"To be frank, Colin, I plan to be the solitary, sedentary type this summer. I have some serious thinking to do, and I thought a mountaintop would be ideal. How about you? What brought you and your family to Spudsboro?"
"Well, my wife and I had been hoping to find a smaller, healthier community to bring up our kids, and then this opportunity popped up. I'd always wanted to manage my own newspaper. Don't we all? So when the owner of the Gazette died and it went on the block, I grabbed it, although I may be in hock for the next twenty years."
"Are you talking about J.J. Hawkinfield?"
"He's the one! It's his house you're staying in. My kids wanted me to buy that, too, but they were asking too much money for it, and we don't need all that space. We're better off with a ranch house in the valley. And who knows if the school bus could get up the mountain in bad weather—or if we could get down?"
When they arrived at the golf club, groups were pouring into the clubhouse. Saturday lunch, it appeared, was the accepted way to entertain in Spudsboro. Men wore blazers in pastel colors. Women dressed to outdo each other, one of them actually wearing a hat. Altogether they were far different from the sweaters-and-cords crowd that patronized restaurants in Moose County. There were club-shirted golfers as well, but most of them walked through the dining room to a noisy bar in the rear, called the Off-Links Lounge.
Carmichael ordered a Bloody Mary, and Qwilleran ordered the same without the vodka.
"How do you like Tiptop?" the editor asked.
"It's roomy, to say the least. Something smaller would have been preferable, but I have two cats, and no one accepts pets in rental units. Dolly Lessmore twisted an arm or two to get me into Tiptop."
"Yes, she's quite aggressive. As they say at the chamber of commerce meetings, he's less and she's more . . . Cheers! Welcome to the Potatoes!" He lifted his glass.
Qwilleran said, "What do you know about your predecessor?"
"I never met J.J., but people still talk about him. They're thinking of naming a scenic drive after him. He was quite powerful in this town and ran the Gazette like a one-man show, writing an editorial every week that knocked the town on its ear. Mine must sound pretty bland by comparison."
"What was his background?"
"J.J. grew up here. His family owned the Gazette for a couple of generations, but he wanted to go into law. He was in law school, as a matter of fact, when his father died. He dropped out and came back here to run the paper, but he was a born adversary, from what I hear. He stirred things up and made a lot of enemies, but he also spurred the economic growth of Spudsboro—not to mention the circulation of the Gazette."
Qwilleran said, "From a conversation I overheard in a coffee shop this morning, there's divided opinion about economic growth."
"That's true. The conservatives and old-timers want everything to stay the way it was, with population growth at zero. The younger ones and the merchants are all for progress, and let the chips fall where they may."
"Where do you stand?"
"Well, you know, Qwill, I'm exposed to both viewpoints, and I try to be objective. We're entering a new century, and we're already engulfed in a wave of technology that's going to break the dikes. And yet . . . the environment must be understood and respected. Right here in the Potatoes we've got to address such issues as the stripping of forests, damming of waterfalls for private use, population density, pollution, and the destruction of wildlife habitat. How are they handling it where you live?"
Qwilleran said, "In Moose County we're always thirty years behind the times, so the problems you mention haven't confronted us as yet. We haven't even been discovered by the fast-food chains, but the situation is going to alter very soon. The business community is pushing for tourism. So I'll watch the situation in Spudsboro with a great deal of interest. Who are the pickets in front of the courthouse?"
"That's an ongoing campaign by the environmentalists," Carmichael said. "Different picketers show up each weekend—all hill folks from Little Potato, some of them with a personal ax to grind. There are two kinds of people on that mountain, living quite primitively, you might say. There are the ones called Taters, whose ancestors bought cheap land from the government more than a century ago and who still cling to a pioneer way of life, and then there are the artists and others who deserted the cities for what they call plain living. We call them New Taters. They're the ones who are militant about protecting the environment. Strange to say, some of the conservatives in the valley are afraid of the Taters, even though they're on the same side of the fence politically. It's not a clear-cut situation."
