By Dr. Robert Thorson

I’m on a road trip, blogging my way from Maine to Montana in search of stories about Earth’s most precious fluid – fresh water. I stumbled across something so cool in Eaton, N.H., that I ditched my planned column about the new Connecticut Science Center. (I’ll get back to that one.)

In this tiny town is a success story regarding the necessary trade-offs between commercial enterprises and water conservation.

My wife and I were driving north near the eastern border of the state between Freedom, where all the politicians go, and North Conway, where all the shoppers and skiers go. We were moving steadily along on Route 153 when, seemingly out of nowhere, there appeared a charmingly unpretentious village store. It was tucked into an opening in a fairly narrow valley full of small lakes that lie below pleasant, but un-majestic hillsides and forests.

Eaton is a place with an abundance of stone walls, small roadside cemeteries and overgrown orchards, typical of land that was cleared during the 18th and 19th centuries for a rural economy based almost entirely on agriculture. With no grand lakes like Winnipesaukee or grand mountains like the Presidential Range, today this area’s economy seems to be mostly about retirement income and summer visitors and residents.

On the porch of the Eaton Village Store were flowers and a wooden chair painted as an American flag. Inside are the post office with familiar brass-keyed boxes, a few shelves of essential-needs, curios, newspapers and candy, and a folksy cafe. On duty were a pleasant cook and her teenage helper.

Across the street were four dilapidated tourist cabins, that looked like they’d been abandoned no more than a decade or two earlier. It was this cluster of cabins that had first caught my attention when driving by, and that prompted me to stop, turn around and inquire at the store. Why, I wondered, would cabins in such a nice place be left unused, especially when the road was crawling with tourists? Though we never got an answer to that question, we did learn that the property around the cabins is critical to saving the village store.

A few years ago, the village store was failing. Local folk wanted the store to remain in business not only for the sake of tradition, but also because, being a combined cafe-post office-general store, it was their only public, civic gathering place. This was when the Eaton Village Preservation Society purchased the building and leased it to the store’s operator.

Trouble arose, more recently, when the cafe’s on-site septic system, which was out of date, failed because it was too small. It was releasing excess nutrients into the watershed of nearby Crystal Lake, a situation that could cause excessive algal growth.

The solution came this spring when a couple from Virginia with a relative in town bought the property across the street, the one containing the dilapidated cabins. They have granted an easement to the Eaton Village Preservation Society so the land may be used to build a new septic system for the store. Though some money remains to be raised, it was if someone had waved a magic wand, making the rock and the hard places disappear, saving the store and this part of the lake’s watershed at the same time.

The case of the Eaton Village Store is a microcosm of the never-ending tussle between commercial development and environmental regulation. It shows us that with the right mix of local pride, goodwill, creativity, government cooperation and money, those of us who love America’s small lakes can have our cake and eat it too.