11/11/97 ... Petitions and pork barrels.

The town hall sits on top of a hill in Bowdoinham, shaped like a village church with a tall steeple. While we were away the town had the old onion dome removed, and a shiny new copper onion now glints at the top of the steeple. You can see it for miles, upriver or upcountry.

Inside there's a single voluminous space which has been used for basketball games, weddings, banquets, and civic meetings. At one end of the hall there's a raised stage, and a big quilted curtain made by the town ladies hangs from an iron rod across the proscenium. It's been a while since there was an annual local "show." Some institutions do fade away.

The first Saturday of every month there's a contra dance at the hall, and the fiddle music and smoke wafts downhill over the lines of parked cars. Or used to. Those seedeaters are more discrete, or just past passing it these days. But they still dance up the dust.

Most town meetings and large gatherings now take place in the school gym, which is already heated, and has real plumbing. There's a drafty one-holer in a corner of the town hall you can use at your peril. We also vote at the town hall.

This week was straddled by political events. Last Tuesday we went to the polls to vote about turnpike widening and clearcutting, again. The road contractors got the nod, but the paper companies and the Governor King got razzed. Today they opened the new bypass bridge in Topsham, one of the slickest back scratchings I've seen.

I sat at the petition table for a couple of hours on election day, and chaffered with the dutiful. Sylvia and the LWV unfolded the booth petitions at the back of the stage, and a stream of citizens acted out our democratic ritual. There were no red, white, and blue curtains on the booths this year, and everyone had something to say about it.

"You gonna watch me vote, Frank?"

"Damned right. You better vote the way I want."

We marked our paper ballots and dropped them in the big wooden boxes, watched over by familiar faces. Then we checked out the petition table. Finally we bought coffee and baked goods from the Fire Department's Woman's Auxiliary. That's how it's done here.

There were only three citizen initiative petitions in circulation this year. A proposed ban on the aerial spraying of pesticides, a proposed rescinding of the tax break to BIW (Bath Iron Works, the shipyard, the state's largest employer), and a proposed limit on campaign spending in initiative and referendum campaigns.

Our Green selectwoman, Karen, had called the night before asking me to spell Green Ed at the petition table. Peggy and I were actually founding members of the Maine Green Party a few years ago. Not because we always agree with the Green agenda, but out of disgust with the Demopublican juggernaut. Someone should prick the giant's toe. So I'm on call for poll sitting.

I believe in the referendum process, and sign any and all petitions I think should have their day at the polls, even if I don't entirely agree with the wording. Legalistic quibbles are beside the point when enough of the public demands a say. And I've got a beef about pesticide spraying anyhow.

Our little house in Jonesport was on the edge of blueberry land, and we got doused with aerial sprayed Guthion on three occasions. My trouble with respiratory allergies dates from then. Enough of us hippies (and mothers) squawked back then to get our neighboring growers (the fathers, after all) to go to ground spraying near our houses, and to warn us the day they were going to spray. I can attest that ground control of aerial spraying is a joke, the chemicals go where they will. I signed JOHN HANCOCK in a bold script on the no spray petition.

So did a high percentage of the trade. Sort of an apple pie issue, on the face of it. One professional Enviro refused to sign because of the wording. She pointed out that the restriction on any spraying that put pesticides into a watershed was actually an outright ban on pesticide application. It always ends up in the water.

"Yup," I said.

It was harder to sell the other petitions. Not that I was selling. Just giving witness. But the assumption was I supported the petitions, so I got an earful.

"Geez, I couldn't sign that," said one resident about the BIW petition. "I'm against corporate tax breaks, but I've worked there 27 years. I wouldn't dare." Pukpukpuk.

And the spending limit of $500 per person, etc., couldn't muster a quorum. It was being circulated by Jonathan Carter, our Green Leader, probably the most irritating politician on the Maine scene. Even the unwashed find him hard to love. The petition was intended as a way to keep corporate interests from smothering a referendum in media dollars. But it proved a bit disingenuous. Carter's current referendum fight, or its reprise, saw a Connecticut sugardaddy bankrolling the Green campaign. The paper companies spent millions, of course.

That was about clearcutting. At least originally. After a series of false starts, Carter and the Greens finally got enough signatures to force a vote on a clearcutting ban last November. Preliminary polls showed that 75% of Mainers wanted an end to clearcutting. Big Paper panicked, and the ever-obliging Angus (our King), hustled the legislature through a rare exhibition of bipartisan logrolling, and presented a "compromise" plan on the same ballot. Muddied the waters nicely. Big Paper spent big money, and the upshot was a hung jury. The so-called "Forestry Compact" got a plurality, but not the necessary majority to enact. So this year we voted on the Compact, up or down.

It was a wonderful show. The Compact had everything going for it. The Gov, the legislature, Big Paper, big money, and the eager acquiescence of the mainstream Enviros. Audubon and the boys had sat down at the table with the power brokers and gotten stroked heavily. The small print got juggled nicely so the Good Guys could say there were "real limits" in the Compact, serious first steps toward a new forestry management. And the Bad Guys could do business as usual. A triumph of the new consensus politics.

On the other side were all the little guys from the far extremes. There was the ever-inflating persona of Jonathan the Good on the Left flank, making all of us wince, while he hammered away at the details, exposing all the crafted loopholes in the Compact. Then there was the Libertarian Right bellowing like a stuck pig that the Compact would destroy land owners' rights, forever. There were guys in the restaurant talking politics together who hadn't spoken in years.

Rub the rad Right and the green Left together and you get a strange smoke. You might even hear a Bleeding Heart admit that Big Government isn't the be-all, or a Redneck say that there ought to be a ban on herbicide silviculture. Very interesting. Such a wide-ranging debate actually brought the underlying issues to the surface. Very dangerous in a Demopublican society, and the media blitz managed to obscure the issues enough so that the swing vote in the electorate went to the polls "undecided."

On the morning after, the Greens were hooting, and the Libertarians, too. Now the debate moves back into the legislature. Never a hopeful sign. Like a marriage going into court. They wrote the Compact, after all. At least all its flaws have been pointed out, ad nauseum. We'll be squabbling over clearcutting for a while yet up here in the Great Northern Paper Plantation.

And building hiways. The real purpose of government is abetting road contractors, of course, and their well-heeled lobby finally convinced Mainers that SAFETY and JOBS depend on widening the Maine Turnpike. You win some and you lose some.

That's the way I feel about the new bypass. Today Peggy and I went down to the Grand Opening, and walked across the Androscoggin on the new bridge. There was a raw northerly blowing, but it hadn't kept away the crowd. Kids were rollerblading on the ramps, and two school bands were warming up to march across with the King. Every cop in the county was on hand to direct traffic. We didn't stick around for the ceremonies. Just wanted to walk down the middle of a hiway for a change.

This well manuered federal project was a long time in bearing fruit, and since you paid for it you might like to taste the windfalls.

There's a natural bottle-neck where the rivers run into Merrymeeting Bay. Eastbound traffic headed toward the coast dumps off the interstate onto outer Pleasant Street in Brunswick, and goes stop-and-go onto Rt.1, which skirts the south bank of the Androscoggin where it curves round into the bay. At the same time, all the north-south traffic that wants to go east on the coast crosses the Androscoggin from Topsham to Brunswick on the green bridge, and joins the interstate flow. We're talking about the BIW traffic. In the afternoon, after the yard shift change at 3, traffic backs up on Rt.1 for miles, as the tourists and the yardbirds jockey for position. Fondly called "the 50 minute mile."

The locals who don't work at the yard simply avoid Brunswick between 3 and 5 PM. Or go into the Pub for Happy Hour. But this minor inconvenience to the majority of us was an irresistible opportunity for certain landowners and road contractors. Actually the same people, amazingly enough. We got lobbied for years about the necessity for a Brunswick-Topsham bypass. A way to take the interstate traffic and the yardbirds out of Brunswick. Make it safe for pedestrians again.

Some of us remember when Rt 1 traffic actually went through downtown, in the 50s, and how the big problem was Maine Central freights stopping the action. Back then it was the new Rt 1 along the river that was going to solve "the problem." Now the new bypass would solve that solution. And a glorious idea it was. A highspeed loop rising off of Rt 95 in Topsham, cutting behind the High School to the Androscoggin, jumping the river, and joining the coastal route at Cooks Corner. No muss, no fuss. On-off ramps at the Topsham interchange would let yard traffic from Lewiston merge, and VIOLA, no more bottleneck.

This was OK for the road contractors, and the traffic, but not so good for the landowners. Here was all this interstate traffic, all this easy access, flying right past on the way somewhere else. That isn't how you make money in America.After the congressional backscratching in general appropriations, the local powers got to have their say.

When the bypass plan came before the Topsham planning board, guess who was sitting at the table? Crooker, the biggest contractor in the state just happens to have his yard at the Topsham interchange, and the other big landowners along the bypass corridor were grinning beside him. Regretfully, they couldn't approve a flyby, the traffic would have to come down to ground level and run a gantlet of lights through this prime development property. A single lane on-off ramp into a busy local corridor. Just perfect for mall development.

Are we replacing one bottleneck with another, right in front of the High School? When the new plan was announced, some of us yelped, but it was a done deal, of course. They'd even added another ramp to the byway that runs to Bowdoinham. Opening another corridor. We're the next prime turf. Pretty slick, Huh?

But: you win some, you lose some. At best, the bypass will split the interstate traffic into two streams around Brunswick, and relieve some of the yard rush. It may make the Topsham interchange a place to avoid, which, ironically, will divert my business away from the greedy bastards, and it WILL make MY getting around Brunswick a piece of cake. I want to thank you all for your tax dollars.

Being away took the heat out of these local boils for us. I found I could listen to the clearcut debate, or sit at the polls, without getting incensed at one injustice, or another boondoggle. After being to LA, a 6 lane Turnpike just doesn't upset me. I look forward to the next round of political obfuscation.