The Pit and the Pond . . . : Environment: The lake that was the inspiration for ‘On Golden Pond’ is being threatened by a gravel-digging facility.

BELGRADE, Me. —  It is the time-out-of-time quality that people here treasure most about Great Pond. “It’s a kind of tranquility. It’s an anachronism. It’s a vision of life’s possibility that people, once they experience it, never want to lose,” said Charles Blaisdell, a retired lawyer who lives alongside the 10-mile-long lake that inspired Ernest Thompson to write “On Golden Pond.”

That immutability was at the heart of Thompson’s play and subsequent film. The movie version of his fictional tale of generations coming to terms with one another starred Katharine Hepburn as well as Jane and Henry Fonda, and earned Henry Fonda a best-actor Academy Award just months before he died in 1982.

Now Great Pond--the real Golden Pond--has claimed the leading role in a drama of its own. Thompson and Hepburn are some of the players in the fight over whether a huge gravel pit will be allowed to operate on a Pleistocene-era spit of land that juts out into this lake 30 miles outside Augusta, the state capital.

In Belgrade -- the Great Pond -- the mountains -- the trees -- the rocks -- the bog -- the lakes are calling out to you:

SAVE ME!

SAVE ME!

Can’t you hear them?

That is Hepburn, Academy Award-winning actress, best-selling author and now environmental poet, writing to oppose a move by the U.S. subsidiary of a British-owned company to greatly expand a small gravel-digging facility at Horse Point, a graceful peninsula that separates the northern end of Great Pond from an adjacent bog and nature reserve.

Thompson, whose family began spending summers at Great Pond in 1903, “so we do sort of have squatters’ rights,” said he was “not sure what all the implications are ecologically” if Tilcon-Maine Inc. is allowed to go ahead with its plan to bring in generators, rock crushers and a daily battalion of trucks to remove three-quarters of a million cubic yards of gravel from the site.

“But I would be willing to bet you that if this were not the lake that was somehow loosely connected to ‘On Golden Pond,’ it wouldn’t be getting this attention,” Thompson said.

By telephone from his home in New Hampshire, not far from where the movie of “On Golden Pond” was in fact filmed, Thompson added, “There’s a certain amount of exploitation on the part of the activists” in the Great Pond debate.

John Willey, a cabinet-maker whose home fronts on Great Pond, said that was exactly what he had in mind when he decided to enlist some celebrity support in the fight against the gravel pit.

Willey decided to bypass any Fonda-family connection because “Maine is a politically peculiar state. It manages to be at once extremely conservative and extremely progressive.” It is also a state where many people drive their cars until they drop, and where some of those soon-to-drop vehicles still sport Vietnam-era bumper stickers that proclaim “I’m Not Fonda Jane.”

“I thought it would disturb a number of people who have joyfully supported the Great Bog Protection Assn. if we had invited Miss Fonda in,” Willey explained.

Instead, Willey headed to the public library, where he pored over Who’s Who in search of some sort of mailing address for Katharine Hepburn. Eventually Willey mailed two letters, one in care of Hepburn’s agent in Beverly Hills, and one to an address in Connecticut that was listed in Who’s Who.

Almost by return mail, a response came back on stationery personalized with the actress’ full name, Katharine Houghton Hepburn.

“Here’s my effort--Use it--Change it--Or throw it away,” Hepburn typed with her characteristic free-form punctuation. “What you’re trying to do is certainly very important.”

To Andy Tolman, a hydrogeologist in Freeport, Me., who has advised the state to turn down Tilcon’s application, some of that significance lies in Great Pond’s geological legacy.

Great Pond is a relic of the Laurentide Ice, a glacier that saw its peak in what Tolman called “relatively recent” geologic time, about 18,000-20,000 years ago, and that retreated entirely about 10,000 years ago. The area that Tilcon wants to develop is seen as a perfectly preserved footprint of the glacier, Tolman said.

“There are a number of eskers,” as such glacial tracks are known, Tolman said. “This happens to be one of the nicer ones.”

Frances (Effie) Pentlarge, whose family has summered at Great Pond since 1917, said she is equally concerned about how the gravel pit might affect present-day life at Great Pond. Pentlarge expressed what seems to be a prevailing sentiment here when she said, “I personally just would like to see things left the way they are.”

With his dialogue normally limited to a laconic “yup” or “nope,” 65-year-old Dave Webster was Ernest Thompson’s model for the mailman in “On Golden Pond” who uses his boat to deliver letters and parcels. Webster, recently retired as the area’s summer mailman, launched into what was for him a veritable Gettysburg Address when asked about Great Pond’s gravel-digging imbroglio.

“Well, I don’t really think it would be any asset to open it up,” Webster said.

Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection has granted Tilcon-Maine preliminary approval to go ahead with its expansion of the gravel pit. The state’s Board of Environmental Protection, the DEP’s governing body, will issue a final decision at a hearing scheduled for today.

David Boston, president of Tilcon-Maine, did not return calls to his office. No one else at Tilcon would discuss the Great Pond gravel-mining project.

In New Hampshire, Thompson decried the steady encroachment of “what is loosely called progress” on the lake where he spent his summers as a child. Condominiums have gone in where girls’ camps once stood; the boats each year seem faster, larger and louder; and the effects of acid rain have been detected, Thompson said.

The gravel pit may be only the latest affront to the Great Pond environment, said Thompson, 42. “But being a child of the ‘60s, I would still rather they didn’t do anything.”

The magic of Great Pond “is very subjective,” Thompson said. “But it is also very real.”