French Port

Charles Baldwin

juill. 2011 · AuthorHouse

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French Port is dying. Modern medicine has doubled its population. The island's farmers have harvested its trees to bring more land under cultivation. The sun dries out the top soil and the wind takes it out to sea. The island's disaster is not only ecological. French Port once exported modest quantities of timber and some potatoes. Now it must import fertilizers, which it can't afford, just to produce enough food. French Port is going broke. Few people can afford a ticket off the island and most don't want to go anyway. French Port is home. Edward Warren is a retired, disenchanted, and once removed native son who comes to the island looking for something meaningful to fill an empty life. On property once belonging to his grandmother he discovers an artesian pool capable of solving many of the island's problems and of making Warren as rich and as important as an island resident can be. Soon he meets an alluring, lonely woman with an ugly past who permits him to board platonically in her home. The American could for once feel socially productive and, for once, he might achieve personal happiness. But, as a newly acquired, cynical friend points out, "people will fight over a turd.” They will certainly fight over the water Warren has discovered and owns but, surprising, Warren increasingly finds himself enjoying their conflict. French Port cautions that all associations of people are charged with suppressed hatreds and that nothing triggers violence like an outsider with a little power who means well.

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Charles Baldwin was born in the southeast but transplanted to Akron, Ohio before he was old enough to remember a southern heritage. He has never felt at home anywhere. On his family’s visits to what they referred to as “down home” Baldwin saw tractors rusting in the fields and broken back barns on the verge of collapse. And he heard about constant unemployment. Baldwin worked for thirty years as a wastewater treatment operator and supervisor in Akron, Ohio, learning the deficiencies and whims of local government and discovering many of the consequences of ecological mismanagement. He saw the downward spiral of a great industrial city into one of the most prolific centers of illegal methamphetamine production in America. Baldwin is connected to the world by his wife of thirty-five years, four children, and two grandchildren. He is politically active to the extent that he votes, donates to liberal causes, and worries frequently about what sort of world we and our descendants will live in after the "last best hope of earth" achieves bankruptcy. Baldwin’s stories flow and are funny. But his characters frequently hurt one another and the more enlightened seem aware that something terrible is coming, that ultimately any civilization’s relationship with nature simply cannot be sustained. The reader isn't taxed by Baldwin’s detailed descriptions, which lend credence to the setting and invite the reader into the story. Baldwin's favorite authors are O. Henry, Barbara Tuchman, William Shirer, and Raymond Chandler. His favorite comment about writing is from Thorne Smith who considered himself a realist because his characters wander into the reader's awareness, make inadequate plans in order to achieve goals which frequently are contrary to their own genuine interests, fail, give up, and wander away. The reader is left with a comfortingly genuine sense of human inadequacy.