Don't Take Any Chances If You Can't Get Through

How different the ends of almost any trip. You set out in good order and high spirits, your pocket full of cash or credit, the fuel tank full, tires aired-up, the cabin vacuumed and polished, children neat and quiet in the back and your bride beside you thinking, "Don't that man look good behind the wheel in this odd slantwise light of a new-dawned day!"

A weekend later, or a week, you slump back to that same spot a beaten, broken, used-up, dirty, tired, spiteful creature, disgusted with your crap-ass beater of a car, wishing the brats in the back seat had never been born, and unable to remember or reconstruct a taste of desire for the motorized jaw grimly riding shotgun, your every wrong-turn action or idea catalogued and remarked and reviewed until even you doubt your own abilities and intentions. And all your money is gone.

So it is with winter in this northern climate. You might start out as that mountain boy running moonshine was so memorably described by the great Robert Mitchum in his unfortunately little-known song, "Thunder Road" - "Your tank is filled with hundred proof; you're all tuned-up and gassed."

And you very likely will cruise through December and possibly quite far into January until, your wood diminished, oil at an unreachable three-thirty a gallon (or whatever price the speculators think you should pay this week), heartsick and half-frozen, you realize you have merely made it to the nadir, the bottom of the curve, the coldest week of the year. Whether you think that Pennsylvania woodchuck is your friend or not, you face still six or eight weeks of winter.

But you're used to hardship. You endure. Maybe you get excited about Valentine's Day or President's Day, perhaps thereby enriching a jeweler or a car dealer. But still the nights go to zero and still May, even April, can barely be imagined. It is here, in the second half of February, short but deadly, that many give up. If you cannot get to Florida you might as well lie down and die. Or at least stop shoveling the driveway and paying your bills. It is hopeless; it will never get better.

Over thirty years ago I stumbled upon an escape route from that time of crisis. It is a path available to any Maine man or woman who will invoke the requisite spirits, summon the will, take the leap. Fix your future on a Saturday in March. Determine spring not meteorologically or astronomically or biotically, but politically: it will be spring when we have finished town meeting.

Now you persons unfortunate enough to live in the towns that have ignorantly overthrown the town meeting in favor of one or more poorly-attended "informational meetings" followed by a preposterously long, unamendable "referendum ballot" are denied this salvation. Sad. Too bad. But you did it to yourselves. In your sorrow and increasing desperation you may at least serve as a warning to your neighbors of the folly of relinquishing so precious a right and duty.

Now, I'm certain that anticipation of town meeting revives, encourages, sustains those only incidentally or peripherally involved. Anyone can wonder, guess, discuss, argue: who is running for road commissioner? Why? What do the selectmen propose? To what effect? Will we be revalued this year? Will we build or buy or repair a building, a fire truck? Does anyone hint at irregularities in the way we have allowed ourselves to be governed? Are those suggestions credible, likely, provable, proven? When will we get the town reports? When, indeed. I can tell you something about that.

In March of 1977, just two years a resident, I was elected first selectman. My second and third selectmen were themselves newer to Alna than I. We had no experience in municipal administration. The town had just finished its first professional revaluation; we would soon vote to transport secondary level students to school (previously they found their own way to enlightenment); the Superintendent of Schools had not yet made the gross budget miscalculation that would raise our taxes and horribly complicate public acceptance of the poorly understood revaluation. Before the year was well advanced two members of the school committee (on opposite sides of the bus question) would not speak to each other.

The town did not have a telephone in the town office. It did not own a typewriter or a calculator. We did have an ancient, cast iron hand-cranked adding machine. I discovered I would be required to keep the town's financial books. So don't tell me an average person with no experience can't do these jobs. We were ignorant and untrained and we had no suggestion of the maelstrom of compounding crises that would define our administration. But we found our way through to another March, another election, and some of us again ran for office. I eventually served twelve one-year terms.

For a few years after the voters threw me out I just let my life expand into the space opened up by the elimination of public duties. I could now cut wood unmolested on a Sunday morning. The telephone did not ring at six a.m. or midnight to bring me a plea or complaint. Gradually, though, I found that what I had learned as I fought my way through that first year and acquired the experience and ability that subsequent terms provided fitted me for a less intense but perhaps more valuable service.

For a couple years I was Emergency Management Director. I distinguished myself in this position by telling some loathsome fat bureaucrat from FEMA that his fulsome remarks about the governor's great contributions to public safety in the event of an atomic incident and his failure to commend the unpaid local firefighters for their far greater effort and sacrifice was offensive.

I did this in the meeting that gentleman had convened, he said, to critique an emergency exercise, but which apparently he intended principally to show off his fine suit, smooth white flesh and smarmy demeanor under the bright lights of television exposure. As I called to his attention the oversights and errors of his presentation his face became sort of liver colored.

Then some rolls of jelly-like meat bulged out over his collar and he began grinding his teeth. His eyes squinted almost shut. At length, just as I finished telling him I thought the governor was useless, the state emergency command bunker a waste of money, and the unshaven firemen standing at my side an unremarked hero, the man's head exploded , raining down bits of foul-smelling self-regard on the vacuous blonde lady from Portland who did the voice-over for our twenty-second exposure on that night's news.

And that was fun, but incidental. Mostly I am of use to my community as one who remembers not only what I and we did twenty or thirty years ago, but who remembers those who were before me. As I am now an elder statesman, so too were Hamilton Grant and Frank Carleton and Clifton Walker. Go back in the town reports and see the names: Maynard Albee, Ken Chaney, Calvin Cheney, Paul Miete, Tom Colpitt. I knew them all; they each gave me advice; some told me I was wrongheaded, and some of them may have been right about that some times.

And now we are all computered-up. I argued against this, but the tide was unstoppable. In 1990 we were desperate to "move into the Twenty-first Century." And now that century is well started and how has it been going for you? And it turns out that you can't flip screens on a computer like you can turn pages in the old ledger and distribution books, and there is a growing appreciation these days for the very adequate government we provided for ourselves years and generations and centuries ago using only paper and ink and our will and skill.

I am moderator. I could not be a facilitator or group leader or team leader. But in the all-powerful yet strangely powerless role of town meeting moderator, at least in this town, I have found the purpose for which my years as selectman, my youth as a paperboy, my inability to let incongruities pass unremarked, my affection for Tom Jefferson and Lenny Bruce precisely have fitted me. Elected Friday, I am retired at the close of business Saturday afternoon. My job is to guide, to a degree to instruct, sometimes to inspire, often to avert ugliness, always to drive away boredom and confusion. When I no longer do these essentials well I shall know it, the voters will feel it, they will not elect me or I shall be unavailable for the office.

One other role I have assumed by default. I am neither elected nor appointed. The job is not listed in the town report. It is uncompensated. It has no title. I am a sort of editor, author, graphic designer for the one document the town produces each year that the people want. Everyone anticipates the arrival of the

"Annual Report Of The Municipal Officers Of The Town Of Alna, Maine For The Year 2007-2008."

In 1977 I dared a cover with original artwork and photographs inside. I pioneered the full-color cover in 1988. This year we will have color inside . We use prose and poetry and pictures to keep the cold hard boring reality of the auditor's report from banging too solidly against the devastating truth of the list of unpaid taxes. I think we may soon be ready for our first (tastefully done) nude centerfold.

Because we retain our town meeting, because our fiscal year ends on January thirty-first and we meet in March, the book placed in the hands of our voters a week before the meeting represents the condition of the town as it stands, not as it was a year or more ago, or as the selectmen anticipate it might be in some photocopied document handed out at the eleventh hour. No system is an improvement upon the New England town meeting. No document is more necessary to its success (except of course the warrant that calls it) than the book that voters hold as they do what they are charged to do in the company of their neighbors, with the assistance of their selectmen, under the direction of a moderator they have chosen.

It is a hideous, dark, cold, always uphill journey from January to late March. We need to pull ourselves forward with poor traction and few reserves. It is a great help if we have something to grasp, some solid thing that is fixed, that will not let go, that we can build upon and haul ourselves out of hopelessness.

The last pictures and captions are lying on Laurie's computer at the Lincoln County Publishing Company. No later than seven days before the twenty-eighth of March the selectmen will post the meeting warrant. That weekend every adult in town will read the book that they helped write, however little they may have had to do with its layout or production.

The snow will be gone or it won't on March twenty-ninth. There may be crocus blossoms. But when my term expires as my gavel falls, it will be spring in Alna. We shall be born again, a town for another year.