Word: milles
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...afternoon last April, in the central Maine town of Dover-Foxcroft (pop. 4,000), Charles MacArthur was standing beside the canal lock that feeds water from the Piscataquis River into the hydroelectric plant of Brown's Mill. He heard a strangely squishy, popping sound. "It was sort of like a baseball bat hitting a rotten stump," he recalls. The bulkhead below the 600-kw generator bulged from hydrostatic pressure and quietly let go. MacArthur (who owns the mill) turned, horrified, to see 100 tons of concrete, studded with steel reinforcing rods, tossed lightly into the springtime air as thousands...
...about. He was-reverent pause-a small businessman. He also happened to be another of the President's favorite people: an energy-crisis fighter, an advocate and indeed a practitioner of "small is beautiful" technology. Hydroelectric plants of no more capacity than the one at Brown's Mill, he told the now fast-fading uh-huh in Washington, are being built for $6 million. Could a taxpayer in good standing borrow $30,000 to restore a single little bulkhead? Hello? Hello...
...visitor to Dover-Foxcroft soon sees, in purely material terms the project consists of a complex of five buildings MacArthur bought for $100,000 with a mortgage taken out last July. Dating back to 1867, Brown's Mill stands in all the interesting stages of decay known to brick, mortar and wood. As MacArthur takes you on the conducted tour, picking his way buoyantly through the rubble, he can manage to see Brown's Mill as a stranger sees it-but not for long. For MacArthur, in this cavernous tomb to New England's vanished woolen industry...
...lamps. "The only water-powered African violet farm in the world," MacArthur announces with a mock-grand wave of the hand to introduce the domain of Cliff Shafer. A big, soft-spoken man with kindly "Please grow" eyes, Shafer patiently fights the presence of mildew on his gloxinia and mill cats in his potting soil. In Maine, the greenhouse, which costs about twelve times as much to heat as comparable space in a factory, is a faltering institution. Shafer can easily sell everything he grows at the mill to retail florists and wholesalers in nearby Bangor...
...there is Hermie Nutter. Hermie more or less came with the mortgage. On a now rusted water tank, next to patriotic graffiti of World War II (BUY WAR BONDS, REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR). Hermie scratched his name and the date when he first started to work at Brown's Mill - 1939. Over the years he did just about everything, from repairing spinning frames to caring for the steam turbines. Even after the mill, in its last metamorphosis as a leather tannery, closed down five years ago, Hermie stayed on as maintenance man. Now, on a lower floor crowded with alternative...