Al Bagley's Eternal Spring

Al Bagley’s Eternal Spring

The other day, while finishing up to last minute Christmas shopping at BJ’s warehouse, my wife Hillary insisted we add bottled water to the purchase.  Recent lake-effect snow days had triggered her emergency response system, and keeping some extra spring water around is always a good idea out here on the Buffalo frontier.  In short, I found myself dragging a five-gallon container of the pure stuff out to the car.

 As we hefted it into the trunk, Hillary noticed the big bottle cap.  It said the spring water was bottled by Polar Beverages, Worcester, Massachusetts, from several sources in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  Always on the lookout for reminders of our Laconia, N.H. childhood stomping grounds, Hillary remarked “Hey, one of the places on the container cap is Alton, N.H…! I wonder…?”

Alton is next to Laconia, and the bottle cap was no coincidence.

Dial back more than 50 years.  I’m in 7^th grade gym, in the Laconia Jr.-Sr. High School locker room, changing to hit the showers amidst the slam of metallic doors and the din of kids’ yelling and joking.  Suddenly I’m pinned against my locker and a huge, towering face, pressed to my nose, says “So you think you can take me, huh?”  I can’t quite recall what I said, but there was plenty of terrified stammering in it, and something to the effect that I surely didn’t say anything about him at all.

Fortunately the hulk let me down so my feet touched the cold concrete floor again.  Then he actually smiled, showed me his bulging bicep, and said, “Well, if you ever want to bet, just let me know!”  Of course, I never did place that particular bet, but there is another kind of bet I should have placed on Alfred R. Bagley.

Al was a big, burley guy, the kind who matures early as an adolescent, and makes everyone else around him look puny and hairless.  From then on he earned a wary, frozen smile from me in the hallways.  I was secretly pleased when he started calling me Jeff instead of “Bowen”.  Probably someone had told him my dad was the principal of the school, and that beating me up wasn’t a goo idea.  Anyway, our limited hallway encounters were reassuring because he usually smiled rather than scowling.   

High school years flew by, but I seldom sighted Al because, like all those special-ed kids in the 60’s, he was virtually hidden in an out-of-the-way classroom that adjoined our cafeteria.  As we used to say back then, that’s where the “slow” kids were.  Regardless of their disability, the slow learners were definitely self-contained—or imprisoned, apparently except for junior high physical education.   Mainstreaming and inclusion were terms no one had thought of back then; no one would for at least another decade.    

Al lived out in the hills of Gilford, a rural community next to Laconia.  Gilford is known best for its county-run ski area, now called Gunstock Ski Area.  In the early 60’s, my future wife and her family had just moved to Gilford, where Hillary’s dad, Warren Warner, took over as manager of Gunstock.  Warren hired Al Bagley to work the tows on weekends.  And Al was good at it – reliable, loyal, courteous, and kind to skiers who got tangled up in the tow rope. 

Al Bagley also loved to hunt deer and was good at that too, especially off season when it was illegal.  I am sure this endeared him to Warren.  I always suspected that in another life Warren would have jacked deer in a minute.  He always thought that the world was oversupplied with deer who deserved to be hunted down and thinned out by any means from flintlocks to archery to rifles of many different gauges.

Al Bagley and Warren Warner became fast friends, really great friends, over the years.  Al worked his way up to a tow supervisor at the Area, and from time to time he would invite Warren to cruise the woods hunting from Al’s quad.  Eventually Al had plenty of property on which to roam. 

It turns out that there were hundreds of acres of prime hunting land near where Al lived, and in return for hunting privileges from the owner, Al treated the old codger, who lived like a hermit on the property in a ramshackle house, with great kindness.  When the old man’s health declined, Al made sure he got food and provided transportation whenever it was needed.   

When the codger died, having no living relatives, he willed Al his house, an old Cadillac, and those hundreds of acres of fields and woods. It was a hunter’s paradise.  The woods would have been more than enough for Al.  However, one day, when Al was hunting an unexplored part of the property, he discovered a spring bubbling up from the ground.  The water was abundant and pure.  Al mentioned it to others and eventually started giving some of it away. 

Bottled spring water was nothing new in the 1960’s.  Poland Springs, Maine had been in the business for years.  But spring-fed water was gaining in commercial popularity as the trend toward healthier lifestyles accelerated across the decades.  

Before too long, Al Bagley set up a small bottling operation at a site in Alton, N.H. near the spring he had fortuitously inherited.  Tanker trucks would arrive from all over New England to suck up and pay surprisingly good bucks for H2O supplies. 

No doubt about it, Al Bagley did quite well financially, selling out more than a decade ago to a company called L&G Bottled Water Company which is still located right there in Alton, N.H.  My guess is that Al still gets a cut of the profits, but his real passion was and still is hunting.  He stayed loyal to his friends, and Warren Warner remained one of them to the end.

Thus our destinies interweave.  I am sure the connections are described somewhere in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent books about tipping points and outliers.  Would Al Bagley have realized such success had he lived in a city?  Had he not been “slow” and guided by his teacher toward vocational pursuits?  Had he not been a truly dedicated hunter?  If bottled spring water had not become so popular?  If he had not been a kind, considerate person who really did care for an incapacitated old codger, just as he took pity on me back in junior high?

Interesting to speculate, isn’t it?  At Christmas time, as I write this, I’d say that speculation is only part of the story.  I’d like to think that being in the right place at the right time is helpful but not definitive to one’s destiny.  In the end, it’s about the relationships we create with others, and the passion that we have for what we do.  For Al, the relationship and the passion came together in Alton, N.H., where he loved to hunt and found a perfect way to enable itn wealthy perpetuity. 

This Christmas and for the upcoming year, like Al Bagley, may each of us find an eternal spring somewhere on our property, one that empowers us to do what we really love to do, to practice and share it with our friends, and to become really good at it.

JMB

12/09