I’m not going to lie to you. When I was assigned to cover the Sabattus town meeting a few weeks ago, I silently stewed.

I considered flinging myself down a flight of stairs to get out of it. I toyed with the idea of claiming that religious convictions prevent me from entering towns with double letters in their names. I tried holding my breath until I was blue — you don’t want to send a blue reporter to an important gathering — but the best I achieved was a vague maroon.

My skills of evasion aren’t what they used to be, so come 6 p.m., I found myself trucking out to Sabattus, grumbling, pissing, moaning and occasionally weeping as I went, hoping I might drive into a sinkhole before I got to the Town Hall.

Sinkholes are never around when you need them.

But here’s the thing I forgot: In towns like Sabattus (and Turner and Greene and Lisbon) government isn’t just some creaky, rusting prop swinging in the wind. Small-town government is a living thing and the people ride it like a wild horse.

The room was packed when I got there. A butt in every chair and two dozen people leaning against walls, arms crossed, jaws set. They’re not here to waste time; they’re cracking knuckles, ready to do business.

They can’t just jump in, however, there are rules to follow — parliamentary rules that have been governing town meetings across the nation since a time pre-dating the Civil War. There are calls to order, motions and second motions. One doesn’t simply stand and begin speaking, he or she obtains the floor, waiting to be recognized by Mr. Moderator. When it’s time to vote, the people lift their bright-orange paint mixers with a casual air, as if voting in this way has become second nature.

A few thousand bucks for road paving? Why not? The room turns orange. Two grand for General Assistance? You betcha. Up come the orange paddles. The meeting moves along swimmingly, until it doesn’t. There are 39 articles on the agenda and a full third of them touch the tender, jumping nerves of the people in one way or another.

You want to give how much to the animal control officer? Do the cops really need a new cruiser when they can’t even manage speeding out by the ball field? Who is getting pay raises and how is all of this going to affect the bottom line?

There’s an older woman seated roughly in the middle of the pack. But not always seated. Midway through the meeting, she jumps to her feet, demanding answers on a tax matter that no outsider could ever understand. She grills Town Manager Andrew Gilmore, forcing him to leave the podium in order to thumb through his paperwork. The woman in the center of the room reluctantly sits down. Five minutes later, she’s on her feet with another question and Gilmore is back at his paperwork. Before this meeting is over, the people will make the town manager earn every cent of his salary.

“It definitely goes along with the job,” Gilmore tells me later, “and even when it’s personally directed at me, I try very hard never to take it personally. Lessons I learned years ago, the hard way.”

The meeting progresses, tense at times, light at others. They crack jokes that fly over my head. A woman offers a remark about contractors whose names begin with G and the whole room busts a gut. If you’re from two towns over, you won’t get the joke. If you’re a reporter from the city, you don’t have a prayer, and yet still I am entertained. Entertained, enlightened and encouraged, even, because these people know how to run a town, by God. In this room at Sabattus Town Hall is a mini-Republic at work; a microcosm of a nation that is great.

You’ve got to have that cranky old woman in the middle of the room complaining in a gore crow voice about obscurities. You’ve got to have the guy who despises and distrusts the cops, the guy who hates the animal controller and the slightly loony fellow who hates everyone. That’s America, man! It’s still alive and well in Sabattus (and Turner and Greene and Lisbon) because the people are utterly engaged. They pay attention. Try to pull one over on those folks and they’ll hitch up their britches and come after you.

If you tried to sneak an additional penny onto their tax bills, they would recognize it at once. Moreover, they would ride over to the tax man’s house on their lawn mowers to complain. Complain LOUDLY. And by God, that’s the way it should be. In Sabattus (and Turner and Greene and Lisbon) the people hold their local governments accountable and because of this, the government is afraid of them. The government SHOULD be afraid of its people. That’s liberty, by gum!

This system works in Sabattus. It doesn’t work so well on the federal level where the government is no longer afraid of us. In Washington, they view us as subjects to be lied to, tricked, deceived and ignored. Clearly, we need to ride to D.C. on our lawn mowers and give them what-for. And we need the people of Sabattus to teach us how it’s done.

But alas, even as I crow about the joy and beauty of democracy in small-town Maine, wiser observers note that even that is at risk of falling apart. Declining attendance is a factor, of course. People are becoming more apathetic about the workings of their governments. They are distracted by outside things of a less stressful nature: family, golf, the NFL, the NBA, the MLB. How can you expect to draw hundreds to a town meeting when “Dancing with the Stars” is on and there’s all the drama of the Mark Ballas car wreck to ponder?

And if the people stop tending their gardens, snakes will slither in.

“The biggest threat to small-town politics,” one man grouses, “comes from outside developers who learn to work the system, steamroll local officials who think they’re a lot smarter than they really are, and get themselves placed on things like the Board of Assessors.”

That’s heavy stuff. For the moment, I’m betting on the people of Sabattus (and Turner and Greene and Lisbon) to keep it together and to keep their leaders honest. Lose Sabattus and other towns will come tumbling after and the next thing you know, we’re living in a corporate prison where our voices don’t mean anything.

As goes Sabattus, you might say, so goes the nation. When it’s time to fire up the lawn mowers, I hope like heck they’re ready.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer, also known as “Lawn-mover Man.” Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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