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One Angry Town: A Tiny Town Fights Over Water
One Angry Town: A Tiny Town Fights Over Water
One Angry Town: A Tiny Town Fights Over Water
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One Angry Town: A Tiny Town Fights Over Water

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When a Swiss company builds a water bottling plant in northern Wisconsin, it appears to be a great opportunity. It will bring dozens of jobs to an area that has been losing jobs for decades. But a group of local women wonder what impact large scale pumping will have on the local water supply. Their concerns put them in opposition to most of the town. Jessica likes the idea of jobs, but is concerned too about how some families might be impacted. When the bottling company president brings her to Switzerland to consult on the project, she doesn’t know if she is his prisoner, or his lover.

Back in Wisconsin, arguments over the bottling plant get violent. Women protesters are attacked, and shots are fired into one of their homes. Jessica and the women protesters try to calm the situation, but tensions are high when the project is stopped, and then sold to a new company. It is up to Jessica to get the project restarted, and to help locals about to lose their water supply.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 3, 2018
ISBN9780463147764
One Angry Town: A Tiny Town Fights Over Water
Author

William Wresch

I have three sets of books here. The first is an alternative history of the US, envisioning how things might have gone had the French prevailed in the French and Indian War. That series comes from some personal experiences. I have canoed sections of the Fox, and driven along its banks. I have followed the voyageur route from the Sault to Quebec and traveled from Green Bay to New Orleans by car and by boat. My wife and I have spent many happy days on Mackinac Island and in Door County.The Jessica Thorpe series is very different. It takes place in the tiny town of Amberg, Wisconsin, a place where I used to live. I wanted to describe that town and its troubles. Initially the novel involved a militia take over of the town, and it was called "Two Angry Men." But both men were predictable and boring. I had decided to have the story narrated by the town bartender - Jessica - and I soon realized she was the most interesting character in the book. She became the lead in the Jessica Thorpe series.I restarted the series with a fight over a proposed water plant with Jessica balancing environmental rights and business rights. I put Jessica right in the middle of a real problem we are experiencing here in Wisconsin (and most other places). How badly does a tiny town need jobs? How much environmental damage should we accept?The third series changes the lead character. Catherine Johnson solves mysteries. She also travels. It took her to many places I have been. The last several books take place in Russia. I admit I have no idea what is motivating the current madness there. Catherine looks, she tries to help, she struggles. What else can any of us do?

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    One Angry Town - William Wresch

    One Angry Town

    A Tiny Town Fights over Water

    A Jessica Thorpe Novel

    By William Wresch

    Copyright 2018 William Wresch

    Smashwords Edition

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

    Jessica Thorpe, bartender in a tiny Wisconsin town, thinks she can help her town land a new Swiss factory. It will bring jobs. But it may also threaten the local water supply. As the town forms sides and begins battling, Jessica flies to Switzerland looking to save the project – and the peace. Two men are crucial to the project, and she loves them both. By the time she leaves Switzerland, she needs one of them to bring the plant to her town.

    Chapter 1

    A Useta Town

    Tiny Amberg, Wisconsin was going to get a factory. Its first factory in decades. Its only factory. Time to celebrate, right? Wrong. The town went to war – with itself. To better understand what happened, it helps to understand this town. For starters, if you get into a conversation with any of the geezers here in town, it only takes two sentences before you get to useta. Things like We useta have the largest hotel north of Milwaukee. Or We useta have the largest granite cutting shed in the world. Give them half an hour, and they will give you a local history that is mostly accurate, all of it describing what useta be here.

    All of that was before my time. But if you want the short version, the town has basically collapsed three times. The first time was the most dramatic. The town is surrounded by granite outcroppings and there was a time when people used granite in building. So a guy named Bill Amberg came to town, started a quarry west of town, and then built a cutting shed next to the tracks you can see across from this bar. Was it the biggest shed in the world? How would anyone know? Do you see people taking measurements of sheds? But it was big, and it and the quarry attracted hundreds of men in the early 1900s (yes, the town is that old). Moving the blocks required rail lines, so there was also a lot of railroad men in town, so I have no doubt about there being a large hotel for all of them. You also hear stories of monster brawls between the two groups, boys being boys. So that’s the town for a few years.

    Then some guy invents a new way to build buildings, and granite is no longer important. OK, these things happen, but then the local boys make things worse. They go on strike. Who knows any more what they wanted – money, shorter hours, safer conditions? A hundred years later it hardly matters. Old Bill Amberg watches this go on for a few days and then says, OK, good bye. He clears out his office, gets on a train, and goes off to start another business somewhere else. Some claim Canada, some claim California. Who cares?

    A month goes by and people realize he ain’t coming back, and the business is really closed. Most people just move away (folks from here are good at that), but a few folks decide they have a plan to make the world great again. They hold a vote to rename the town from Pike to Amberg. Surely with a town named after him, Bill will come back and all will be good. To show you just how pathetic the whole thing is, they pick a day to celebrate the name change and send out an invite to Bill. Surely he will attend. Nope. He never responds to the invite, and they never hear from him again. You would think they would eventually get around to changing the name back to Pike, but they don’t. Don’t ask me why. Eventually the hotel and cutting shed burn down. The quarry is still west of town if you want to see it. Just a hole filled with water now.

    The second collapse comes about twenty years later. There was all pine forest around here, so much it took decades to clear. But eventually they had cut it all. So now what? Why not sell the land to farmers. They say the sales pitch began with If it will grow trees, it will grow corn. They also say the companies brought farmers up to see the land in the winter when the snow covered all the stumps. That’s probably true. Anyway, during the 1920s lots of farmers moved up here, spent their lives blowing up stumps and planting crops only to find that the land was poor and the growing season was short. They got some crops in, but they were barely hanging on when 1930 rolled along with the Great Depression. That ended farming up here. If you drive around you can see some one room schools that were used by the farmers, but the land was all taken for back taxes. What did the county do with the land? They planted trees. Look at all the county forest as you drive around. Pretty ironic, don’t you think? Families worked themselves half to death to take forest land and make it farm land, and here we are back to trees.

    The third collapse is going on now. Paper mills were built in Green Bay and Appleton, and it turns out the jack pines and poplars planted on that old farm land work pretty well for creating paper pulp. So the local boys would turn sixteen or eighteen, buy a chain saw, and cut pulpwood for a living. It’s not an easy living. I went out with my first husband a few times to help trim the wood he cut. If you go in the summer, the mosquitoes are grateful for the feast, and if you go out in the winter, you spend all day tripping over stumps and roots you can’t see under the snow. And of course you still go out in the summer and the winter because you want to eat. But now some of the mills are closing, and even the ones still open are using more recycled paper. Depending on how many beers they have had, some men will blame the Chinese, others will quote the price of paper in Finland and tell you that is the problem. But mostly we know the problem is electrons. All the newspapers up here have closed, as has the local post office. Who uses paper when you can use electrons? Electrons are faster and cheaper – and cool. There are still men out in the woods cutting pulp wood, but probably half as many as there were just ten years ago.

    So there you have it – a useta town. We are down to maybe a hundred people in a dozen or so homes, a block-long Main Street -- and that is only occupied on one side. What’s left is this bar, a small restaurant that changes hands every year or two, a tiny grocery store that is mostly just open in the summer and during deer season, and a post office building they closed two years ago. Welcome to Amberg. It useta be more.

    What do people do now? Some men still work in the woods. Women mostly work retail or restaurant jobs in Wausaukee. Old people collect social security and visit their doctors. The young either go off to college or join the army. And the young never come back.

    None of this excuses what happened that year. It wasn’t right. But in a useta town, sometime people useta have better sense.

    What about me? I useta be pretty dumb. I don’t claim to be brilliant now, but I think I am at least less dumb. When was I my dumbest? When my hormones went into overdrive. In other words – high school. Tiny. We started dating when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. He had just made varsity of the football team – lineman, hence the joke about him being tiny. We both had a bad case of high school hormones, and I was pregnant before the end of my sophomore year. Tiffany came just after my sixteenth birthday. Tiny was still seventeen. I worried the hospital in Marinette would make some big deal out of our ages, but apparently we weren’t the first.

    The local churches weren’t as open minded. My mother insisted we get married. And we tried, but it took over a year to find a minister who would do it. Finally we tried the guy at the Presbyterian church in Athelstane. I think the church had maybe twenty members. It’s not like he had lots of other things to do, so he agreed to marry us – if he could also baptize Tiffany. We agreed to a package deal, and that was that.

    Anyway, Tiny worked the woods for a few months after high school and then joined the Army. A couple months after he got to Germany he found his true love. He never told me her name. I think of her as Brunhilda and imagine her as six one and two hundred pounds. Not that it matters. It turns out the Army is pretty good about managing such marriages. They made sure all the paperwork was done right and guaranteed I would get money every month for Tiffany. So that’s that for Tiny.

    Husband number one almost directly caused husband number two. The Army made sure I got child support. It had to be direct deposited into a bank account. I’m seventeen, never had a job, never had a bank account, never dealt with any of that. Now I have to learn about such stuff. I needed three trips to the bank to have all the ID they wanted. Who knew you needed a social security card? Anyway, I’m running all around, Tiffany on my hip, learning to be an adult, when someone asks me if I have insurance. For the car? Yes, and for the trailer. Oops. I am pretty sure we have nothing on either. Turns out I am right. Now that I have determined to act like an adult, I decide to get insurance. Where do I go? Richard Larson Insurance Agency, Wausaukee.

    Rick is all of twenty two, just out of college, loans up to his eye balls to buy the one agency he could afford in a place he vaguely remembered driving through once on vacation. He is young and lonely. I am young and none too bright. I get the insurance policies, he invites me out, we are an item for about three months, long enough to create Britney. He takes me down to Sheboygan to meet his family, the weekend ends up being maybe an hour before he drives me back to Amberg, me crying all the way.

    Family objections not withstanding, he decides to do the right thing. We get married. Britney is born, and Rick starts looking for a wife more suitable to his family, namely one who finished high school and is not living in a trailer with a drunken mother. He finds a teacher at Wausaukee High and his life is all straightened out. I get another set of divorce papers to sign and a monthly child support check. Life moves on.

    I understand at this point a number of women would be pretty angry. Basically I have been a starter wife for two men who decided to trade up pretty fast after giving me a kid. And when I was eighteen, nineteen, and twenty you probably did not want to meet me when I was in one of my moods. But it turned out my mother was a much better grandmother than mother, so I had more help than I expected, and the girls… well the girls were marvels. Sweet, smart, helpful. Sure they had bad days, but there were so many good days when I look back on those times I can only smile.

    They are both in Green Bay now. They went down for nursing school. Tiffany first, then Britney two years later. Lots of science classes but always As and Bs. Tiffany is already an RN working for a hospital down there. Britney will follow in another year. Two sweet, successful young women. I get down to see them about once a month, and we have a great time out shopping or trying a new restaurant. They may have started life in a trailer, but they will not end there.

    Time to describe the bar. Lots of this story takes place in my bar. When the girls were small, I waitressed. After my mother died, I started bartending at the Amberg Bar – still minimum wage, but no more five a.m. shifts. I was around to get the girls breakfast and put them on the bus. Bars up here close at nine or ten, so I was home to check their homework and kiss them goodnight.

    The Amberg Bar was the last surviving business on town, and it was barely going. Afternoons I would clean the place, call the distributor in Peshtigo with my weekly orders, and pour exactly two glasses of wine for the Kaminski Twins, two really old ladies who would sit at the one table in the bar, play cribbage, and slowly sip their wine while ignoring me. Fine. That left me free to clean and restock. Around three the men would start coming in. Loggers, mostly. Winter they would be in early – it gets dark here around four, and it’s cold as hell. They’d want one dollar draft beers, and bad pizza. We’d talk, watch whatever game was on TV, and the evenings would pass.

    It’s really no more complicated than that. The pay sucked and the tips were laughable, but Clark (the owner) left me alone to run the place, and when your education stops at sixteen, it’s not like Wall Street is calling. The bar was warm, I had known some of these guys since grade school, evenings went by faster than you might think.

    Chapter 2

    It starts with a Fishing Lodge

    So, got the basics? Tiny town in the northeast corner of Wisconsin. Only business left – my bar. Me – twice divorced mother of two grown (and successful) daughters. I pour beer five nights a week, and visit my daughters on my day off. Not exactly the fast lane, but I’ve got no complaints.

    While things didn’t change much at the bar, elsewhere in Amberg there were two events that had people talking that year. First, the All Seasons Club was reopening. This is the large resort along the Menominee River. It comes complete with a nine hole golf course, a large restaurant, and a ballroom. Every four years it is resold, remodeled, and reopened. For two or three years everyone is hopeful, but soon bills go unpaid, staff leave, and the place closes yet again. But some company in Chicago had sold it to some other company in Chicago and it was reopening in June. That would be great for the local high school kids. They would have summer jobs as wait staff or grounds crew.

    The second, and more surprising event, was the sale of the fishing lodge on Town Corner Lake. The new owner had a history of success as a fishing guide to the rich and famous, and he was going to give this place a try. Why he would be more successful than past owners was unknown, but at least for a season or two a few more people would be passing through town, and maybe they would eat a burger at one place and have a beer at another. Who knew?

    Anyway, in late June I got a phone call from Mrs. Swanson. She and her husband were former cooks at the All Seasons Club two or three owners back, and were now catering for people, although you have to wonder how often their skills were needed, given the small size of Amberg and the few major social events that happened around here. But it turned out they were now catering for the fishing lodge. She and the new owner of the lodge, a Mark Baker, had been talking about doing something special on Saturday nights, the final night of the weekly charters. She had recommended a nicer meal and a hostess. He asked if she had anyone in mind. She did, and that’s why I was getting this call. There was only one person in town with a bartender’s license – me.

    We talked for over an hour about what I would do, what I should wear, and when I would do all this. She said I would be paid $200, which meant my answer was yes, of course, but I did need to clear it with Clark. Clark agreed instantly, maybe because he thought Morgan would bring in more business on Saturday than me since she was a hottie, and maybe because he was as curious as anyone else about how this new lodge owner was going to run his business. I would be his inside source. (Can I digress here about Morgan? I work at the bar five days a week, and she covers the other two. Why two? Because she needs more money than she can make in one. Is she hot? I never thought so. Okay, she’s not bad, but she’s thirty, still pretending to be twenty six. Get over it. And what about that name? Isn’t Morgan a kind of horse? But, enough about her.)

    So Saturday, a little after three I drove over to the Swanson residence. She would fill me in on details as we drove over to the lodge. Mr. Swanson was capable of speech, but it was an activity he generally left to Mrs. Swanson. First things first, trying to think of what a hostess wears, I had selected a floor-length red satin gown I had acquired in the time of Rick. Sure, his parents wanted him to dump me, but if I just found the right dress, and did my hair the right way, he would defy them, right? So I spent far more than I should have on some slinky dresses with very short skirts (that got his attention), and then tried this long skirt number to show how mature I could be, and took my hair to blond. Basically I was seventeen and thought like a seventeen year old. Did the clothes and hair work? Well, he certainly got me out of my dresses fast enough, but not so fast he was willing to stand up to his parents.

    So I ended up with a second divorce and a closet of fancy clothes I had nowhere to wear. The one I pulled out for my hostess gig had half-sleeves, a looser skirt that would be good for walking around the room, and an off-the-shoulder neckline, which this evening would be not very off-the-shoulder. Mrs. Swanson saw my dress and declared it perfect.

    The plan, once we got to the fishing lodge, was simple. I was to go to the bar and make drinks for the men, then I would sit with them at dinner, and later I would make drinks again. After eight years of tending bar, this was all simple. And the fact that I would be doing it for just five men meant I would be doing far less this evening and getting paid far more than I would have been back at the Amberg bar.

    And that is pretty much how things went for the evening. We arrived at the lodge around five. I helped the Swansons carry things from their car into the kitchen, and then I went to see what shape the bar was in. The lodge was built around a great room – a huge open space with leather furniture, a massive stone fire place, and a wall of windows looking out over the lake. The furniture with the lodge, since I saw little that was new. Just as well, the furniture was high quality, dark leather, very masculine and very comfortable. It was a fishing lodge, so fish now hung from all the walls. If it had fins and could be stuffed, it was on one wall or another. I thought it was silly, but it wasn’t my home – or my business.

    There was a massive bar at one end of the room, and I checked to see if it had all the mixers and ice that would be needed, but I should have known Mr. Swanson would have taken care of that. He did bring out a new bottle of scotch while I stood there, but everything else was ready. So I took up my position near the bar, and waited for one of the men to come down from the rooms on the second floor. I had been told there were four customers, plus the owner. That level of business I could handle easily.

    Finally near six the first two men came down the open staircase at the other end of the room. I stood with my hands folded in front of me as they crossed the room. Hi, I’m Jessica was my opening line. I took their drink orders, asked their names – Dave and Bryan – and learned they were from Minnesota while I mixed their drinks – Scotch for one, a local beer for the other. This was going to be simple. I encouraged them to sit in the leather chairs while I got their drinks, I brought the drinks over, and we carried on a conversation like we were old friends. Craig arrived a little later, I introduced myself, brought him his drink, and we were rolling. When I wasn’t getting their drinks, I sat on the arm of a chair near them, and we just kept talking – their week of fishing, their lost lures and the ones that got away –basically the same conversation I would be having back in the Amberg bar, but at a slower pace with less background noise.

    Mark, the owner, came in next and sat with the others. He just wanted battled water, so I got a glass, filled it with ice, and opened the bottle for him. He spent a little time adding to the introductions of the three customers, explaining which kind of fishing they had liked best, and there was some banter back and forth about who had landed – and who had lost – the biggest fish of the week. Basically they had all had fun, and they enjoyed each other’s company. The fourth customer – Zachery – didn’t arrive until nearly seven, explaining he had trouble packing, at which time I was told by all that Zachery had been late for everything this week, one more thing to laugh about. In short, the people and the occasion were pleasant, I monitored their drinks and brought more when needed, and the time passed like lightening.

    A little past seven I noticed Mrs. Swanson standing at the far edge of the room – my signal that dinner was ready. I deferred to Mark on this one. I just asked him directly – it appears dinner is ready, should we go in? He said we should, I offered to refill any drinks, and we all walked to the dining room. I was a little afraid of how many fish I would now find dangling from everywhere, but instead I found a mixture of nice quality décor – oak paneling, wall sconces, large beams on the ceiling – and just weird men stuff. There was a huge chandelier made of tangled deer antlers, dripping with small lights that might once have been on a Christmas tree. And then there was the fish. Apparently Mark had once caught a trophy Muskie. It had to be five feet long. Where did he put it? Hanging just behind and above his head, so I saw it every time I looked at him. Maybe that was the point.

    Since Mark becomes important in this story, maybe I should describe him. He was about five ten. I noticed in my heels, I was about the same height. He had a fairly square face, not bad looking, with dark hair now going gray. But there were two main features to the man. First he had obviously spent many years in the sun. His skin was deeply – and I would guess permanently – tanned. It made it hard to be sure of his age. I would guess mid forties, but he could be ten years either side of that. His other feature was his shoulders. Are fish really that heavy? He looked like he had spent a lifetime pulling whales from the depths. It was not a bad look, actually. His shoulders were covered in a pale polo shirt. All the men had gone with polos in various colors, two of them had also worn blue blazers for the occasion, and all of them had worn good pants – no jeans. As Mrs. Swanson had explained to me, they had felt they wanted something nicer on their final night, so they had showered, shaved, and put on the best clothing from the bottom of their suit cases.

    Dinner went very well. The Swansons served a three course meal – salad, then a nice steak with potatoes, then desert. Red wine was set in front of the men, white for me, food pairings be damned. As back in January, as hostess I decided the pace of the meal. Mrs. Swanson watched from the hallway, standing behind my left shoulder. When I noticed that everyone was done, I lifted my left hand a few inches, and she and Mr. Swanson cleared and brought the next course.

    Table conversation started around fish, but early on someone asked if I was from Amberg, and then it was endless

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