Sagadahoc Stories 126: 12/1/02

September Eleven 2001 upset a lot of applecarts. My digital fruit was already scattered, thanks to a global meltdown of our Macintosh, and the general mayhem stomped it into cider. But life (and art) goes on, so I’ll try to pick up the pieces of this local tale.

The seasons have come and gone since this journal was updated, and we are hanging on the edge of winter again. A cold snap pulled down our storm windows, a dusting of snow grinds underfoot, the oaks have let go their leaves, and seasonal gunfire mixes with the the sound of pnumatic nailers.

The Invasion of the Contractors has made a beach head in Bowdoinham. We are the next promised land, and the realtors are salivating. Wall Street may be in the toilet, but local land values continue to inflate (at 2% a month we’re told). The old Post Office is now a realtor’s office, their parking lot always seems busy. The restaurant is full of unfamiliar carpenters and there are hushed huddles in the Credit Union, passing papers.

The town is peddling furiously, trying to stay ahead of the wave. Bowdoinham’s comprehensive plan, finally accepted last year, has no real teeth, but our planning cadre has been busy orchestrating ordinances to alleviate the inevitable. We passed one limiting the rate of growth to slighly more than the current annual average, apportioning the permits between single house starts and larger sub-divisions. Proposed ordinances will focus commercial development up near the highway, ban big boxes, and encourage a centralized pedestrian village. Meanwhile the For Sale signs are in bloom and new roads have been slashed in off the blacktop all over town.

Housing Development

The airport subdivision (grandly called “Riverwalk Estates”) got Planning Board approval after much to do. The access roads have been dozed in and two houses are abuilding. Three other subdivisions are in similar progress within a mile of here. Frank sold his house by the “Estates”, and Otavio’s crew is concocting a high-tech mansion for him in the woods out back of us. With so much building in ear-shot, we feel thoroughly suburbanized

Click on the Tick

The only defense against Levettownization may be guerilla warfare. If Bowdoinham could be made psychologically undesirable, maybe the development pressure would ease. When the rivers stank, nobody was in a rush to move here. Maybe the current tick invasion could be advertised. Mr. Mann suggested we get Bowdoinham declared THE TICK CAPITOL OF MAINE. I had some nasty lime green T-shirts printed up, and circulated a petition addressed to the selectmen. Sold a handful of Ts at the Celebrate Bowdoinham Day. Only got 50-odd signatures, though. Still have plenty of Ts, if you want one. There are tick lawn ornaments, too.

The politicians are doing their best to make the town undesirable. Our local Bad Boy poll, Big Dan, conspired with the Republican Leader of the state senate to produce eleventh hour soft money attack ads which succeeded in nauseating everyone. One of our selectmen ran for the local state house seat (as a Republican) and sent his family to electioneer at the polls. It was disconcerting to step into the town hall and be confronted with an obvious gladhanding pitch. The Democratic candidate rushed to the polls to press the flesh -- on the theory that one political offense justifies another. Apparently the confronting got out of hand, and the first candidate’s daughter got roughed up and spat upon. The (unsuccessful) Republican candidate cited the incident in his public letter of resignation from the selectmen's job. Now we can claim to be the town where they spit on Republicans at the polls.

Ornamental Ticks

It is a fine old Maine tradition to offend and disgust potential settlers. Verezzano reported the natives along this shore bared their asses at him, and laughed uproriously. We’ve keep this tradition alive by giving the Mushroom Lady to the world.. Lawn ornaments, after all, are intended to keep the bourgeois at bay.

There’s worse. To really paint it black, Blackberry Books has just published HUMAN SACRIFICE by Jim Moore, a retelling of the Sara Cherry murder which turned this town upside down in 1988. Moore contends Denis Dechaine was falsly framed and convicted for molesting and killing the poor child, and marshalls evidence to prove it. At the time of the trial a cadre of Denis’ friends and acquaintances formed a protest group called Trial and Error, arguing that the police hadn’t followed any other leads in the investigation. Moore, a retired ATF agent who began his investigation assuming Dechaine had done it, turned 180 degrees after following the back trail. He contends that the medical examiner’s time of death is well AFTER they had Dechaine in custody and under observation (a fact cleverly diguised in the trial testimony), and that there was tissue under Sarah Cherry’s nails which didn’t match Dechaine’s DNA (which post-trial evidence was quashed on appeal).

Moore suggests four plausible alternate murderers, none of whom were investigated. He argues that the deciding factor for the police and prosecutors was that the first lawyer Dechaine hired told them he had confessed, making any other investigation moot. Even if Denis killed Sarah, HUMAN SACRIFICE is a frightening indictment of prosecutorial myopia and a good old boy lack of legal ethics.

The good old boys in this town are clogging the Cathance. New docks are poking out into the river, downstream, and the riverside folks are complaining about erosion damage from boat wakes. The wardens say it’s illegal to leave a wake within 500 feet of shore, which makes the entire Cathance a no-wake zone, but they won’t enforce the rules unless there are repeated complaints, and a no-wake zone is posted. Andy and Michael are ripped up enough about the banks disappearing in Wallentine’s Bend that they asked the town to make it a bouyed go-slow zone. Now the jet-skis use the bouys for slaloming. You have to wonder if it’s boat wakes or rising sea-levels doing the most damage, though. The water is getting higher and higher, and we saw the effects of a microburst at Andy’s dock this summer. Peggy, Ian, Lyle, CC, and I were cruising on the bay one of those brooding sultry days, when we saw a squall line moving in from the northwest. We throttled up the TOAD as much as she will, standing on the afterdeck to keep the Honda from cavitating, and battened down the gear as we ran upriver. We were counting the seconds between flashes and booms as the sky went black and the lightening whacked. When it got down to a 5 second count, I sheered in to Andy’s float, and we legged it up the ramp and into under Riverbend’s shed roof. The storm struck full blast, wind sheer tearing the trees, lightening sizzling and ripping, the downpour driving sideways. A bolt must have struck the Town Hall, because the fire siren went off and wailed for 20 minutes. The storm raged for all of that. Then was gone. Every private dock downriver had been torn up by the violent winds. We shovelled out the TOAD, and snuck home.

No Wake ?

Landing

The other tail-between-the-legs story of this year happened at the restaurant. When Dianne was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Jeanine put the Town Landing up for sale, and found a hopeful new owner in Tom. Running a local eatery is notoriously bad for your mental stability. The restaurant has broken up four relationships, and driven another to the brink, since we’ve lived here. Jeanine and Dianne were the only couple who seemed able to keep it all in balance. But running your own restaurant looks so easy, and Tom took the bait.

Tom signed a lease-purchase agreement and began renovating the operation. He had been a building contractor, and carpentry came easy. Juggling all the other eggs in that basket wasn’t so. Tom wasn’t real good at multi-tasking. If you were part of the lunch hour rush when he was at the grill, you might wait 45 minutes to get a cup of soup. Before long the clientel was reduced to an absolute hard core, and we were grumbling. Tom was hemoraging money, unable to make his payments to Jeanine. When Dianne heard that Tom was dumping the mess back in Jeanine’s lap, she said: “I’ll shoot him. What will they do to me, give me a death sentence?”

Dicey was a great lady, who kept grinning until the end. When she died the whole town turned out to mark her passing. We gathered on the shore looking out on Dianne’s favorite view of Swan Island. Michael had written her a song, and the friends of her life gave tribute after tribute. Allie’s little boy, Aaron, helped spread her ashes on the Kennebec, as we all toasted her her down the tide. Now Jeanine is back feeding us, and keeping the heart of the town alive.