The beaver holds great significance in the lore of the Torbett family. No animal has had more impact and remains more spoken of, with a wry grin, in the dwellings of Grandpa Torbett’s descendants, for it was the beavers that started the war. Yes, the great beaver war of Lisbon, Connecticut.

 It was not a war that caused much of a stir for the rest of Lisbon, other than when officers arrived to inform my grandfather, while trying to suppress their laughter, that he could not fire his shotgun at the taunting rodents within the city limits. Still, it was the beavers that fired the first volley. It was a small, but very personal war between Grandpa and a band of marauding beavers, which had crept up from the marsh behind the house to invade Grandpa’s gardens.

 Yes, the garden was the battlefield. The beavers had dammed the slow moving bog, and the marshy waters had begun to encroach upon the fertile bank where Grandpa had his garden. The beavers also developed a taste for cultivated vegetables and they wreaked havoc on everything in their path as they searched for their preferred leafy delectable.

 Since local authorities had quickly eliminated firearms and, due to some intuitive premonition, had firmly excluded the use of explosives, Grandpa entered this battleground disadvantaged and outnumbered. His first foray was to rip holes in their dam in hopes of lowering the water level away from his garden and somehow encouraging the beavers to move into a more accepting neighborhood. His several attempts at this merely triggered the sense of industry within the little furry bundles of indomitability. He also succeeded in angering them. They retaliated.

 Grandpa soon began to see pieces of his woodpile appearing in the beaver dam to stop up the breaches. The beavers had not only invaded his garden by the marsh, but had now crossed the brook and invaded his home. This was intolerable! It was now open war!

 For months, Grandpa’s daily war with the beavers waged on (the family staunchly contends to this day that Grandpa enjoyed every minute of it), with no visible result save the precipitous depletion of Grandpa’s wood stores. But the beavers got too greedy and sealed their own doom. One late night, the flat-tailed, aquatic bandits made off with a recently purchased 4×8 sheet of half-inch plywood. Grandpa awoke the next morning to see it stuffed defiantly in their dam, blocking the latest Grandpa-induced breached, and mocking him in the glare of the morning sunrise.

 This was the last straw, or sheet. They had crossed the line. Grandpa succumbed to reality, and the advice of children and grandchildren, and called the game wardens to live-trap the beavers and move them to a more hospitable location. (I would suspect that some of you are thinking they moved them in right next door to you.)

 Sadly, we see this humorous, but true story played out here in the politics of Maine. The policies of our Governor have begun to tear breaches in the dam of the river of revenue built by zealous Democrats over some forty years. The flow of prosperity and industry has slowly started to move again and the stagnate waters of government bureaucracy have begun to recede away from the gardens, which contain the fruits of the labors of the people of Maine. Mike Michaud is determined to stop this and bring us back to the days when he and his master, John Martin, were taking from the hard earned wages of Mainers, chasing business from the borders of our fair State, and stealing the benefits from senior citizens in order to shore up the dam he and fellow Democrats had built to fill the tax-marsh of wages for big government.

 Not content even to raid our gardens filled with the fruit of our labor; our income, Michaud has crossed the brook into our homes and raided veterans’ benefits, senior citizen funding, and the very basic traditions that we pass down from generation to generation in our families. While the beaver is an amazing creature of industry that sometimes comes in conflict with another amazing creature of industry; humans, the corrupt politician, such as Mike Michaud, that wants your garden of finance and the stores of your homes, is nothing more than a shadowy enemy of the people of Maine.