I guess I’ve been reading too much about open space lately, because last night I had the strangest dream. It was the year 2024, and the last students from Charlestown were about to graduate from Chariho High. Ruth Platner and Cliff Vanover, having finally achieved their lifelong dream of eliminating the town’s school fees, were the graduation speakers. Their speech extolled the virtues of exploring the world and seeing new places. Following the ceremony, they were on hand with lots of glossy brochures for colleges in Australia to try to ensure that the graduates would be far away from Charlestown if they decided (or didn’t decide but it happened anyway) to breed.
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| Rush hour on Route Two (circa 2024) |
After Ruth’s landslide reelection to the Planning Commission in 2012 (which was then renamed the Family Planning Commission), she and Cliff started putting in place their master plan for keeping residents of Charlestown from breeding through a combination of confiscatory taxes on additional children and an ordinance capping the town’s population at 2012 levels, meaning no one could give birth or adopt a child unless someone else in town moved away or died. (New residents had to show medical records indicating surgical sterilization.)
Unfortunately, Ruth’s zealous application of the town motto of “Whatever It Is, We’re Against It” had resulted in most of the town’s open space being marred by ugly cell phone towers. Federal law restricts the reasons municipalities can block cell towers from being built, and residents weary of bowing and scraping before the Planning Commission only to be told “no” eventually realized that the only way they could make large plots of land pay when they weren’t permitted to develop them in any way (lot sizes had been frozen in 2012) was to lease them for cell towers.
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| Charlestown Beach Road (circa 2024) |
This had had the unfortunate effect of interfering with Ruth and Cliff’s ultimate plan to depopulate the town, because it meant that anytime anyone died, their property was immediately snapped up by people eager to move here for the exceptional cell-phone service. In fact, after the deadly cholera epidemic in 2016, property values in Charlestown had reached near-Manhattan levels. The beach bathrooms approved in 2011 had never gotten built because Ruth and her planning commission minions micromanaged every design decision and the builders ended up dropping the project, by which point the town was broke anyway due to Lisa DiBello's lawsuit and couldn't get the bond financed. (This was when Ruth had herself appointed Planning Commissioner for Life in exchange for signing a contract promising never to sue the town.) After years of people going “au naturel” at Blue Shutters, heavy rains washed the muck into Quonochontaug Pond, contaminating the shellfish and creating the epidemic, which caused a run on all those suddenly vacant properties along East Beach Road.
And it turned out that Cliff’s “trickling-stream” economics plan, whereby open space was supposed to somehow contribute to the town’s tax base, was every bit as effective as trickle-down theory. Admission fees for nature walks through the pristine wilds and derelict buildings of the abandoned YMCA camp on Watchaug Pond after he and Ruth—whoops, I mean the town—purchased it simply hadn’t provided the windfall that they’d anticipated would allow them—whoops, I mean the town—to buy whatever privately owned land remained, and they’d run out of conservation organizations to beg for funds. And user fees to hike the Charlestown Moraine dropped off when hikers started dying after coming into contact with the many rare species of poisonous frogs that had been discovered to populate the vernal pools. Though the town is a mecca for birdwatchers since Ruth and Cliff passed the ordinance requiring cat owners to declaw their cats and keep them indoors and placed a bounty on feral cats.
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| US One in front of what was Larry LeBlanc's land (c. 2024) |
Overall, as long as you don’t have kids and like being either a farmer or a player in one of the town’s historical reenactments, life in Charlestown is pretty good. And of course for the Floridians, it’s a dream come true: high property values, low taxes—and great cell phone service to boot, so they never miss a phone call from their stock brokers while they’re at the beach. And they don’t even have to see the ugly cell towers since they’re all north of Route 1. Some of them do find it a tad inconvenient to have to arrive by stagecoach—Ruth and Cliff had all nonpermeable surfaces in town torn up and the only allowable road surfaces are either natural stone or crushed clam shells—but for most of the tourists, being dropped off at either the Wilcox Tavern or the General Stanton Inn is a happy sign that their vacation is about to begin.
And have we ever got dark skies now! Artificial lighting has been banned outdoors. And the police department was disbanded in favor of a neighborhood watch program—Cliff patrols Biscuit City Road every night with his flashlight ever aimed downward—so no more pesky flag having to be lit up at night at the police station. Deer, wild turkeys, and grass sparrows roam the streets unmolested.
Then the light from my clock radio woke me up. Hope the neighbors can’t see it through my bedroom window; I don’t want to be fined for light trespass …