Free Idyll Banter by Chris Bohjalian Page B

balloting. The result, he says, “is a lot more people voting who haven’t been a part of the discussion.”
    Marsters’s moral? He has two. Democracy takes time; at the very least, a single Monday night or one Tuesday a year. And, at its best, it will be a messy business.
    Perhaps that’s why someone long ago picked the first week in March for Town Meeting Day: What better way is there to emerge from a winter’s hibernation than to gather as a tribe in the center of town and welcome in mud season with the sloppy but satisfying work of self-governance?

VILLAGE’S CENTER STARTS IN
AISLE ONE
    DESPITE MY DEEP appreciation for electronic mail and the power of the Internet to ferret out information quickly, we have yet to invent a means of communication as efficient, speedy, or dependable as a good general store.
    We have that sort of emporium in Lincoln: well-stocked aisles of bread and canned goods, a couple of refrigerator cases and freezers, and a small hardware section in the back, all serving as the front, essentially, for the sort of impressively low-tech transmission station or relay center that must make phone companies jealous.
    Everyone in Lincoln, of course, understands this. If you absolutely must get a message to somebody fast . . . you call the store. If you simply must know why the fire engines just left the station . . . you phone the store. If you have to leave town in a hurry and need someone to milk your three-hundred-pound llama . . . well, you call the store.
    Husband and wife co-owners Dan and Vaneasa Stearns have become human fiber-optic cables, linking the village in ways no technology ever could.
    One day this summer, I saw how we depend upon them. I was in the midst of the sort of home repairs that demand an hour from most guys and take me about a week. So I wound up walking to the store every few minutes in need of yet another three-cent nut or four-cent bolt, or some free (but invaluable) advice from Dan about how to drill a new screw hole into a metal light fixture.
    In the time it took me to visit the store three times, Vaneasa received four phone calls.
    Nancy Stevens, the local private investigator (every village needs one) and llama-meister, had to travel abruptly to Boston, leaving behind Holly, her llama, and Holly’s new calf, Barn Baby. Barn Baby was going through a phase in which she insisted on nursing from a barn beam instead of from Holly (hence the name), and so Nancy needed someone to help her friend Ruth Shepherd milk Holly until she returned and could get Barn Baby back on llama-manna instead of pumpkin pine.
    And since you won’t find an assistant llama-milker in the Yellow Pages and Nancy needed one fast . . . she called Vaneasa.
    A problem? Nope. Vaneasa instantly thought of Pam Smith, because Pam keeps a thousand-pound Scottish Highlander Hereford Cross beef cow as a pet and probably wouldn’t mind holding Holly while Ruth was working the business end of a particularly woolly milk machine.
    A few moments later, local septic-system cleaner Alan Clark needed to reach local excavator Chris Acker right away, so he called Vaneasa and asked her to have Chris call him. Now, when you’re a septic-system cleaner and you need an excavator, you don’t mess around. Time is, well, of the essence.
    And so Clark didn’t waste precious minutes leaving a message at Acker’s company and he certainly couldn’t count on a cellular phone in Lincoln. As Priscilla Presley and a forty-person film crew discovered two years ago, cell phones don’t work in our hills.
    Did Acker get Clark’s message quickly? You bet. Acker arrived at the store in search of a ham salad sandwich less than ten minutes after the local septic-tank czar had left a bulletin for him there.
    Yet the flurry of phone calls was not yet complete. Vaneasa would receive two more that would have nothing to do with such inventory staples as Slim Jims and Pepsi and