“Every so often one or two of the retail people in Salamander would make a try at stirring us up. The young woman who took over the variety store in ’76 was that way. She formed a development group, pushing ideas that seemed pretty alien to the locals. Even got some advisers from down at the university to come up here, study things, and make recommendations.
“And, boy, the townspeople thought those professors were really queer geese. One argued in favor of what he called ‘bootstrapping our way up,’ which was like talking a foreign language to most of us. It went completely against the advice we’d been receiving from the governor and his economic geniuses, all of ’em hoping Salamander might attract a big meat-packing plant or, better yet, a laser research facility.
“Problem is, industry ain’t too excited about coming to a place where there’s no labor force, a decrepit sewer system, and a declining water supply. Executives take one look at Salamander’s golf course with its sunburnt greens and rattlesnakes, which I mentioned before, and they choose something a little spiffier.
“Anyway, Charlene Lorenzen struggled with her variety store, while the locals were shopping at the Falls City Wal-Mart, and tried to get us all foamed up about making Salamander into what she called ‘a place where people will want to come and live.’ I admit she had some interesting ideas.
“For example, since you can buy a house in Salamander for almost nothing, she suggested we provide a haven for struggling artists and writers. They’d pay their rent by giving lessons to all the locals and generally creating a more intellectual and artistic feel in the community. The boys at the elevator and over at Leroy’s had fun with that, saying the only thing worth painting around here was Alma Hickman’s cheeks and yellow stripes on the highway.
“Charlene talked about some other ways of getting things going, such as building a new sewer system and redoing our municipal water supply. But when it came to raising taxes a little to pay for them, nobody was interested. One problem with having a town full of older folks, though I’m generalizing a bit here, is that they’re not inclined to make investments in a future they’re going to miss.
“One of the economics professors who came calling at Charlene’s invitation made a lot of sense to me. He said Salamander was not going to attract major industry and pursuing that particular course of action was a waste of time. Instead, he argued we should get into what he called ‘vest-pocket manufacturing.’ Said all we had to do was visit some of the industries in Falls City or other such centers of economic excellence and see what two or three of us might produce in the way of subcomponents for the larger products being manufactured there. Said that producing a high-quality product at a reasonable price was a no-fail strategy every time. He pointed out that every new job in Salamander was a major addition and that we didn’t need all that many new jobs to keep Salamander going.
“He also said we needed to decide what kind of place we wanted to be and then work toward that. To those accustomed to government largesse and laissez-faire, all at the same time, that seemed awfully managerial. One possibility he offered, which went along with what Charlene was thinking, was simply to define Salamander as a bedroom community, kind of a suburb, for Livermore and Falls City and then work on making it the best possible place to live and raise a family.
“Among other things, he suggested the local implement dealer ought to move all his rusty combines off vacant lots on Main Street, since that detracted from the appearance of the place. That was an unfortunate suggestion and got him on the shit list of not only the implement dealer, but also the many folks here apparently seeing rusty farm machinery as objects of beauty. That’s the only reason I can figure out why they dump ’em in ravines on their farms, so they can have a pleasant evening’s stroll down to look at the 1942 hay rake lying there on its side.
“The professor’s list of things to try seemed endless to those who saw none. He kept saying, ‘You don’t have to be fancy, you just have to see the possibilities.’ Most of us had trouble with that second part, but we were polite to him during the free noon meal at Clyde Archer Legion Post 641 and wished him a safe trip back to the university.
“After a while, Charlene got kind of tired of people telling her that every new idea she or somebody else suggested wouldn’t work in Salamander. You could see it in her face. Finally, she sold off her remaining stock at bargain prices and closed her variety store. Last I heard, she was operating a home-decorating shop in Falls City and doing real well.
“In any case, talk on the street and at all the local gathering places was about the new highway. U.S. Representative Larkin held a press conference in the Legion Hall where he extolled the virtues of concrete and traffic and economic development along with its sidekick known as progress. He even mumbled about how maybe the highway could bring about a reopening of the mines over in Leadville.
“Looking out at a fairly grim horizon, then, the only hope the residents of Eble Olson’s town could see was the proposed interstate highway. It wasn’t ever made quite clear just how the road would benefit Salamander, but all the experts said it would, leaving the exact nature of those benefits to our own fertile imaginations.
“For a while, Carlisle and one Mr. Moore, a professor over at the community college, plus a group of outsiders interested in hawks and their well-being, stopped the highway dead by filing a lawsuit to halt construction while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was trying to figure out whether or not to list the T-hawks as endangered, since they was almost extinct. In spite of our collective intent to destroy virtually everything in the name of improved shopping malls and other features of the good life, it seems some do-gooders, long of hair and bereft of love for their country, got some laws passed years ago saying you couldn’t destroy the habitat of animals if their species was near to passing into oblivion.
“There were several months there when the little T-hawks appeared to be a severe roadblock, in a manner of speaking, and caused considerable hand-wringing in all the papers. Various creative solutions were hatched over beer at Leroy’s. Several of the boys said there weren’t many of the birds anyway and about ten minutes of shotgunning could turn an endangered species into an extinct species, in which case it wouldn’t be endangered anymore. There was a certain logic to that, I had to admit. But there was also the risk of about twenty years in jail and a fifty-thousand-dollar fine, which sort of cooled things off.
“Instead, they got some bumper stickers printed up that read, MY FAVORITE BREAKFAST? FRIED T-HAWK. That sort of mindless poop appeals to people without minds, so pretty soon almost everybody in Salamander had one of the stickers on their cars and store windows. Fellow named Ray Dargen pasted one on the door of Danny’s, but Thelma scraped it off that night with a razor blade.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Moore got quieted down pronto when the president of his little college said the highway was clearly in the best interest of the school and that Mr. Moore’s support of the highway clearly was in Mr. Moore’s own best interest. Moore, however, was a gritty fella and hung in there behind the scenes for the duration with Carlisle.
“Things got pretty dicey. Word was that funding for the highway was getting shaky, and that only increased the level of frustration with those opposing the road. Eventually, our congressfolks said they’d support oil drilling on the continental shelf near Santa Barbara, California, in exchange for voting on a bill that somehow or another exempted the T-hawks from protection, which was made easier by the fact that two other pairs of hawks had recently been found in locations southwest of here. Bird lovers testified in Washington, D.C., that the additional T-hawk habitats were also being destroyed and that it was vital to preserve the Yerkes County site. You could hear ’em scream from here to the White House, but it didn’t do ’em any good, and truth went marching on.
“At first, some of the local ranchers and farmers who objected to the road cutting through their land were on Carlisle’s side, though they admitted to being a little uncomfortable aligned with radica
l environmental causes. More than that, they were afraid the locals would start calling them ‘T-bird,’ which is what Carlisle was being called behind his back.
“Axel Looker led this group opposed to the highway going near or through their land. But when Axel saw the money being offered for his property, he sat down and did some figuring, ‘penciled it out,’ as the boys around here like to say. The generous offer would allow him and Earlene to retire in Florida, which they’d been wanting to do for some time. When Axel withdrew his opposition, the coalition folded. Axel also let it be known that he would no longer scoop out Carlisle’s lane in the winter.
“It’d be unfair to imply that Carlisle was completely by himself in this, though it was pretty near to that. One ranch couple in particular, Marcie and Claude English, hung in there with him. But they were kind of outcasts anyhow, since they were deep into something called ‘holistic resource management,’ which they claimed would restore and preserve the grass out here for decades more of grazing. For those raised on Genesis and its reassurance that we humans are to have dominance over everything God created, that all sounded like something a little to the left of Satan. Besides, the idea was thought up by a fellow from Africa, and everybody knew Africa wasn’t doing well. But Claude and Marcie were kind enough to have Carlisle over for dinner a number of times during all of this and refused to budge, forcing the government eventually to use assorted legal atrocities on ’em.
“Carlisle and his buddies held up progress on the road for several months, but their options were steadily declining. And I knew the final public hearing over at the Livermore High School gym would be worth attending to see if Carlisle had anything else left in his arsenal. So I’d been fishing around with Claude English—groveling, as a matter of fact—and he offered to take me the following Tuesday evening.
“I’d guessed it was going to be a real shootout and thought about wearing my old army helmet, just for fun. But I was afraid the great business minds trying to turn Lester’s into a trap for all the tourists supposed to blow into Salamander, following the concrete trail we’d lay for them, would use mental incompetence as grounds for my eviction.
“In that case, my worst fear was they’d send me out to the Yerkes County Care Facility, which Bobby Eakins called ‘the Boweling Alley.’ So I decided to remain as inconspicuous as possible.
“Claude and Marcie picked me up the evening of the highway hearing. Susanna Benteen went with us. That was kind of fun, since I’d never been close up to her, let alone talked at all with her. She was real nice, asked me a lot of questions about my life and times, laughed real genuine when I tried to get off a little joke or two.
“She wasn’t at all distant like I thought she’d be, and it gave even an old guy like me goose bumps just to be riding along in the same car with her. Something kind of haunting about her, like she’d seen about everything there was to see. And, of course, she was just plain fun to look at, like a good painting or something, and I got to wishing I were a little younger. Did that just for a moment, then settled back and enjoyed the ride on a crisp February evening.”
I could see the old man was a little tired from all the talking and suggested we take a recess until the following day, giving me time to transcribe my notes. Around eight o’clock the next evening, I met him again and bought a beer for myself and whiskey for him.
“Where was I?” he asked when we had settled in a booth.
“You, Susanna Benteen, and Marcie and Claude English were on your way to Livermore for the public meeting.”
He nodded, took a sip of whiskey, and got his thoughts organized.
“Well, picking up where I left off, the Livermore gym was hot and didn’t smell too good. Radiators hissing, people fanning themselves. Bowing to public demand, the school janitor opened the side doors, letting a breath of fresh air into the place. But those sitting near the doors started complaining about the draft, so he closed them again, leaving all three hundred and fifty of us to breathe a recirculating swirl of greed, hostility toward Carlisle McMillan, and old jockstraps.
“The ground rules for the meeting were as stifling as the air in the Livermore gym. Each person was given an allotted speaking time of ninety seconds and could rise only once, thus curtailing honest discussion of any kind.
“Things got started with a statement read by one R. M. ‘Highway Bob’ Hawkins, who took a sip of water and then introduced himself as executive vice president of the state’s Associated General Contractors. He pointed out that for each dollar spent on construction, a spin-off of two seventy would be generated by something he called the multiplier effect. He also said that for every one million spent on road construction, sixty-seven workers would be put on various payrolls, meaning that something in the neighborhood of about forty-five hundred jobs would be created in the state by just the construction activity itself. He finished up by saying, ‘There’s no question that the great driving machine of our economy is construction. It’s the real pump primer that gets those waves of economic benefits rolling.’
“At that point, Claude English rose and said that if construction generated so many good things, why didn’t the state just build a bunch of pyramids and solve everybody’s problems? A good part of the audience laughed, even though they all knew Claude didn’t have his thoughts together on the highway project. Still, he was one of them, had been for a long time, and a little joke was all right. The moderator rapped his gavel and called for order.
“Following Highway Bob’s chest thumping and Claude’s comment, the audience was treated to statements supporting the highway by the Falls City Chamber of Commerce, the Yerkes County Development Authority, the Livermore Boosters Club, the Farm Bureau, and the High Plains Development Corporation. Bill Flanigan of HPDC looked serious when he said that his group had carefully weighed all things pro and con about the project before coming down in favor of the road passing through Yerkes County, also noting there just weren’t many cons to be found, if any.
“Marcie English then got to her feet and tossed up a nice soft one for the experts to shoot down. Her voice was a little shaky, not being used to speaking in public and all, and her main argument had to do with preserving the family farm and not taking land for road construction. The moderator smiled and thanked her for her input, as he called it, reminding her the Farm Bureau was in favor of the road, and looked around the room for the next pigeon.
“There was silence for a few seconds. Then Carlisle McMillan, looking awfully tired from trying to fight the highway and earn a living all at the same time, stood up, stated his name as required, and got his endgame under way. He simply asked the experts to prove the selected route was the best one based on the criteria they had listed in volume twelve of the report. He’d acquired a copy of the report, all fifteen volumes of it, and had spent a lot of time reading and calculating, using instructions supplied by a Stanford professor, he later said.
“The moderator, a public relations specialist from the State Highway Department, gave Carlisle a condescending smile and said the selection involved sophisticated mathematics, implying Carlisle should sit down and be a good boy because the figuring was way over his head.
“Carlisle, showing no signs of discomfort, replied, ‘I think I’m capable of understanding the calculations, and I’d like to see them demonstrated.’
“That set everybody off jibbering and booing Carlisle. See, most folks don’t even like the word mathematics. The very mention of it usually is enough to cause a run for the exits by the general public. So when Carlisle stood his ground and asked for proof, there was a lot of mumbling about his gall and how they all wished he’d go back to California, where smart-asses who understood mathematics belonged in the first place.
“Things got more interesting at that point. The moderator conferred privately with Dr. Wendell Hammer, chief brownshirt for the propeller heads. After that, the moderator, red in the face and stuttering a little, said that the person who’d done the calculations wasn’t in atte
ndance that evening. Carlisle said that wasn’t his cart to haul and suggested that certainly others present were capable of showing why the proposed route was best, given they were so strongly in favor of it. More huddling up front. Over in the amen corner, the local leaders were highly agitated.
“Dr. Hammer got pushed to the forefront of things and tried to smoke it by Carlisle with a bunch of technical gibberish involving stuff with names such as ‘social utility functions’ and ‘discount rates.’ Carlisle took it all in and said his personal calculations conclusively proved that another route forty miles to the west was the best one, based on the criteria presented in the report itself, and that he’d be happy to demonstrate that fact. He also said, and I wrote this down pretty much word for word: ‘The discount rate used in this study is far below the true cost of capital for the project. I’d appreciate knowing how you chose the rate you used. It’s not realistic, and anything approaching a realistic figure will produce a benefit-cost ratio favoring the western route even more. Furthermore, I can prove the western route is better even using the crummy numbers you experts have put in for the discount rate.’ ”
The old man chuckled. “To those in attendance, this conversation between the good Dr. Hammer and Carlisle was like a battle between androids employing light swords and ray guns. Nobody had any idea what the two of them were talking about, including me, ’specially when Carlisle used the word sophistry as part of his criticisms. Besides, everyone already knew the proposed route was best since it included Livermore and Falls City, and why all the fuss over an extra fifty million dollars in construction costs anyway? Somebody else, the nation’s taxpayers, was footing the bill for that.
“The moderator tried to invoke the meeting rules on Carlisle, saying, ‘I think maybe we’ve heard more than enough from you, Mr. McMillan,’ at which point the crowd applauded.