Nothing Ventured

by Roderick Price

  “Ms. Thompson, you or your designee now have the floor,” the judge said, his somber tone jarring her back to reality. He looked at her over the top of his glasses, motioning toward the State’s lectern. He had been the faculty advisor to Law Review her second year. If some lawyers from New York or Houston thought they were going to come into Madison and pull one over on the locals, they were sadly mistaken. If she ever needed a recess, a motion, a multi-day stay of proceedings, with her old law school professor, all she had to do was ask. If it was even close to the realm of appropriateness, she had it. Today was a little different, even though she had Jason beckoning for a morning break to review the latest proposal, she slowly gathered various compilations of documents, and after some length, moved to the lectern. The entire courtroom focused on her every move, awaiting the state’s response.

  She spoke with no benefit of prepared remarks for she had just been handed the latest oil company proposal minutes earlier. Still, she seemed completely at ease, to the point of taking her coffee cup with her to the podium.

  “Your honor, esteemed colleagues, all of us have worked long and hard to craft an approach which balances our overriding concern for the environment with the real needs for jobs, growth and economic prosperity for the people of Wisconsin. We will need additional time in committee with state and industry representatives to review and finalize the details of the proposal as outlined this morning. However, I would like to say that the state of Wisconsin believes that the proposal by these oil companies represents a breakthrough in providing balanced growth to the people and industry of Wisconsin. I applaud the efforts of the senior executives of these companies, and your Honor, I believe we have the basis for granting approval to the oil companies the right to move forward on this facility. At this time, the State will seek no injunctions that would impair the progress of Superior Oil Refining and Lubricants Company as outlined in defendants’ draft proposal, and we look forward to finalizing the terms over the coming days.”

  The stunned Judge looked from Taylor, to the oil company table, back to Taylor and then up to the huge old Waltham clock on the wall. Finally, no more than fifteen minutes into the proceeding, he slammed down the gavel firmly on his desk and announced to all that no injunction would be granted against the oil companies in the State vs. Superior Refining matter. Court was adjourned. As the fat, balding, graying oil men in suits warmly congratulated each other, jeers from the gallery overwhelmed Taylor with “traitor,” “wimp” and “sucker,” and worse. Jason, not looking or speaking to her, quickly packed his things and deftly darted out through the clerk’s alcove. She was left alone to slowly pack the huge stack of documents in front of her chair into her worn briefcase. There would be no big press conference today. She had let the day belong to the oil companies.

  CHAPTER 26

  Taylor had called the Fairmont herself to request a lake view room. There was a commuter flight down from Madison, but she had taken off right after lunch and took her time driving down. When she got to Elgin, she stopped for a rest. She spent over an hour drinking coffee at the over-the-freeway McDonald’s, just watching the cars and trucks streaming below her. Most of the cars had one passenger, possibly a businessman on a client call, a worker returning from her day, a student, a trucker, or a nurse. An occasional car had a nice family in it, with Dad sitting very upright driving and Mom looking across the seat toward him, engaged in conversation to pass the time, probably catching up in their busy lives, kids dozing in the back seat. She poured the sugar packet out onto the serving tray and made tiny designs in it with her stirring stick. Then she would stare at the cars for a while—even found herself counting them—and then turned back to her little sugar pile, first piling it all closely together, and then spreading it broadly and evenly out over the thin paper cover on the tray. A couple of men had waited to catch her eye, and smiled at her, but she returned a cold, lifeless stare that immediately made them glance quickly off in another direction.

  It had now been two weeks since Martin had called her. He had seen that she was a speaker at the Chicago API Conference, talking about environmental regulations and issues. He really wanted to have dinner with Taylor and catch up with her. She thought back to their steamy encounters in northern Wisconsin. Martin also said he needed to talk to her about some business. When she started joking with him about what kind of “business” he had in mind, he had immediately gotten very serious and asked that she not mention to anyone that they were meeting. Strange.

  CHAPTER 27

  “Good morning, Ma’am, I am Larry Walker with Walker Resources, and I am wondering if I could speak with you or the man of the house about some timber-related business.”

  Jesus, this was easy. Not only was he good at this, these people were just so trusting. He had been in Houston too long. Maybe he could come up here in a few years and buy a small piece of land on a lake. Great fishing. Long bow season for deer. A man could just live off the land. Get a double-wide like this guy had done. Good people up here, too. Kept to their own business.

  “Why Mr. Walker, Roy went down to the co-op about an hour ago to pick up some drill bits. He should be back any minute. You can either sit and have a cup while I put away these dishes or stop back later.”

  “Oh Ma’am, I couldn’t trouble you for some coffee, I’ll just wait out in the car for your husband to get back,” he said, turning convincingly back out the door.

  By the time Roy returned, Larry and Helen had become pretty good friends. Roy was sixty-two, on disability from the phone company for the past ten years. A lineman, he had taken a bad fall and hurt his back. No brothers or sisters so they owned the land themselves. That was the worst, when one of the kids was living on the family farm. They were both on their second marriage. Helen’s dad had actually bought them the land when they got married. The factory had towed the double-wide all the way from Wausau to the site back here in the woods. One daughter was divorced, working in Superior as a nurse’s aide.

  “Is that the new Oldsmobile?” asked Roy as he came through the front door.

  “Yeah,” said Larry, never missing a beat. “They call her the Aurora. It’s a rental of course, but I really like it. This one’s got the V6 in it, so it’s got pretty good get-up-and-go for one of the newer cars.” Roy was smoking a pipe, looking a lot younger than sixty-two. Didn’t look like his back was hurting him much, either. He still looked lean enough to strap on those spikes and walk a pole.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” said Roy. “Seems like you can’t even buy a car with a V8 anymore. Name’s Roy, what can I do for ya?”

  A helluva handshake. Larry would need to be pretty direct with this one.

  “I’m with a small timber company called Walker Resources. We’re in the pulp and paper business, supplying pulp feedstock to the mills down in Georgia.”

  Roy leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “We ain’t really interested in pulping off the land, Larry.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Larry. “If all this was about was pulping off the land, I don’t think I’d have the stomach to do it. For years, all the company would do is clean off the pulp trees and replant them with the cheapest, fastest growing trees they could find. Then in another five or six years, they’d be back in, cleaning off the land again and replanting the same old cheap trees. They made a fortune. But a couple of years ago, the company founder came down with lung cancer. He started thinking about, you know, giving something back. It turns out that when he died, he left his estate and company in a trust dedicated to conservation. That’s when I decided to come to work for the company. So now, rather than just pulp off land and replant it with cheap stock for the next round of milling, we replace it with top quality, hybrid hardwoods.”

  “What kind of hardwoods,” asked Roy. He was leaning forward over the table now, puffing slowly on the pipe.

  “We analyze lands all over the country to find prime spots to do this and we thi
nk this area around the State Forest is best for a mix of oak and walnut. I am told oak was one of the primary hardwoods here more than a hundred years ago.” Larry had perfected this story. All of his leases contained language that gave him all of the underground mineral rights to the land, as well as the right to clear-cut. But he wasn’t telling anybody about the oil reserves, right under their noses.

  “Yep, was mostly oak, and of course, white pine. Not jack pine like the junk that is out there today, but big white pine. Grandpa said that some of those trees were so big that sometimes one forty-foot section of a tree would fill up a whole flatbed rail car.”

  “Actually,” said Larry, “my grandfather was one of the boys that did some of the original cutting up here. His dad was a no-good drunk who finally just up and left them when Gramp was just a little boy down in Shreveport. When he was twelve, he hitched a riverboat ride up here on the Mississippi from New Orleans to Prescott. Came right up the St. Croix with some loggers. Got a job carting sawdust in a wheelbarrow at one of the big mills down by Spooner. He got paid fifty cents a day and all he could eat.”

  Larry took a long drink of coffee and a breath. Best to slow down with people. “So, he never talked about himself, but one time when my brother and I were squabbling over some candy, he said he worked the entire first year and sent back every single penny he made to his Mom and two sisters. Joined the Army as one of the first machine gunners back in the First Big War and made it through all right. Settled back in Shreveport after the war and never made it back up here.”

  “You got family?” asked Helen.

  “Well, not really,” said Larry. “Divorced, no kids.”

  Larry looked over at Roy and Helen. Helen had stopped working on the dishes and just stood quietly leaning against the Frigidaire; one of those short, rounded ones you see on My Three Sons reruns. She was holding a dish rag and a pan, as if drying it, but she just stood there motionless, listening to Larry’s story.

  “Ma and I are against pulping, that’s for sure. But this one’s a little different ain’t it Ma?”

  Helen nodded her head slowly.

  “I don’t expect to barge in here and hit you guys with this cold. I understand you want some time to think it over, so I really just stopped by today to meet you and tell you what we’re trying to do. I’ll also leave off a copy of this standard lease here in case you want your lawyer to have a look at it. The only thing that’s different is the length of it is pretty long, given the time it takes to grow out those big trees, and there are very restrictive conditions on the selective cutting that can begin no earlier than five years from the date the lease is signed.”

  Roy gushed with laughter.

  “Five years from now, let’s see, I’ll be pushing seventy. Probably won’t care what you cut.”

  “Well to tell you the truth, if a landowner is only thinking about money, he maybe shouldn’t sign up for this, because at this point the company is more like a Conservation Agency than a big money-making corporation. You’ll also see in the fine print that we are paying the same going rate as what you could get from any of the other pulp companies, it’s just that we aren’t coming in and stripping off the land like they are. The other favor I need you to do for me is to keep this quiet for the next three weeks or so when I am going around talking to your neighbors about it. For this to be successful, I need to work real hard and privately to get all of the fifteen or so acreage owners around you to sign up. The old man who left all the money made it clear he didn’t want somebody putting up a Dairy Queen in the middle of his forest. If I don’t get all of the landowners in an area, Walker Resources will make me just walk away and not proceed with the venture. To tell you the truth, we can’t afford to have one hold out asking for more money than what everybody else is getting. It just isn’t fair to you or economical for the long term. But you guys take your time and talk it over. I’ve taken too much of your time already.”

  “Well, it wasn’t like we had a big day planned,” said Helen, smiling at Roy carefully as she turned to put the old aluminum pot in a big drawer underneath the oven.

  “Yeah,” said Roy straightening up in the chair, “my motto these days is if you don’t get it done today, you can just get it done tomorrow.” Then all three of them laughed together.

  “Roy, if you want, you can ask Mr. Walker to stay for some lunch. It’s almost eleven thirty.”

  “Oh,” said Larry, “I wouldn’t feel right putting you out like that.”

  “Not putting us out one bit,” said Roy. “Would you like to stay and eat with us?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble. I usually just have a sandwich back at my cabin over at Deep Lake.”

  “No trouble at all,” said Helen. “We’d be glad to have you stay.”

  “Well maybe just for a bite, but then I need to let you get on with your day.”

  “I’ll put on an extra plate.”

  Larry never went in to one of these initial meetings expecting to get a signed lease. Mentally, he always planned for three visits and then, if it happened on the second, it would be a nice surprise, and if it took a fourth, that would be okay, too. But an hour and a half later, when he backed his Aurora away from the house, they were standing on the porch waving good-bye, and he had a signed lease for fifty years of oil and timber rights on three hundred acres in the heart of Chequamegon State Forest.

  The truth was, he already had fifteen leases, and those leases were sitting safely back in the cabin in a big, red accordion file. Well, that included Mel Baker’s “signature,” if that’s what you want to call it. He just told every single one of these landowners to swear to secrecy, and how he needed to get everybody to sign up, or they wouldn’t get big money. And of course, he lied about the timber and pulping too. He was after the mineral rights—the oil—but nobody had come close to suspecting that. After that big lunch, Larry was ready for a nap back at Deep Lake Lodge.

  CHAPTER 28

  Larry had laid low for a few days after they had found Melvin Baker. Now he had only to sign up the two remaining landholders inside the bounds of the state forest. Late in the morning he had walked out of the rustic, wooden cabin overlooking the lake and trudged steadily across the old cinder drive to his car, his cordovan penny loafers grinding unaccustomedly on the path. Throwing his leather case into the back seat, he grabbed the ice scraper from the floor behind the driver’s seat. He began scraping away the thin layer of crusty ice that had gathered on the windshield. Very light snow flurries were whirling about in the leftover fall leaves. The snow was coming in off Lake Superior, bringing with it silent little promise after promise of the winter to come. Occasionally, an errant flake would catch Larry by surprise on the open skin behind his collar and spread an icy chill over him as he leaned over the windshield.

  It wasn’t as if Larry had to explain his actions to anybody. Larry knew that going about his business in a consistent and predictable manner could only serve to continue to build his legitimacy with the small number of people at the lodge or in the community that knew enough about him to strike up a conversation. Larry was no stranger to this area. He had been up here in his early days as a lease hunter. Northern Pipeline Company, NPC, as they were called in Minneapolis, had been intending to build a new natural gas pipeline across northern Wisconsin and Michigan since 1978. At the time, Larry had been doing pretty standard work in the West Texas oil fields, working leases for NPC, and they had asked him to take a six-month assignment in northern Wisconsin to lease the right-of-way for the pipeline. He was single at the time, and though he moaned and groaned about it, he had actually relished the idea of being up in “Sportsman’s Paradise,” living high on the company expense account. At that time, he had stayed, for the most part, in hotels in Superior and Ashland. They were two of the only towns up around there that had more than five thousand inhabitants—something to keep a young man occupied. But even though his hotels were miles away from Iron River, he became fa
miliar with the entire area. The NPC pipeline was to run north of Federal Highway 2, through the aptly named “Barrens” country north of Chequamegon. On many days, Larry had eaten lunch in Iron River.

  When Larry first arrived on the scene at that time nearly twenty years ago, he first thought his task hopeless. The first three landowners that Larry had called on that year, had actually ordered Larry off their land. One of them had threatened him with a deer rifle. NPC had the right, through legal court proceedings, to take “non-participating” farmers and landowners such as these to court and sue for eminent domain. This would legally require those in the path of the pipeline to finally give up and lease their right of way to NPC for a settlement price. But such court proceedings would take the company much longer to gain approval for the pipeline and were likely to cost the company four times more than a landowner would, who’d be willing to lease his land in a friendly business transaction. At the end of the week, when Larry had reported his lack of progress back to his manager in Houston, the man had become belligerent. His boss told Larry to essentially get off his ass and get some leases signed, or else. His manager closed the conversation by suggesting to Larry that perhaps he would not need a return trip back to Houston, if he did not start showing some progress on his assignment. Today, Larry would consider killing a man who would dare to talk to him like that. At first, the then young Larry had become worried that his job could be at risk, and then he became angry at the lack of respect and support he was getting from his home office. Depressed, Larry had found himself sitting among the beat-up Formica tables and Naugahyde barstools of the Green Top in Iron River. Behind the bar hung a weathered picture of Eisenhower, grinning into the camera and clutching a rainbow trout from a visit there after the Big War. Eisenhower had come to fish the Brule River—some of the best trout fishing in the world. It was on that night that Larry had met a man named Vern Patterson. Vern was a long-time local guy. Vern and his father had gone to the same high school in Iron River. His grandfather had gone there to school through the sixth grade. They were third generation in this god-forsaken town. After seeing action in Saipan during World War II, Vern had worked for the county for thirty-five years; first as a mechanic, and then on the road crew. On the side, he had dabbled in selling insurance and real estate. After six children, he and his wife enjoyed a meager existence in a double-wide trailer home overlooking Bluebird Lake down by Delta.