Michael Forbes

Image: Kieran Dodds / Polaris

1 of 3 NEXT

A quarter of a century ago, movie audiences were enchanted by Local Hero, a fable about the efforts of an American oil tycoon to buy the gorgeous Scottish fishing village of Ferness and turn its beach into a refinery site.

    
The young company man he dispatches to this wee town finds most of the residents eager to sell out. All that stands in the way of a deal is a stalwart old beachcomber, a man content with his whiskey, his wisdom, and his driftwood shack—in short, secure from the blandishments of consumer society.
   
A similar yarn is playing out on a scruff of hill and sand on the coastline north of Aberdeen, the prosperous hub of Scotland's North Sea oil trade. Here, in the bedroom community of Balmedie (population 2,000), Donald Trump hopes to build Europe's largest golf and housing resort.

The proposed $2 billion project has pitted local boosters and Scottish politicians against those who complain that Trump has tried to bully his way around the country's environmental laws. Still, with the project backed by Aberdeen's press, its business leaders, and much of its citizenry, passage seems increasingly likely.
 
The lone stumbling block may be Michael Forbes, a quarry worker who plays the Ferness beachcomber in the updated tale. The 55-year-old Forbes and his family have lived in a huddle of farm buildings behind the sand dunes for four decades. His 23-acre farm is encircled by Trump's proposed complex: The property borders the front nine holes and sits directly between the links and the hotel.
   
In Local Hero, the beachcomber blocks the ambitions of the tycoon by sheer folksy cussedness, which is pretty much the attitude Forbes has adopted toward Trump, whom he calls "Slippery Sam." P.G. Wodehouse could well have been describing Forbes when he wrote: "It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine."
   
Forbes refuses to sell his land. He prefers to remain on the ramshackle homestead he has named Mill of Menie, among broken tractor parts, battered junkers, rusting oilcans, and piles of discarded tires.
   
The burly Forbes wears a DUMP TRUMP pin on his jacket, and the most mischievous of grins. The front of his T-shirt reads: DON'T TRUMP ON THE PROTECTED DUNES. The back says: NO TRUMP.
   
"Slippery will have a giant red T flashing atop his hotel," he says. "On the roof of my shack, I intend to have my own flashing red letter: F, followed by a dash and O-F-F."

He says this from an easy chair in the sitting room of his mother's house, a yellow prefab bungalow—Forbes calls it a "chalet"—surrounded by roaming tribes of cats, geese, and cackling chickens. "To my mum, this place is paradise," he says. In fact, the word is inscribed on a plaque by the front door.

Amid this paradise, the main point of public contention over Trump's project has been mobile sand dunes that the government has declared a protected site. The Trump team has likened the dunes to giant sand slugs and wants to plant grass to stop them from drifting up the coast in rough weather. Conservation groups argue that such stabilization would do irreparable damage to the mobile dunes and the wildlife they contain.

"We always weigh economic impact against environmental sacrifice," says George Sorial, the Trump team's chief negotiator. "Critics have unfairly claimed that we'll destroy the dunes." In fact, he asserts, the developer merely wants to "modify" a small portion of one: "We're actually going to enhance it." And when it comes to enhancements, no one trumps Trump.
   
"Trump's logic—or lack of it—drives me demented," says Debra Storr, a Balmedie councillor. "If the sand dune can't move, it's no longer mobile, is it?"

1 of 3 NEXT