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The town is making every effort to preserve its civility. To the old list of God and politics, the crank phone has been added as a topic requiring the utmost diplomatic discretion. "Some people have got the idea I'm carpetbagging on them," says Hathaway. But nobody speaks more affectionately of Elden than Alice Johnson, the chair of the Don't Yank the Crank committee, who came to Bryant Pond twelve years ago as an art teacher in the elementary school. She married another outsider and settled down in a handsome mid-19th century home by the lake. A Cuisinart and a microwave oven share the house with her crank phone. She is not a purist.
A past president of Maine's League of Women Voters, Johnson argues for a political compromise. Why not both dial and crank? Her defense of the crank is deliberately unsentimental. She quotes praise from a computer programmer: "It's so old it's in the advance guard." But behind the crisp march of her logic, Johnson dreams of a Bryant Pond for her daughters, now 6 and 8, almost as idyllic as the Bryant Pond of Elden's childhood.
What a charming spot for a renaissance of old values. There are little green islands on the lake. An elegant white house sits at the base of a rock cliff on the western shore. In the evening, frogs croak, crickets chirp, and the freight trains of the Canadian National Railway clatter by on the way to Montreal, the loonlike hoot of the locomotive echoing in the woods as if rushing back in time.
The public utilities commission is reviewing the sale a second time, and is still trying to decide whether a dual system of crank and dial would be practical. But meanwhile, what a strain it all is, living out a parable of progress—or not-progress—with its neat jinglejangle and the whole world watching.
When Elden Hathaway was eight or nine, his father installed electricity in the house. It was in the middle of winter, but when the job was done, the father turned on all the lights in the house, and Elden ran out in the road and jumped up and down to see the miracle of all that light blazing into the night. Over half a century later, Hathaway can still remember the excitement. Progress was a simple matter then.
—By Melvin Maddocks