Odor of battle

Small town tallies dollars and scents in summer doldrums

by Max Alexander

The first car to hit the skunk must have been small — not anything like a fully-loaded gravel truck, the primary form of vehicular transport along my country road. When Mephitis mephitis meets bituminous hot-top under the double-wheel of a dump truck, the evidence is pretty much destroyed. But this skunk was still a fully formed specimen, ready for the taxidermist. He must have been clipped by the fender of a Volvo (summer tourist lost on his way to Camden), or maybe a Honda Accord (government worker commuting to Augusta). Either way, there he was, with V-shaped white markings identifying him clearly as Maine’s common striped skunk.

Skunks are members of the weasel family and are said to be quite tasty, although people from away rarely try them. But native Mainers — that is, the Penobscot Indians — used to eat them regularly. They were careful to remove the scent gland (located within the anus), and not just because it smells so noxious. The offending chemical, a sulfuric compound called butylmercaptan, is in fact a nerve poison that can be fatal if ingested. An angry skunk can squirt the stuff 16 feet, but with pinpoint accuracy only up to nine feet. Either way, the stink travels as far as a half mile.

That’s under laboratory conditions. Factor in a hot summer on a back road in Maine, with multiple tire encounters, and I believe you can double that distance. Every day for two weeks that skunk got flatter and flatter, and smellier and smellier, until finally he was découpaged into the pavement and the whole town could pick up the scent.

Dead skunks are supposed to get picked up long before they turn into folk art. But backcountry towns like mine are broke in summer; last winter’s snowplowing bill has just been paid off, and the new tax bills don’t get mailed out until August. High summer is when small Maine towns cut way back — which is in stark contrast to the citizens, who are reeling in cash from the summer people and ready to tap a few keggers.

It makes for a strange tension around town, between ornery selectmen trying to pay the warrants and devil-may-care residents bent on a good time — especially when your town is trying to fend off a proposed asphalt plant that would spew 55 tons of sulfuric compounds into our air every year. That’s more sulfur than several million skunks emit, but the plant would mean more dead skunks, too, once its trucks start rumbling down our roads.

Concern about the Lane Construction plant heated up last week when the town’s lawyer submitted a $2700 bill for his work on the hearings over the last two months. Our land use ordinance allows us to charge legal expenses to the applicant — a reasonable notion given that the plant is, after all, their idea. But some of our town officials can’t see burdening a $300 million Connecticut corporation with legal bills that might have been avoided if a bunch of rabble-rousing citizens hadn’t decided to protest the plant in the first place. If the taxpayers want to get all persnickety about a little sulfur dioxide pollution, let them pay the legal bill.

But, this being July, the town has no money. Jim Bowers, a local CPA who’s also on the town budget committee, gave a report to the planning board chairman that ended with stark reasoning: “It’s like this, Bradley. The town has no money. If we don’t get Lane to pay the lawyer, we can’t have a lawyer anymore.”

Taking a lead from Shakespeare, someone suggested that not having a lawyer might be a good thing. But given that the neighborly folks from Lane have two lawyers at every hearing, it was decided after much chin-rubbing that the town should probably have at least one.

Lane was ordered to pay, but ornery officials still grumbled about how a bunch of whining citizens were driving the town to financial ruin. Some even hinted darkly that the biggest complainers were “folks from away,” although the accusers did not offer to eat skunk as a demonstration of their own native heritage. At any rate, the storm passed quickly because the summer people are up, the ice cream stand is crowded, and the locals are making money. Besides, it was time for the big summer opening at the Downtown Art Gallery.

Last week, we all came down to check out new landscapes by Lorna Crichton and Joan Freiman, while sipping wine and engaging in the usual small-town summer chatter: comparing asphalt plant emission studies, wondering which town officials finished high school, and reminding each other to remove our “Lane, Lane Go Away!” road signs so the shoulder mower can get through.

“If he has to stop and move the signs, it’ll cost the town money,” someone warned.

Sarah and I went out to round up our kids, who were climbing on the town’s war memorial. Most of the names engraved in that cold stone are families that still work the land here, reminding us that freedom comes at a particularly heavy price for small towns. I decided we should thank God when the bill for democracy comes from the lawyer — and not the stonecutter, or the undertaker.

At the art opening, during a passionate discussion on effluent runoff, I spilled red wine down the front of my shirt. But driving home, I remembered to swerve and avoid the dead skunk. n

Max Alexander can be reached at malex@midcoast.com.