COME SIT DOWN WITH
THE OLD MAN
OF THE MOUNTAIN
IN HIS STUDY
Have a seat in front of the fire as The Old Man tells a few of his favorite stories.
I am a country lawyer. I have been a sole practitioner for over 35 years. It seems to suit my temperament, as you may appreciate after reading these pages. At times, I may not be the easiest guy to get along with, so I have not inflicted myself on any partners.
For years my office was on Main Street over a furniture store. The store was operated by three brothers, straight-forward honest men in flannel shirts, in a large rambling building. Behind my office and above their store there were what seemed to be miles of attics stretching back into an endless, rambling old wood-frame structure. I wandered around there from time to time, as a moveable wall in my library furnished a gateway to a dusty sea of inventory, discarded older pieces of furniture and just plain junk.
In those early days of my career, as is true of most country lawyers, I did a little bit of everything: real estate and business problems, wills and estates, some civil litigation, more than a few divorces and even some criminal defense, the latter usually on behalf of indigent defendants whose defense was paid for at the meager rates funded by the state.
In spite of a pretty fair record overall in the courtroom, I never won a drunk driving case. Probably it was my subconscious, expressing its disapproval for this incomprehensible behavior and subverting my efforts on behalf of my hapless clients. Perhaps for this very reason, I received occasional “referrals” of future clients accused of driving while intoxicated. If you stop to think about it, the usual source of such “referrals” would have to be the constabulary, since the culprit would be in custody following his apprehension. Maybe the authorities figured that I was all the counsel these defendants deserved. Consequently, I occasionally received calls from the police department explaining that someone was in need of my able representation. And if you also stop to think about it, these calls customarily came in the wee hours of the night.
Forgive me if I digress for a moment. I have never trusted file drawers. While I have an excellent index system, I have always worried that “out of sight” means “out of mind,” that a file - once it disappeared into the maw of the filing system - would never re-emerge in order for me to complete whatever task lay incomplete within. It follows, therefore, that work to be done must remain in plain view, lest it be forgotten. And so it is that my office has - as I suspect has many a solo country lawyer’s - been strewn with files and paperwork. Miraculously, I almost always know where everything is.
Which brings us to an evening, actually an early morning, when the phone rang next to my bed. Groggily I picked up the receiver and said “Hello.” At this stage of my life, with my children just toddlers and therefore close at hand, the main worry presented by an odd-hours phone call was that something had happened to one of my aging parents. Almost always though it was a call that went something like this: “Hello, this is Officer Such-and-such at the Littleton P. D. We have a subject in need of representation.”
It was always the “P. D.,” never the police station. And the person in need of representation was always a “subject.” Usually an intoxicated one. Probably an intoxicated one recently dragged from behind the wheel.
I quickly learned that - while this signaled an emergency for someone - it did not necessarily mean that I had an emergency. I was quickly disabused of any notion that I would achieve fame as a great DWI lawyer, and recognized that in fact there was very little professional fulfillment on the other end of these calls. Predisposed to turn down such opportunities, I usually found myself finishing the conversation something like this:
“Has the subject given a voluntary statement?” Euphemisms abound in the world of the police precinct; how can one give a “voluntary statement” when he is intoxicated, surrounded by men strutting around in uniforms, uttering their officious law enforcement bureaucratese, and detained in the police station with the harsh glare of its flourescent lights? There could never be enough Miranda and similar warnings to repair the impediments to sound judgment implicit in this context.
“Why yes, the subject has chosen to make a voluntary statement.”
In multiple copies, several languages, on sheets with big, fat pre-printed Miranda warnings, no doubt.
Yes, yes, yes.
“And may I safely assume that the subject has been administered a breathalyzer test?”
“Well in fact, after we explained the implied consent law to him, the subject did agree to a breathalyzer test.” The officer then would confirm that the test gave rise to the statutory presumption, even a very strong presumption of intoxication. Because, after all, otherwise the “subject” probably would not have needed my services.
“Officer, I think the subject needed representation, but I am not sure he needs much now.” And I would say good-bye.
Which is why I was not particularly surprised early one morning when the telephone rang and I heard, “Hello, this is Officer Such-and-such at the Littleton P. D.”
I responded in as friendly a manner as I could muster at 2 or 3 A.M. But this time was different. The officer continued in his best law enforcement monotone, “I was on routine patrol tonight behind the furniture store when I discovered that the rear door was not locked.” I remembered that an electrician had been working on the back part of the store the day before. “I secured the premises and proceeded to investigate for signs of a breaking and entering. I discovered the rear entry to your offices and, upon accessing the same, ascertained, sir, that your offices had been ransacked.”
My heart sank. Visions swept over me of toppled file cabinets, smashed photocopiers and typewriters, pages ripped from their bindings in my library, even a large oil painting done by my late grandfather that graced the reception area slashed in some mindless act of hooliganism. There was no point in trying to go back to sleep. I thanked him for the call and his professional handling of the matter, and hung up; then I proceeded to get dressed and drove in the middle of the night to my office, just hoping that I did not encounter any prospective clients careening their way home. I arrived safely and ran up the stairs. I opened the door and beheld the reception area apparently undisturbed, my grandfather’s painting safe and sound. No file cabinets lay topsy-turvy. Behind that the library seemed much as I had left it, a project or two spread upon the table waiting for me to finish them up. And in my private office I surveyed the usual clutter: files spread half a dozen deep across the vast desktop, chairs piled high with more files that had somehow gotten demoted from their spot atop the pile of priorities, still more folders piled on the floor because they had somehow defaulted to a much less urgent status.
For a moment I wondered what in the world prompted that young cop to wake me from a sound sleep in the middle of the night and send me on this fool’s errand; then of course I stepped back and took a more objective look at the mess that I had grown accustomed to, and realized how the mistake occurred.
Later, in lieu of filling out a crime report, I sought out the officer and explained that, No, my office had not been ransacked, it always looked that way. That was exactly how I had left it the afternoon before.
I first arrived in the North Country in 1970, at the peak of the hippie, counter-culture era. The North Country has always been conservative, both culturally and politically, and there was almost a paranoia about drugs here. Even when the rest of the country was looking the other way, winking at marijuana, it was regarded as the nose of the camel under the tent, the first in an avalanche of corrupting substances. Maybe my new neighbors were righter than they were wrong.
The old Yankees looked uncomfortably on these shaggy carpetbaggers, young men and women, many spoiled children of privilege, who seemed unkempt, who did not share their unquestioning patriotism, who opposed our military efforts in southeast Asia. Some suburban types may have come here from areas where possession of a token amount of pot was not even prosecuted. But we had a stern judge here, later suspended from the bar for unethical practices and relieved of his place upon the bench, but in the meantime self-righteous enough in dealing with the parade of bearded, long-haired young men who appeared before him for possession of an ounce or two of grass.
I was somewhat sympathetic with these contemporaries of mine, although I never indulged myself. I came of age during the 60’s and could empathize with their confusion over the conflicting forces that rent our culture, planted the seeds of mistrust in our institutions, and alienated generations from each other. But I did not understand why anyone - be it a hippie with a baggy full of pot, or an obnoxious tourist from the city - would come here totally heedless of the sensibilities of those who have lived here for generations.
So it was with some amusement that I noticed a pattern develop. As a young general practitioner, I found myself in criminal court defending various defendants accused primarily of misdemeanors from time to time. Within the jurisdiction of one court in which I often found myself was an intersection of two major U. S. highways. At this time the intersection employed stop signs to cause the east-west traffic to yield to the north-south traffic. Repeatedly there were serious accidents at this intersection, and eventually a more persuasive traffic light took the place of the ineffective stop signs.
The intersection is also not far from the state police barracks. Frequently I noticed that a trooper would station himself in his cruiser on the knoll which overlooked the intersection in question. This must have been like shooting fish in a barrel..
The pattern I noticed allowed me to develop a profile of my stereotypical Friday night defendant, for that was the night that court was convened in the jurisdiction that played host to the intersection. My defendant probably wore a ponytail and a scraggly beard, and more likely than not drove an old Volkswagen with a headlight missing and perhaps an expired inspection sticker. Usually he would be approaching my intersection from the west. Without signaling or coming to a full stop, he would slow and hook a right and head south.
My trooper would apprehend his culprit several hundred feet south of the intersection. As he approached the Volkswagen, my defendant would roll down his window and simultaneously the glove compartment would flop open because, of course, it never stayed shut, and a film canister would fall on the floor and pop open, spilling what the trooper would later testify was “brown vegetative matter” into plain view.
Later in my office my client, being well-versed in Constitutional law and the abuses of the pig-establishment, would explain to me his open-and-shut defense: “He didn’t give me my rights.”
My job was to explain to him that, by that point, he didn’t have any.
As mentioned elsewhere in these pages, I lived for a time in the tiny town of Easton, the remnants of a hamlet in a valley set in the midst of a vast forest on the western slope of the Kinsman Range which forms the west wall of Franconia Notch, the northernmost peak of which is Cannon Mountain from which is suspended The Old Man of the Mountain. I had a client in town who owned his ancestral homestead farm consisting of hundreds of acres that commanded one of the most beautiful views in the Northeast. He was a wiry little man of little education, in his seventies back then. One of the occasions on which I represented him was when a barn on the farm burned down one night, apparently ignited by high voltage transmitted from a fallen electrical distribution line, carried by nearly a mile of electric cattle fence through the woods and ultimately to a transformer in the barn. After scorching its way through the woods, melting ceramic insulators and setting fire to several trees, the charge arced from the transformer and set the barn on fire.
I brought suit against the electric utility, alleging their negligence in maintaining what was the original Rural Electrification Agency line that had first brought electricity to my client's farm and most of Easton Valley back in the 40’s. Along with the barn, my client lost all the contents which included an antique blacksmith shop and about eight antique Ford, Model A and Model T automobiles. Being an old-timer he was of course uninsured.
One day I was up visiting with him and touring the site to prepare for trial, checking out the utility line and observing the numerous patches in the utility cable, and following the blackened route through the woods taken by the errant voltage. On the way back, walking down the road with my client, I took in the panorama: the Easton Valley stretched out below me, the double peaks of Mt. Kinsman directly before me, and the range stretching from Cannon Mountain to the north and the Mittersill Resort high on its slopes all the way down to Kinsman Notch to the south and even Mt. Moosilaukee beyond.
I could not contain myself and complimented him on the breathtaking views from his farm. As we shuffled down the dusty road he remarked, “Ayuh, that’s what the assessor says every time he comes up to appraise the place.” I nodded my understanding that the tax assessor’s enthusiasm for the view could have a down side for him. Then he added, “I always remind him to take off for the cloudy days.”
I had another old client with a farm that had been in his family for generations also. He was deaf as a stump, but a good, hard working man. Back when I knew him, he was into his seventies as well, but he still put in a full day working around his place.
His farm was actually in Franconia, but not far from the Easton town line. And he owned a woodlot in Easton that had been in the family for generations as well.
Since I moved away from Easton it has built its own volunteer fire department, but back then - being as small as it was, and with most of the men in town either quite old or working out of town during the day - Easton had no fire department. Instead it contracted with the neighboring Town of Franconia for fire protection. Every time there was a fire in Easton, the Franconia Fire Department would respond, albeit from many miles away, to - as one local wag put it - “come out and cool the ashes.”
Franconia would then send Easton a bill for the call.
On the occasion in question my client, the deaf old farmer from Franconia, had been clearing some brush on his place. He loaded it on a wagon, and apparently intended to haul it behind his tractor along the road to Easton where he would dump it on his woodlot to decompose. As he putted along the road towing his wagon, he was puffing on his pipe. One of the matches he used to keep his pipe going must have found its way into his cargo, as it was noticed by one of his neighbors along the way that his wagon was ablaze. Efforts to alert the farmer were unavailing, as he could not hear their shouts, and he rode on. So, of course, the neighbors dutifully called in the fire. And, just as dutifully, the Franconia Fire Department responded and extinguished the conflagration, although they arrived shortly after the farmer and his flaming wagon had crossed over into Easton.
And, again as dutifully, Franconia sent Easton the bill, which prompted one citizen to comment that, it was not enough that Franconia charged us for attending to Easton’s own fires, they had now started sending Franconia’s fires to Easton to be put out.
Not long ago I attended to a closing for two of the afore-mentioned flannel-clad brothers. Years ago they built a fancy new store, and later I moved my office out of their old building into fancier quarters myself.
The closing was scheduled to take place at my office at nine o’clock Monday morning, the day after we “sprang forward” to daylight savings time. One thing I am fastidious about is changing my clocks on this semi-annual occasion. So I knew I had plenty of time when I got to my office early that day, about 6:30, and figured I would get some work done before their closing, and maybe even enjoy a walk down to the bank in the fine spring air to make a deposit when they opened at eight, and get back by nine.
So I worked and worked, keeping an eye on the clock in the corner of my computer screen. I was surprised at how much I managed to get done, and then as the clock showed 7:40, figured it was time to be on my way to the bank.
The walk to the bank takes me along the strip where their new store is located, and about 20 minutes later that is where I was, headed away from my office and in the direction of the bank. Suddenly a truck pulled up next to me, the two brothers inside. “Say Tom,” they shouted. “We gonna have that closing this morning?”
“Yup,” I replied. “See you at my office at nine.” And I continued walking. I could sense their confusion, and a conversation ensued in which I laughingly told them they must have forgotten to set their clocks ahead. A serious discussion took place in the cab of the truck, a brand new truck as it turns out, in which they puzzled over the owner’s manual and whether they had properly dealt with the time change. Finally they gained enough confidence about the issue to tell me quite positively that it was nine o’clock now.
Now it was my turn to be confused, but the strength of their opinion persuaded me, and I hopped in the truck and rode with them back to my office. We arrived to find the other party to the closing waiting patiently, wondering where everyone was.
To make part of this long story short, I had reset all the clocks except the least obvious one, that inside my computer.
The parties were friends and the closing was a pleasant affair, with plenty of robust guffaws, many of the laughs at my expense. I joked that, as I gain a firm foothold in middle age, I seemed to be exhibiting signs of dementia. I laughed at the thought of these loyal clients having to roam the town in their pickup, searching for their absent-minded attorney, finally catching up with him just as he is about to wander into the woods like some Alzheimer’s victim, then collecting him and bringing him back to his office to attend to their business.
There are worse things to be than a country lawyer.
