For the past few years, I’ve carried with me a quotation given to me by a friend. We were out walking and assessing a stretch of potential conservation land. A brook ran along a gully nearby, and we were wondering about the brook’s work across time, which led, as many brook talks do, to my concern and hope for Mere Brook.

“Once,” my friend said, “at a conference some time ago, I heard Butch Phillips of the Penobscot Nation talk about their central river. In looking ahead, Phillips said, ‘Heal the waters, and everything else will get better.’ I’ve never forgotten that, and it’s been central to my work along the Androscoggin and at Merrymeeting Bay ever since.”

On the evening of April 16, I sat in Brunswick council chambers with 40 other citizens, and an uncounted number on Zoom, in a meeting to hear about the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority’s plans for the town’s general aviation airport at the Landing. Much of the crowd was there to voice worry about the imprint of the airport and its business, and about the effects of the Landing in general. That concern has been mobilized in part by the large firefighting foam spill last August, with its specter of still ill-understood PFAS and PFOS contents infiltrating our grounds and waters. The other motivator was rumored expansion of the airport and its operations.

The spill — 50,00 gallons of water mixed with 1,450 gallons of foam — billowed visibly for days, and predictably, as measures of its presence got tested for on land and in water, it announced itself chemically in worrisome concentrations. The mix of visibility and chemical measurement was hard to ignore. And, for those paying attention over time, it was also clear that this spill was only the most recent layer of trouble laid down over decades by day-to-day actions on the former naval air base.

Perhaps the most prominent victim of the upset that followed the spill was trust in and the credibility of MRRA, the quasi-governmental creation that runs the redevelopment of the old naval air base. That distrust colored many of the remarks made by the 20 or so speakers at the meeting. I was among those speakers.

My remarks, kept within the three minutes allotted to each speaker:

I live in Brunswick, and I serve the town as chair of the Conservation Commission and chair of the Steering Committee charged with implementing the plan to improve Mere Brook from its urban-impaired status to Class B water. I’ve also written Your Land, a column in The Times Record about our public lands, for the past seven years. In that column, I’ve written often about Mere Brook and its watershed, which is central to our town.

My work in town has led me to read a lot of Navy, EPA and Maine DEP reports about the Landing. I know enough to know how complex the environment of the Landing is. Take for example its stormwater system, 80% of which drains into Mere Brook and then Harpswell Cove. Recently, the three ponds that form part of that system, Ponds A and B and Picnic Pond, whose sediments had been deemed too toxic for human touch, received attention. A $5 million, Navy-sponsored project removed and disposed of the layer of toxic sediment. The ponds’ bottoms were then covered with a layer of clean sand. Not much later, the August 2024 AFFF spill occurred. You can guess where a good percentage of the 50,000 gallons of foam and water comprising that spill went — into the stormwater system and so onto the newly cleaned sediment in the ponds.

My point with this single example (there are many others I could cite) is to underline the need for Town Council and our legislators to fashion a way to oversee the health of the Landing and its waters. MRRA is a real estate development group; they do that well. But the record is also clear that they do not manage the health and the waters of the Landing well. They need oversight and help.

A final thought: I offer these thoughts also for our neighbor Harpswell into whose cove and waters much of the Landing’s and Mere Brook’s waters flow. What we keep sending them is not very neighborly.

What came clear to me after the meeting and as I woke from sleep around 3 a.m. with my mind racing, was the way Mere Brook, the central watershed affected by the spill (and the spills and runoff that have preceded this one) offers to teach us how to live connected lives. If we will pay attention. if we will take up full residence and citizenship in this watershed.

After some years of study and writing short pieces, I am preparing to write a long piece about our diminutive creek and its lessons. This little critter that runs among and through us is a teacher, a teacher at work at all hours, every day, even this hour — now 4 a.m. on a cold, early spring night.

A hundred yards to my south or to my west (Mere Brook wraps around part of my neighborhood), the brook flows steadily. The late moon casts slats of pale light across it; perhaps the waters burble a bit in response. A little elevated by season and recent rains, and so, turbid with the sands of our subsoil, Mere Brook brings news from upstream. It also aspires to reach home, where the tides are working their ebb and flow. Given chance and choice, Mere Brook wants to deliver healthy waters to Harpswell Cove to revitalize this once rich and now poisoned shellfish-loaded estuary.

How we, citizens of Mere Brook’s watershed, behave on our little plots of land and in our habits of life and government will determine if our brook can do its cleansing work and improve the many lives (ours included) dependent upon it. And, of course, larger-scale citizens such as MRRA and the Landing’s enterprises have great influence, too. After talking with many of you, I hope to tell a redemptive story.

I hope that together, we can help “heal the waters.”

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission and the town’s Steering Committee for Mere Brook, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.