Dear Folks,
Happy equinox!
Foundation Farm is buried under four feet of snow, two that were already on the ground, and two more that fell during the “great blizzard” last weekend. More snow is due today. It’s been below zero just about every night for the past two weeks. Some people are getting cabin fever, but this is the kind of winter I’m used to after 20 years in New Hampshire — the kind that (I believe) global climate change has been taking away and Pinatubo has temporarily given back. I’m enjoying it while I can!
The “blizzard” was nothing special around here, just a night when everyone hunkered down and stayed cozy. The power didn’t even go off. There were no car accidents; the police said there were only plows on the road. The snow came down sideways, mostly from the east, the direction from which our weather trouble usually comes. (Our big storms are “Nor’easters.”) After awhile the wind turned around and blew from the west. When the snow was all down, the wind just plain blew in every direction for another day, sculpting gorgeous drifts as high as our heads. It was very cold and very beautiful.
As long as the sky was cloudy and the Arctic air poured in, it felt like January, but the moment the sun reappeared we knew it was March. The temperature has been rising 40 degrees during the day, to just above freezing, and falling that much again at night. The sap run, which had shut down, is starting again. We’re hoping that this up-and-down temperature continues, melting off the snow little by little. If we get a storm from the southeast, with rain and warm winds melting these piles of snow all at once, with hard-frozen ground underneath, we’re going to have terrific floods.
Just before each snow our bird feeders have been as crowded as the supermarkets. The bird storm-warning system works at least as well as the human one. Not only the winter residents — bluejays, chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals — but also the first spring birds have been coming — purple finches, tufted titmice, tree sparrows, goldfinches, starlings. As the big blizzard began I even saw a robin — the first of the year — sitting in our crabapple tree, stuffing down shriveled, frozen fruit. Bright red breast against the white snow. Poor thing. I assume the storm blew it farther north than it intended to go. I hope it can survive on crabapples, because it isn’t going to find any worms around here for weeks.
The day the big blizzard began was my birthday. It was also town meeting day for three of the seven towns on the Pemigewassett River voting on the Wild & Scenic designation, about which I wrote last month. I had intended to drive down, but chickened out as the snow started. The result was already determined anyway — four towns had voted earlier in the week — all NO. The Wise Use side ultimately won six of the seven towns.
I had been at two of those earlier town meetings, and on the Monday after the last votes I drove back to the Pemi Valley (between high walls of snow on either side of the road) for long interviews with the two women who had headed up the opposite sides of the debate. It was a fascinating, confusing, and precious experience to hear them out. I’m going to have a hard time writing this story. There’s so much to say, the drama is so deeply human — and I am personally so drawn to the people on both sides.
Cheryl Johnson, the thirty-some head of the New Hampshire Landowners’ Alliance, the winner of the fight, asked me to meet her in her office in Campton. It’s a single room above a restaurant, reached by a set of narrow, creaky stairs, a room stuffed with computers, printers, copiers, fax machine — and congratulatory bouquets sent to her by admirers. Cheryl is a graphic artist and part owner of Campton Printing. Like most of the folks on her side, she’s self-made, not well educated, and a True Believer with absolute, uncompromising dedication. She was apolitical until she became convinced that the government was out to control her. Even when she started fighting, it took four months before she could get up the courage to speak in public. She still speaks with a tremble and a soft voice, which makes her sound authentic and appealing, especially when she goes up against educated, articulate environmentalists.
I like Cheryl and I admire the energy with which she has organized her troops and fought her battle, though I disagree partly with her position and totally with her tactics. The tactics are adolescent. They rely on wild exaggeration and unjustified character defamation, conspiracy theory and simple-minded populism, much of which is taken, word for word, from the national Wise Use organizations. These tactics had many people refusing to take a stand against them for fear of having rifle bullets come through their windows. Cheryl had the good sense to take only ideas, not money from the national organizations, and she refused to invite in their most inflammatory speakers. (“We were already winning without their help,” she says proudly.) So she was seen, correctly, as a local leader, giving a voice to every inarticulate, ambitious, fearful, economically marginal, poorly educated landowner who ever got furious because of high-handed treatment from a local zoning board, or who ever resented paying taxes to any government at any level, or who ever felt humiliated by a cashmere-sweatered, condescending environmentalist.
That’s about 90 percent of rural New Hampshire potentially in her camp. There’s a huge reservoir of hatred and fear here, accumulated rage from all the times some fast-talking bureaucrat or tourist or city person humiliated a country bumpkin. Among those who have unthinkingly looked down upon and discounted the grassroots folks are the leaders of the environmental organizations, including Cheryl’s chief antagonist, Pat Schlesinger.
For our interview Pat invited me to to her nice upper-middle-class house on a big lot with a forest behind it and plenty of bird feeders in the yard. It was in the town of New Hampton, the only town to vote for Wild & Scenic designation, the most upscale town of the seven. Pat’s husband is a professor at Plymouth State College; their house is as well equipped with computers, printers, etc. as is Cheryl’s drafting office. Pat is a white-haired grandmother, a full-time environmental volunteer for decades, and one who is more used to successes than the debacle she had just witnessed during the previous week’s town meetings.
This whole Pemi thing started because Pat Schlesinger, about ten years ago, trying to clean up a river that, they say, “caused the paint to peel from buildings on its shore,” brought together the selectmen and planning boards of nine towns and said, “We can’t manage this river separately. Let’s manage it together.” The resulting coalition — the Pemigewassett River Council — pulled off miracles. They not only got the river cleaned up, but they brought together hydrological and ecological and land ownership data, made maps and overlays, got local zoning protections, so that when the Wild & Scenic study finally began, 75 percent of the necessary work had already been done. Pat is the one who made all that happen, and she got national attention for it. People on other rivers have used the Pemi Council as a model.
The Wild & Scenic business came about because of a threatened hydro dam at Livermore Falls. The Pemi Council saw that they had protected their river against every threat but one — a federal dam permit, which can override every local and state law and every landowner right. A Wild & Scenic designation is about the only way to combat that, by using one branch of the feds, the National Park Service, to control another, FERC. One of the ironies of this story is that Pat’s group wanted the designation to keep the feds out, while Cheryl’s group successfully scared everyone off by saying it would bring the feds in. “Give this man an inch and he’ll take a park!” said the poster Cheryl put out, showing Gary Weiner, the National Park Service employee who worked with the local people to make the Wild & Scenic plan, in an inked-on park ranger’s hat. There wasn’t a shred of truth in the accusation. But it worked.
Pat couldn’t tell me her side of the story without tears — tears at the injustice of having lies, threats, and fears overcome what she sees as simple environmental protection. Her faith in democracy has been badly shaken. It hasn’t occurred to her that her Pemi Council, which operated so successfully for years, was made up entirely of town leaders and educated, vocal environmentalists, who never stopped to listen to, or even notice, Cheryl’s kind of people.
The vote wasn’t really on the Pemi at all. It was on “do you trust your government, at any level?” and “do you like those self-confident flatlanders who have moved in here and pushed you around?” The answer was a resounding NO, except in educated New Hampton, where people can imagine themselves as part of government, or at least as able to speak to government — where people see government as something they understand, not as an arbitrary, overwhelming force that can at any time, without warning, stop ordinary folks from doing what they want to do.
It’s a sad story. And it’s a dangerous one, because it’s happening everywhere. Cheryl’s FAX is connected to a network of 560 others all over the country. The day after the town meetings everyone in the Wise Use movement knew what had happened and was encouraged by it. Ron Arnold, the scary leader of the Wise Use movement (“Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement”) called Cheryl that day to congratulate her. He had not been involved in the Pemi at all, except to provide some of the rhetoric. His Moonie-funded organization had not contributed a penny. (Says Cheryl, “We budgeted $3000 for the whole thing and spent $2500.” That’s a fraction of what the environmentalists spent.) Cheryl thanked Arnold for calling and teased him with the accusations that have been hurled against her. “Well, I guess I’m just one of your pawns.” Arnold laughed, “If they only knew!”
Well, Pat and Cheryl are by no means rid of each other; each of them is planning her next move. Pat points out that only 8 percent of the registered voters voted against designation. (Only 6.8 percent voted for — town meetings are not well attended, even when there’s a hot issue like this one.) Cheryl is moving on to other rivers, and other ways of foiling environmentalists. One of her next targets is to smear the idea of conservation easements and to kill the state’s 50 land trusts. (I didn’t tell her that I had founded one of those land trusts and had just put my own farm in conservation easements.)
So — now I have to try to get this wonderful, terrible story down on paper, in a more complete and systematic way than I have just done for you.
It must be obvious by now that I’m feeling much better. I don’t know where the kidney stone went, but it caused no more trouble, though I still carry the pain-killer in my purse, just in case. The awful flu took weeks to go away, but it finally did.
Those were bad weeks for me, because somehow my physical state also hit me mentally. I lost all energy and enthusiasm, all optimism, all interest in life. I just went through the motions, wondering why I had set my life up this way, why I was writing a newspaper column and teaching students and caring about the fate of the world. I was convinced that every cause I have given my life to is completely hopeless. This was a mental state so unfamiliar to me that I had no idea what to do about it. It didn’t help that during that time I was getting a steady stream of hate letters from my column about Rush Limbaugh, and I was reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, because Cheryl and her friends kept quoting it. (Hadn’t read it in 20 years. It’s the bible of the far right, and it’s quite a testament. No wonder I was depressed!)
Don’t worry — I wouldn’t be able to write about that period and that mood, if it hadn’t passed. I’m back in the groove now. The term is over and two of my journalism students have already had articles accepted in the mainstream press, with many more waiting to hear from editors. Don, Sylvia, and I have the sheep all crutched and pilled and ready for lambing, which should begin in a week. Sprouts of celery, peppers, pansies, and broccoli are greening in my bedroom windows. I’m getting tired of the grubbiness of our house and moving into a spring cleaning rampage. I’m just back from a nice trip to Maine, where I gave two speeches to lovely, appreciative (cashmere-sweatered, well-educated, elitist) audiences, so I feel that someone else, somewhere on earth, believes the same things I do.
Why is it so necessary to us to feel that everyone in the world, or at least all virtuous and meritorious people in the world believe the same things we do?
Within a week I’ll be back working on books again. I’m not sure which book. The systems book, which nobody seems to like, has to be completely rethought. I may put it aside until the textbook is finished, since I don’t know how to fix it. As soon as the snow melts off a little, I’ll be out pruning fruit trees, the official outside opening act of the new gardening season. And I’m getting impatient to see all those bulbs I planted last fall!
Wow! Bulbs! Fruit trees! Lambs! Spring! Though it isn’t here yet, it’s more than a wonderful thought. It’s a believable one!
Love, Dana
