The two sides – who barely spoke civilly to each other when they met in the General Store or the Post Office – hit head-on over the school budget cuts. Those who owned houses now worth much more than they’d paid for them were getting socked with rising property taxes and wanted them cut. The cabin-owners, whose valuations were so low they were paying mere pennies a year, saw no reason why their kids’ education should suffer to save the home-owners a couple of hundred dollars a year they wouldn’t even notice.
Don Nelson, who was Chair of the Selectboard that year and the leader of the homeowners, thought at first that the Town Meeting was going to go his way without much of a fight. The Town Moderator was on his side and had instituted a few seldom-used parliamentary rules to keep the opposition from ganging up on them, principally a requirement that each side be held to ten minutes and one spokesman during the debate. The homeowners had Craig Wisher, a part-time preacher and full-time logger who was a fiery speaker and very persuasive. Don assumed that Juliette Rose would be spokesman for the cabin-owners, and while she was a forceful speaker and not to be taken lightly, she was also a well-known radical and tended to alienate swing voters with her extremism.
But Juliette Rose outfoxed him. When the time came, it wasn’t Juliette who rose to speak, it was Molly Pepperell. There couldn’t have been a more perfect choice. An old-timer with roots in Wilbur as deep as anybody’s, she was known for an even-handedness and hard-headed realism which earned her the respect of conservatives even when they disagreed with her, and she was an icon for the newcomers. After all, she was a liberal and an artist – a combination tailor-made to appeal to card-carrying members of the counter-culture. As soon as she stood up, Don knew they were dead in the water, and he was right.
The animosity from that meeting carried over into the next year’s elections. Juliette Rose and Molly teamed up again and the whole Selectboard was thrown out except for old Harold Proctor, the only Selectman who hadn’t voted for the cuts. Don, for one, got the message loud and clear: the newcomers had the numbers and – as long as Juliette was around, anyway – the unity. They were now in charge of Wilbur whether the Old Guard liked it or not.
They didn’t. The average age of the new Selectboard (Harold brought it up some) was 30 and the old-timers snorted that the kindergarten was running the whole school. They were furious. These goddamn…kids…had taken their town away from them and were turning it into a goddamn commune. Some were so angry they moved out and a lot more talked about moving. They were certain their taxes were going to go through the roof to pay for windmills to generate electricity and free rock concerts on the common. Worse, they fully expected the new Board to outlaw hunting and make the consumption of any sort of meat illegal.
Don wasn’t so sure. Juliette Rose had run for the Board and been defeated by her own people. They seemed to appreciate her role as an agitator but thought she was a little too wild to trust with the everyday running of the town. That they had the sense to see the distinction gave him hope that all was not lost. They did, however, elect one of Juliette’s early lieutenants, a quiet young man named Justin Platt who worked at the co-op in Amherst. Justin was very smart and a quick study. He impressed Don with his grasp of the complexities of budget management and tax policy, and his refusal to automatically endorse tax hikes before he was convinced they were necessary. He didn’t see the homeowners as rich – which they weren’t, by any stretch of the imagination – and as often as not he fought the cabin-owners as vehemently as he fought the homeowners.
Don started going to Board meetings again. For the most part, he kept his mouth shut and listened, and what he heard wasn’t a bunch of idealistic daydreaming or wild-eyed Communist ranting. The new members of the Board may have been young but they weren’t stupid and they weren’t disorganized rabble. They had a lot to learn and he almost never agreed with their decisions but he came away thinking they weren’t hopeless, either.
After a few months, he started sticking his oar in the water occasionally. They listened respectfully and asked reasonable questions. He even found common ground with Justin on several issues, so when Liz Profitt approached him before the next election and asked him to run, he listened.
“There’s too much bad feeling in town,” she said, “and your side is under-represented. We think it’s time to heal this up. I’m a business owner, too, and while I respect the people on this Board, none of them really understand what we’re up against. If you run on that basis, a lot of us will support you.”
So he did, they did, and he won. Sometimes he felt like a lone voice of fiscal sanity, it’s true, but he won as many arguments as he lost and the homeowners felt better knowing he was there. Over time he became convinced that if they agreed on nothing else, at least the newcomers clearly loved this little town as much as he did. Gradually the bad feeling dissipated, the animosity faded away if it didn’t die out altogether, and things got back to normal.
Now the town was splitting again but the lines were a lot less clear. People he was sure had opposed him were suddenly calling to tell him they supported the road and to ask what they could do. His decision to make peace with the new reality was bearing fruit at last. This wasn’t going to be the walkover he thought it would be during the meeting at the General Store. This time Juliette Rose was going to have her hands full.
But although he relished the idea of a fight he might actually win, there was one consideration that bothered him so much it kept him awake a good part of that night: an even fight could get awfully bloody, and no matter which way it went there were bound to be harsh words and hurt feelings. This battle could turn into a war that would tear the town apart, maybe forever. He didn’t want to see that happen but for the life of him he couldn’t see a way to avoid it.
