Only when a brush fire grew into a forest fire in the Northeast Kingdom near Newport, and raced over and through seven separate hunting cabins, did Miranda's interest in catamounts wane. For two days at the end of August she wandered with her L rods throughout our yard and the yards of our neighbors, finding the underground veins that she needed, I imagine, to reassure herself that an environmental Armageddon was not upon us.
It was during those two days that Laura and I worried most about our daughter. Schoolchildren can be much meaner than newspaper cartoonists and editorial writers. Especially ten-year-olds. It crossed our minds that if some child picked up on Miranda's fear of the drought, or her fear of fire, Miranda would become easy prey in the classroom for abuse.
Fortunately, so many other events were penciled into the calendar on our kitchen wall for the week after Labor Day that the start of school seemed almost inconsequential. The formal
Page 266
appeal before the State Environmental Board was scheduled for the Thursday of that week, the seventh, followed the next day by the beginning of the wedding weekend of Patience Avery and Reedy McClure. There would be a rehearsal dinner that Friday night at the McClure family compound, and the wedding itself at one o'clock the next day.
And for any Avery dowser who happened to have a spare morning or afternoon, the annual convention of the American Society of Dowsers would be occurring that entire weekend in Danville, a small village about twenty minutes away. Over two thousand dowsers from around the country and around the world had registered this year, most to learn or teach or share, but somea good thirty or forty, according to Reedyfor the sole purpose of witnessing the third marriage of the Master Dowser of Landaff.
At the rehearsal dinner for Patience Avery and Reedy McClure, the bridesmaids will be giving the couple a very special gift: The results of the blood dowsing Dr. Katherine Whiting performed, a full blood map and blood report that will tell them with far greater certainty than palmistry what sort of life will stretch out before them.
''You let them take your blood?" I ask Reedy, unsure exactly who I mean by them. My sister-in-law's friends, perhaps. Perhaps something more generally paranoid, something general like dowsers. I know I don't mean my wife and my daughter, although I realize they will be standing right beside Katherine Whiting when the gift is presented and explained after dinner at one end of the McClure's long, wide dining room.
"Sure," Reedy says, shrugging. "What the hell? She said she'd throw in the test the state requires for a marriage license, and a free AIDS check."
Page 267
At the wedding ceremony of Patience Avery and Reedy McClure, there will be no incense, no chanting, no monks in white robes. It will be held, after all, in a small Congregational church.
The morning of the wedding, however, there will be a special non-denominational sunrise ceremony for dowsers of all religions and spiritual proclivities. It will be held on one of the small hills in the McClure compound. Patience expects at least half the people who have been invited to the wedding to attend the sunrise ceremony, as well as some crashers who simply want to hear radio personality and psychic Sas Santoli in person.
"Your parents are turning over in their graves," I warn Reedy. "I can't envison your father savoring the image of five or six dozen dowsers trampling through his meadows, and waving around a bunch of divining rods."
"I don't see any harm," Reedy says, shaking his head. "Patience promised me they'd replace all the divots."
At the wedding ceremony of Patience Avery and Reedy McClure, Patience Avery will be wearing pearls worn by Reedy's mother at her wedding, and at his grandmother's wedding before that. It's a tradition.
In return, Reedy will carry in his pants pocket the calcite crystal that Patience brought back years before from a dowsing assignment in New Mexico. Sharpened to a fine, triangular point and mounted on a pure silver chain, Patience says that the crystal balances energy fields, elicits positive human auras, andcarried by a male in a front pants pocketeliminates snotty comments from the mouths of nonbelievers.
The ski industry is a non-union industry, but it is nevertheless a tightly knit club. Environmentalists, however, are an equally supportive and clubby bunch.
Page 268
Consequently, Thursday morning, the day of the Copper Project appeal, the wide front lawn of the statehouse is packed with pickets and people. If there had been four hundred and fifty people at the hearing before the District Five Environmental Commission the last night of June, there may be twice that many this morning at the statehouse. Perhaps there are an even thousand.
Automatically Laura and I both reach for one of Miranda's hands, so that our daughter is sheltered between us as we walk through the group to the steps of the statehouse. Dawn Ciandella cuts ahead of us to ensure that no one tries to stand in our way, walking briskly with one hand just over her head to keep the sun out of her eyes.
"Are Reedy and Patience already inside?" Laura asks me softly, staring straight ahead.
"Maybe. Reedy had to pick up his 'aquatic expert' at his hotel in Burlington this morning, and escort him here. Seems he had a bad experience at one of these events in the southwest. Someone threw a dead fish at him."
I can feel Miranda tighten her fingers in mine, pressing my wedding band against my skin. Lined up on both sides of the walkway, surrounding us, are reporters and legislators, and the hundreds of foot soldiers recruited by both sides. I recognize Phil Robinson, director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, standing at the top of the statehouse steps, as if he were waiting for us.
Phil and I have never gotten along, we have never been on the same side of any issue. Until now. Phil's face is tan but the top of his bald head is a pasty white, as if he has lived outside this summer underneath a small hat.
He smiles at the four of us as we approach him.
"Doesn't anybody work in this state anymore?" Dawn asks him quietly, almost whispering. The two of them spent most of yesterday together with Reedy McClure and his Copper Project appeal committee, rehearsing witnesses and preparing their cross-examinations.
Page 269
"I thought you'd be pleased with the turnout," he says, his voice defensive. "I know we made an impression with the Environmental Board."
She shakes her head. "Well, you sure got out the vote."
Phil kneels before my daughter as if he were an uncle. "And how are you today, Miranda?"
On some level Miranda understands that this man and her father are not usually friends. Consequently, she has remained reserved and distant from him. "Okay," she says simply, looking back once at the crowd behind her.
"Going to give those people a piece of your mind?"
"Phil!" Simultaneously Laura and Dawn chastise him, together turning the man's name into something that sounds like an obscenity.
He stands up and looks back and forth between the two women, forcing an apologetic smile onto his face.
"Ease off," Dawn adds, sharing a glance with Laura. "Okay?"
He nods.
"Let's go inside," he says. "I wanted to catch you before we started because they've moved the room for the hearing."
"Who are 'they'?" I ask.
"The Environmental Board. They want to allow as many people as possible into the hearing, so they've moved it from the Aiken Conference Room to the cafeteria."
Dawn chuckles. "The cafeteria? We're meeting in a cafeteria?"
"The Aiken Room only seats about fifty people," Phil explains to our attorney. "The cafeteria seats a couple hundred."
"Oh good," Dawn says. "I'd hate to think our friends on the lawn can't join us inside."
"Me too," Phil agrees, oblivious to Dawn Ciandella's sarcasm.
I know the statehouse cafeteria well. When the Vermont legislature is in session, from January through the first days of
Page 270
May, I often have breakfast there, meeting with the senators and representatives from Vermont's counties and towns, asking
them in detail about their children and grandchildren, their lives from June to December. I rarely talk business at breakfast, but the hours I spend there are worthwhile. It is at those breakfasts that I become friends with legislators, wearing down their resistance for when it is time to press hard on a bill, when my clients absolutely must have their votes.
The room is clean, modern, but surprisingly dark. Although one wall has a picture window, it faces the woods behind the statehouse and actually gets very little sun. The remaining three walls face the interior of the building.
The Environmental Board, nine volunteers appointed by Governor Webster and her predecessor, have had all but six of the cafeteria tables removed. Of those six, four have been lined up end to end at the front of the cafeteria, creating what amounts to one long judicial bench behind which the Board will sit. The remaining two tables have been placed opposite it: One of those tables will be for our witnesses, and one will be for Powder Peak's.
All of the cafeteria's straight-back chairs have been lined up in rows facing the front end of the room, as if this were an auditorium and the metal warming trays and heat lights were the stage.
There are dozens of small groups of two, three, and four people already chatting idly throughout the room, but no members from the Environmental Board or the Powder Peak defense team have arrived yet. Nor is Reedy McClure anywhere in the cafeteria.
"Where do we sit?" Dawn asks, but I am unsure whether she is directing her question at me or Phil Robinson.
"We should be in the first row, by the windows," Phil answers, motioning for us to follow him across the room. When he raises his arm, I notice the time on his watch. Quarter past eight. The hearing is still fifteen minutes away.
Page 271
"Fine," Dawn says. "Scottie, why don't you and your family take the three seats closest to the windows?"
There is some noise, some activity, near the open doors at the back of the cafeteria, and Patience marches into the room carrying an attaché case in each hand, and pressing a third one against her ribs with her elbow. Her hair looks as if she has been asleep for a month, and her dresssomething dated and blue that may once have belonged to her motherneeds desperately to be ironed. She is shaking her head in disgust as she stomps through the room toward us, and no one dares stand in her way.
"What the hell do you people think I am, a bellhop?" she asks me.
"Us people?" I ask in return.
"You and Reedy and your environmental wackos! We get to Montpelier, there's not a parking space within eleven hundred miles, and so Reedy and Dr. Strangelove give me these briefcases to haul into the statehouse! I swear, they've got bricks in 'em!"
Laura quickly takes the attaché from Patience that her sister is balancing under her arm. Although I was enjoying the image of Patience Avery as a pack mule, I reach for the other two she is holding.
"Where are they?" I ask. "Reedy and the professor?"
"I told you, trying to find a damn parking space! Don't you listen to a word I say? Ever? They should be here by this afternoon."
Trying to pacify my sister-in-law, Phil Robinson gently touches her elbow and starts to guide her toward the front row of seats by the window. "Why don't you sit down," he says, his voice affected but serene.
"Don't patronize me, Phil," she snaps, whipping her elbow away from him. "And don't think for one moment we're going to sit in those seats by the window. By two thirty it'll be so damn dark on that side we won't be able to read our damn
Page 272
notes. No way. I want seats on the side of the room opposite the windows, because that's where all of the overhead lights are."
Phil takes a deep breath and nods. He manages to smile and croak out the word, "Fine."
Although there are nine members on the Environmental Board, only a quorum of five is necessary at any one hearing. Given the economic significance of this particular hearing, however, and the media attention it has received because of the catamounts, all nine members of the Board file into the cafeteria at exactly eight thirty.
Mitch Valine, the Board chairman, nods briefly at me and then at Ian Rawls, seated in one of the chairs in the first row on the opposite side of the cafeteria. Mitch reaches for his wooden gavel, and smiles at the room.
"I do this," he says, referring to the time he spends as chairman of the Environmental Board, "because they let me have a gavel. Real wood, too."
Virtually everyone in the audience chuckles, including Reedy and me. It is not that either Mitch's joke or his delivery is particularly good, but everyone appreciates the idea behind it: alleviating some of the tension in the room. Exclusive of the witnesses that Powder Peak and the Copper Project have lined up, there are approximately three hundred and fifty people squeezedseated or standinginto the cafeteria, including at least a dozen reporters. One of the maintenance workers told me that another six or seven hundred people are scattered in rooms throughout the statehouse, watching the hearing on closed circuit television.
Mitch slams the gavel down once on the table. "Oyez, oyez, attention. This hearing is now formally in session." He allows himself another grin, and adds, "I love that part. Oyez."
Mitch Valine has always struck me as an odd person to have
Page 273
joined the Environmental Board, but absolutely perfect once he was on it. Somewhere in his mid-thirties, he was sent to Vermont five years ago from Philadelphia by a cellular phone company to open the Vermont market. He has, as far as I can tell, no hidden agendas, and unlike the other eight members of the Board, he is neither a committed environmentalist nor a strong proponent of business growth.
Miranda sits between Laura and me, the three of us in the chairs closest to the wall. Patience surprised us all by expressing an interest in sitting beside Reedy in the front row during the proceedings, although Laura has whispered to me that it was not so much a longing to stand by her man in public, as it was a desire to prevent anyone in attendance from mistaking Dawn Ciandella for Reedy's woman.
The remainder of the Copper Project's side of the first two rows has been taken up by the witnesses that Reedy and Dawn have chosen, a series of economists, environmental experts, and representatives from the Vermont Natural Resources Council, the state Sierra Club, and VPIRG, the decidedly leftist Vermont Public Interest Research Group.
In the first two rows opposite us is the team John Bussey and Ian Rawls have assembled, a combination of people whom I know well, people I worked with for years, but now will not even look in my direction: Powder Peak's own environmentalists, hydrologists, economists, and engineers, as well as the two Colorado naturalists who insist there is no reason to believe there are catamounts left anywhere near Mount Republic.
Not one of these people will glare at me, not one of them will even glance my way. I am, in their eyes, not just a lunatic, I am ungrateful. I am a traitor of sorts, a turncoat to the cause.
And, on some level, I can understand their anger. They have convinced themselves, rightly or wrongly, that Powder Peak's future depends entirely upon their expansion. If the Environmental Board fails to uphold the permits that Liza Eastwick's district commission granted the resort; if the Board rules
Page 274
against tapping the Chittenden River because the water hasfor the momentstopped flowing; if the Board rules against cutting huge swaths through the mountain's forests because a father and daughter claimed to have seen three mountain lions there, then Powder Peak may, in their eyes, someday soon cease to exist.
Page 275
28
Mitch has called today's hearing a "quasi-judicial tribunal," and he is running it in what he would probably describe as a quasi-judicial fashion. First the Copper Project will present its appeal, as if we were the prosecution, and then Powder Peak will present its defense. If the morning proceeds as we expect, I will testify around eleven thirty, and Miranda will tell her story just before lunch.
Water Witches Page 30
