I Had A Job In The Great North Woods

It is a terrible thing I have done. That I meant well in doing it does not diminish its ghastly effect nor does it absolve me of the guilt I necessarily and properly and deservedly feel. Nor can I be certain that the consequences of my action will be only those unhappy effects I have already observed or know will soon or inevitably follow. When one steps into a current, disrupts a field, enters into the affairs of other men and women, the eventual recombination of force and flow is beyond prediction.

The first selectman called Friday evening. "Give me your choice for treasurer. The office will be vacant on the twenty-third." "That's easy," I said: "David McLeod." "You simple bastard! McLeod's dead!" "True, yes, but he was the perfect treasurer, capable, affable and trouble-free, and you did not specify that I must pick only from among the quick."

When I was elected first selectman in March of 1977 David E. McLeod had been Alna's treasurer since seventy-five. I lasted twelve years in office and was dismissed; David served nineteen and retired. I do not remember his ever having made an error in his handling of thousands of transactions. I made mistakes often, sometimes repeating the same one at intervals. McLeod's signature was the most precise, regular, clear example of restrained artistry I have ever seen. It was a Nineteenth Century line in an increasingly crude and messy Twentieth Century universe. He wrote it with a fountain pen.

In 1981 I dedicated our annual report to David. I wrote: "Dave's books remain the standard by which our own must be judged at the close of each year." The treasurer of course writes the checks that keep the town's creditors satisfied. He does this by direction from the selectmen over the course of the year through the agency of the treasurer's warrant , a document specifying how much he must pay and to whom. But he also receives copies of the receipts and deposits of the tax collector and the town clerk, and errors or discrepancies in their books will be revealed by the better light reflected from his. In this way we keep ourselves from pocketing petty cash or charging our own taxes to some yachtsman from Connecticut.

I also said: "Frequently towns must make do with elected officials whose performance is merely adequate. Occasionally one or more jobs will be filled for a year or two by a truly outstanding person whose interest and ability bring new life to town government." It is so, of course, in all professions. Most teachers are ordinary and many of them are dull. You will remember all your life the one or two whose interest or ability or humanity inspired or advanced your life beyond the small usefulness of the semesters' work you may retain.

The treasurer's job is not a complicated one. Most of it consists of writing checks, keeping reserve accounts in interest-bearing instruments and reconciling simple accounts. The selectmen keep the general ledger and distribution book, they assess taxes, figure the tax commitment, and try to raise enough money to do the business of the people in the interstices left after the great bloat of the school budget consumes two-thirds or more of every tax dollar. It can be annoying and tedious and exasperating to be a selectman, but neither is that office difficult.

If you can read and write to what used to be considered an eighth grade level but now, I suspect, is more a high school graduate's hoped-for capability, if you can balance a family checkbook, you could be a selectman, a treasurer, a clerk or a tax collector. I do not mean by this statement to diminish these offices; it is the great virtue of Maine municipal government that ordinary men and woman can hold, can succeed in, can sometimes excel at any office. We do not need nor do we want millionaires, think-tank experts, business school graduates, attorneys, financiers, or professional executives. We do well and better than well with carpenters and pipe fitters and truck drivers and simple draftsmen and craftsmen and housewives and the occasional egg farmer. If you are affiliated with a political party, go run for the legislature and do your damage there.

It is good to have a quick mind, of course, to learn fast, to absorb and process and remember what you see and hear. It is to everyone's benefit that some officers hold their jobs for many years. In this way continuity and institutional memory are built. But it has happened that here in Alna we have had in a single year three neophyte selectmen, each new in town, unknown, untested. Each of them learned, grew, and fulfilled the duties of his or her office. We have also had years when apparently capable and well-enough respected persons proved inadequate to the task. At those times former selectmen have come out of their barns and shops and woodlots to help. We are a town, a community. We endure. We are bigger than the sum of us. We are together better than the best of us.

The last year proved difficult. Our town office was often in disarray. We suffered resignations and terminations. Some made demands, some resisted, and some yielded. There were accusations and allegations. Some were hurt, a few were angry, many citizens were confused. We are not yet returned to a smooth and laminar flow. But through it all, our troubles have been more a function of our personalities than of any gross malfeasance or intentional bad behavior. The clerk did not take off to Aruba with a month's excise receipts. The road commissioner did not pave his own driveway with town asphalt. (Nor did he put an ounce of cold-patch on my road, but he and I will deal with that inexcusable lapse in the fullness of time and in a way I shall calculate to best embarrass or perplex him).

When you make up a government from volunteers you get what you have lying around the town. Often this can be a very good product. Sometimes a difficult personality or an odd duck or a quirky mind will open a cabinet the regular people would have left closed. We need the dull and plodding and we need the excitable and incendiary. We benefit from great weight, slow to move or turn, and as well from quick, sharp, bright light and intense heat. Sometimes our three selectmen and one each of clerk, treasurer, tax collector and road commissioner delight in their shared purpose and astonishing personal differences. We then may get great government.

Sometimes, though, the fast-talkers just annoy the taciturn. The fat guy sits on the skinny lady's hat. There is objection on the part of the scrubbed and scented tax collector to that selectman who seldom bathes. We do get some good stories, at least, from these encounters. And some persons serve only a year, then get out, glad to be done with it all. But our problems of recent months have had more to do I think with some fundamental misunderstandings, perhaps naïveté in some instances, certainly intransigence in others. Some jobs have a very limited amount of decision-making. Others (most) afford none. The salient virtue of local government is that its officers answer in every particular to its legislative body, the town meeting. The selectmen have the authority to dispose of alewives and award a snow removal contract. The other officers have only their jobs to do.

So some say he or she is not doing enough. This one is doing too much. I feel micromanaged. You wouldn't feel so if you would just do what the law and convention require. Get out of my books. Then keep your books in good order. This meeting was not properly called. That action is outside the scope of our authority. And so it has gone. But it will resolve. We are a self-correcting machinery.

So I sat with a family Sunday morning and warned that if we could convince another resident to accept the treasurer's job I should be returning to their kitchen to secure for him a deputy that he might go out of town for a week now and then with a free conscience. Would I be rewarded? "I don't want it. I wish you'd get somebody else. But I'd probably do it."

Sunday night I entertained the road commissioner on a hilltop in my woodlot as I stacked the day's oak, the turkeys talked of hot sex in the clearing below and the sun sank into its scheduled oblivion. I tested some thoughts I'd worked up. We complained and connived. Monday night I and three other former first selectmen whipped and pummeled the universal choice for a new treasurer in a bloody, sweaty two-hour meeting at the town office. He's thinking it over.

Here's one wonderful thing about the job of treasurer: you never have to meet a taxpayer. You can do the whole business late at night or on weekends, naked if you wish, intoxicated if you are able. Keep the columns straight and the totals true and you will have done your job. Get us whole and unremarked to next March and we shall be forever grateful that you (and your deputy) helped our town when it needed help, though you did not seek the job, did not want it, perhaps will not like it.

But better yet, run for the office again, for a full term on your own. There is some money in it, some work, some nuisance, much satisfaction. Do this for three years and I will guarantee you a town report dedication. If you have a child or grandchild I promise a picture of that young citizen in the annual report or one of the newspapers. I hold no office, draw no salary, but I have earned some influence. Some will listen when I speak though they may have to meet me in my woods to do so.

So it had to be done. From time to time the evenings or weekends of a man or woman must be encumbered. He or she will be conscripted for the good of us all. The hours any of us may spend keeping books or suffering meetings or debating those small hinges of public business where there is flexibility enough that a decision might be considered will be hours forever lost. We will trade free time, fun, frivolity, high culture or low amusement for tedium and sometimes a degree of misery. But when the conversion is successful, when a common resident comes to think of himself an integral to his town, sustained and improved by it, and in turn dedicated and beholden to it, a larger, better, more purposeful life emerges.

Selectman Emeritus Abbott wore his hat through the whole of the meeting. John Green slumped wearily on the couch. Cooper made several vulgar references to incidents and subjects only incidentally or vaguely related to the important matter brought under consideration. I hope our candidate decides to accept the duty we force upon him that he may one distant day to wear the special underwear and know the secret handshake of those whose lives have become inextricable from the community they have been privileged to serve.