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By Root 469 0

the excavator who offered the lowest price, an earnest young man in town who was also a builder. We were discussing the code problems when he let me know that he was a member of the town’s planning board. Why hadn’t he told me this before? This was a stroke of major good fortune. He even agreed that the width rule was unreasonable. I asked him if it would be useful for me to appeal directly to the town by making an appearance at a planning board meeting. He blew some air skeptically through his lips, not quite a whistle. He shook his head in indecision. He was not so sure it was a good idea. Probably not, he said. I was from out of town—Boston, no less. There was still a lot of heartburn over Rick Rhea. We talked the problem through further, and I perceived that he had his own dispute going with the board, the exact nature of which I could not grasp. He was telling me, obliquely, that his problem with the board might attach itself to my problem with the driveway. I would be wading into complicated town politics and personalities. I decided I should give it a try anyway.

The planning board met in the back of the town’s fire station. I had called ahead and asked to be put on the agenda. On the evening of their meeting, I waited for my turn, the only nonmember in attendance. Seated around the table were a woman and four men. The youngest was in his twenties, my excavator, who was trying to aid my cause by not making eye contact with me; the oldest was in his seventies, a small and wiry man with a T-shirt that read “Kiss a Moose.” The board’s chairman, a person I knew to be an attorney from a little research I had done ahead of the meeting, noted my presence and told the group that I had asked to speak to the board, which gave its assent.

I introduced myself, thanked them for the opportunity to address them and explained my situation. I had bought a piece of land in town, wanted to put up a cabin and hoped to do so without disturbing the natural setting, but had come up against the wide driveway regulation. I asked, respectfully, if it might be waived to allow a narrower drive, maybe twelve or fourteen feet, which was common in nearby towns. Somewhere in my discourse I acknowledged the board’s authority and the importance of its work and complimented the town on its beautiful setting among the hills and lakes. There was silence when I was done. I could feel them sizing me up. Maybe they thought if they looked hard enough they could see into my real self and real intent. The specter of Rick Rhea loomed in the room. I broke the silence and said, with some earnest enthusiasm, that I hoped to be a good neighbor. This was true. A debate ensued. Some expressed their concern about the entire way the land had been subdivided in the first place; another worried about a precedent for other lots up on the hill; still another pointed out that a wide driveway would be necessary for a fire truck to turn around. I felt the discussion trending against my request, and I was powerless to stop it. It would be impolitic to interrupt their deliberation once it had begun. I had had my chance to speak. I was going to be stuck with twenty-four feet. The oldest member of the board, the one wearing the “Kiss a Moose” T-shirt, finally spoke. He had been silent until then. He unscrewed himself from the posture he had been in, legs crossed in one direction and torso turned pointing in the other. They all shifted to hear him. Even before he had begun, I could see that he had taken the taut coil of his body and was transferring its energy to what he was about to say.

“Damn it,” he said. “The man wants to build a camp on property he bought. He paid money for it.” It was clear that he was unleashing outrage over the state of the nation as he had come to judge it from his perch as a lifelong and tenth-generation resident of Stoneham; to him, my problem with the regulation was only the latest example of the sorry state of the country. “If it’s okay with him that a fire truck can’t get up there to turn around, and it burns down, well, that’s his problem. I