Nobody's Fool

identified particularly dangerous-looking branches in their neighbors’ trees and recommendedcostly pruning. In truth, the trees were so mature, their upper branches so high, so distant from the elderly eyes that peered up at them, that it was anybody’s guess as to which tree a given limb belonged, whose fault it would be if it descended.
    The business with the trees was just more bad luck, and, as the residents of North Bath were fond of saying, if it weren’t for bad luck they wouldn’t have any at all. This was not strictly true, for the community owed its very existence to geological good fortune in the form of several excellent mineral springs, and in colonial days the village had been a summer resort, perhaps the first in North America, and had attracted visitors from as far away as Europe. By the year 1800 an enterprising businessman named Jedediah Halsey had built a huge resort hotel with nearly three hundred guest rooms and named it the Sans Souci, though the locals had referred to it as Jedediah’s Folly, since everyone knew you couldn’t fill three hundred guest rooms in the middle of what had so recently been wilderness. But fill them Jedediah Halsey did, and by the 1820s several other lesser hostelries had sprung up to deal with the overflow, and the dirt roads of the village were gridlocked with the fancy carriages of people come to take the waters of Bath (for that was the village’s name then, just Bath, the “North” having been added a century later to distinguish it from another larger town of the same name in the western part of the state though the residents of North Bath had stubbornly refused the prefix). And it was not just the healing mineral waters that people came to take, either, for when Jedediah Halsey, a religious man, sold the Sans Souci, the new owner cornered the market in distilled waters as well, and during long summer evenings the ballroom and drawing rooms of the Sans Souci were full of revelers. Bath had become so prosperous that no one noticed when several other excellent mineral springs were discovered a few miles north near a tiny community that would become Schuyler Springs, Bath’s eventual rival for healing waters. The owners of the Sans Souci and the residents of Bath remained literally without care until 1868, when the unthinkable began to happen and the various mineral springs, one by one, without warning or apparent reason, began, like luck, to dry up, and with them the town’s wealth and future.
    As luck (what else would you call it?) would have it, the upstart Schuyler Springs was the immediate beneficiary of Bath’s demise. Even though their origin was the same fault line as the Bath mineral springs’, the Schuyler springs continued to flow merrily, and so the visitors whose fancy carriages had for so long pulled into the long circular drive before the frontentrance of the Sans Souci now stayed on the road another few miles and pulled into the even larger and more elegant hotel in Schuyler Springs that had been completed (talk about luck!) the very year that the springs in Bath ran dry. Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly luck. For years the town of Schuyler Springs had been making inroads, its downstate investors and local businessmen promoting other attractions than those offered by the Sans Souci. In Schuyler Springs there were prizefights held throughout the summer season, as well as gambling, and, most exciting of all, a track was under construction for racing Thoroughbred horses. The citizens of Bath had been aware of these enterprises, of course, and had been watching, gleefully at first, and waiting for them to fail, for the schemes of the Schuyler Springs group struck them as even more foolish than the Sans Souci with its three hundred rooms had been. There was certainly no need for
two
resorts, two grand hotels, within so small a geographical context. Which meant that Schuyler Springs was doomed. There were limits to folly. True, Jedediah Halsey’s Sans Souci hadn’t been so much foolish as “visionary,” which, as everyone knew, was what you called a foolish idea that worked anyway. And, people were quick to point out after the springs ran dry and the visitors moved on, the Sans Souci hadn’t so much worked as it had enjoyed temporary success. The vast majority of its nearly five hundred rooms (for the hotel had expanded on a very grand scale, not three years before the springs went