Batten Down the Hatches, It’s Town Meeting Time
Have you seen the Norman Rockwell prints depicting “the Four Freedoms?” Specifically, have you seen the one entitled “Freedom of Speech” where a humble-enough-looking guy, in worker’s clothing, hardly coiffed and primped for being center stage, stands up among his neighbors at a small-town “Town Meeting” and says, well—something? Maybe it’s something his neighbors will laugh at, or sneer at, or roll their collective eyes about, or shout down. He stands up and speaks his piece anyway.
Heartwarming, isn’t it?
Matinicus Isle Plantation, the technical name of this place, has a “town meeting form of government,” which is still a thing among some smaller municipalities around northern New England. Town Meeting is a formal election, a structured budget referendum, and a recognized governmental procedure in the eyes of the State of Maine. It is not some funky tradition, some archaic hold-over from the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and lobstermen towed their junk cars out behind the breakwater, nor is it anything even remotely quaint.
Boy, I hate that word.
Anyway, Annual Town Meeting isn’t what all the armchair experts think who like to suggest we just make this stuff up as we go along. You know, “there are no rules east of the breakwater” and all that. There are regulations and established best practices with which we are expected to conform. It isn’t “a local custom.” It isn’t an informal straw poll of who thinks stocking the island with snapping turtles might be a good idea. It isn’t even usually a brawl.
That’s not to say it couldn’t be. Back in 1988, when I was the island teacher and the schoolroom was expected to be full for Town Meeting—and it was well-known that the older generation got themselves well-oiled in advance any possible public speaking—a couple of the regulars advised me to tape up the classroom’s large, plate-glass windows, the way they do in Florida when a hurricane is expected, with lots of masking tape “because,” they winked at me, “some of the boys might want to throw furniture.”
That says more about how new schoolteachers were mentored than it does about Town Meeting.
It did used to be a little bit different, basically in that a lot more “honor system” was in place concerning who did and didn’t vote (and how many times). The meeting was held in April for many years. April was often still mud season, and not too many seasonal folks were around. That was the general idea. A few long-term property owners made every effort to get across the water for the meeting one way or another. That might mean a wet trip in one of the ungentrified, slow-machine lobster boats of the early 1980’s, where they’d show up to vote smelling of sour bilges and soaked to the kneecaps. But back then, most everybody who lived on the island in the cold weather lived only on the island, and they were all registered to vote.
Sometime around 1986 or ’87, the “town fathers,” so-called, proposed to the State of Maine that a population of white-tailed deer, delicious prepared so many ways, be stocked on Matinicus Island. The item was duly placed before the voters on the Town Meeting Warrant, and the schoolroom walls were bulging out with people who wanted to vote on the deer project. Supposedly (and I firmly believe this to be true, or at least likely,) Vonnie Ames showed up with a couple of new sternmen who asked him in not-terribly-muffled stage whispers during the vote, “How do I vote on this one?” “Vote yes!” he commanded. Vonnie also supposedly voted twice.
As the clerk and registrar for many years (but not THAT year) I can tell you that Maine law does allow somebody to have an assistant during voting, if they wish, but the law states explicitly that said assistant may not be the voter’s employer.
In any case, the folks at Inland Fisheries and Wildlife recognized that regardless of how the citizens voted, it would have been cheaper to just buy every man, woman, and baby on Matinicus a cooler full of steak than to put deer on the island, inevitably to be eaten immediately (whether poached or, I guess, roasted, fried, or barbecued) and nothing further happened with that. Well—except that 40 years out, people still tell the story about Vonnie instructing his minions how to vote, just a bit too loudly.
We don’t do things quite the same way anymore. I’ve become absurdly strict about making sure people are duly registered before they raise a hand in Town Meeting, and ridiculously fussy about the procedures. Just ask anybody; they’ll agree. Ridiculously strict. We don’t tape up the windows, either. Sometimes, there are doughnuts.