Baney Trimble, 11, has become a landowner. All he wanted was to ask old Miss Olivia Luke, who owns the tiny valley and the tenant house which Baney’s parents rent, for the use of her chicken shed. He wants the shed because Miss Luke has no chickens, and because Baney has so much of what his brother Steve, 15, calls “junk”.
Baney, you see, is an inventor, and collects all manner of odds and ends. As he explains to his brother and sister Lora, 12, “an inventor needs to be slightly messier than other people”. If he can’t see his tools and materials, how will he know what to do with them?
Well, Baney gets the chicken shed. Miss Luke likes Baney, though she can’t hear him very well, and she approves of his enthusiasm for making things. Miss Luke not only gives him the shed, she offers to sell him one-sixteenth of an acre of land to put it on — because what’s the point of owning a shed if you don’t own the land under it? — for all of Baney’s life savings: $6.85.
Baney picks his site, which is under his favourite tree, a big chestnut next to the stream at the bottom of the valley. Baney’s parents draw up the papers, because they are both lawyers. Steve is a mathematics whiz, so he calculates that Baney’s one-sixteenth of an acre extends in a circle of radius 29.44 feet around the base of the tree.
The family moves the chicken shed onto Baney’s land, and he moves in his things. All is briefly well — until Lora spots two men pacing the valley. Mr Hoffmeister and Mr Bell, officious but not unpleasant, inform Baney that the state has decided that Miss Luke’s valley is to be turned into a lake to store excess rainwater. Like Miss Luke, Baney will also lose his land, and his chestnut tree.
So far, so good. Of course Baney decides to fight the state; he has energetic siblings to back him up, and his lawyer parents. Miss Luke is on his side too, though she is old. What will happen?
This is 1972, and this is the first half of the story of Baney’s Lake, a book written by an American writer named Nan Hayden Agle, who died at the ripe age of 100 five years ago. This is before Nixon quit, before the 1970s energy crisis, before the defeat in Vietnam. The story is set in the state of Maryland not far from the city of Baltimore. In the world of this book, people still more or less trust one another, accept that life can be tough, are firm about their citizen and property rights but still think of the Law with a capital “L”.
Baney and his family fight hard and fair, and they lose the fight. Nobody is nasty, but the state does win. Miss Luke’s valley becomes a lake. Miss Luke and Baney still own their land, even if it is at the bottom of the lake (it’s called “easement”), and the state gives Baney a raft on which to put his chicken shed, and a rowboat to reach it — because it is anchored to the stump of his beloved chestnut tree.
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That’s the story — but just think how little sense it now makes. If Agle were writing fiction today, Baney would win and the state, whose representatives would be venal and in cahoots with contractors, would lose. The crazy notion that justice can be done when both sides win, especially when it involves the government, simply would not wash.
I miss such a time, though I don’t remember it. Perhaps I’m not old enough. Now the only things I can think of are the legal murk of Lavasa, the 400,000 displaced of Polavaram, the angry dispossessed farmers of Greater Noida and the villages cut off by the Tehri dam. A time when one could think of trusting the government is long gone, and with it an era in which compromise could still be noble. We are sunk.