to raise money for his group’s ongoing legal fees. If Poland Spring stays in town, he says, it might be all right for it to take just 5 percent of the “excess” water in the Wards Brook aquifer, instead of the current 75.
“Do you think that amount of water would make it worthwhile for the company?” I ask.
“Not today,” he says, “but in 2030, it might.”
AFTERWORD
IN NOVEMBER 2008, a few months after the hardcover of Bottlemania went on sale, a new James Bond film opened across America. Released under the baffling title Quantum of Solace, the movie features a very