We didn’t move out here to experience more stress. Of
course, the mere adjusting to a very different lifestyle has been stressful,
but beyond that, we expected that we’d have amiable neighbors that we could
talk to on a regular basis and we wouldn’t be caught in any neighborly
crossfire, so to speak.
Well.
I am changing names to protect the guilty. But before I go
on, I need to paint a picture of how several of the properties around here
border each other.
Property boundaries
Our property is a little over five acres, about 600 feet
long on the north and south sides. The south border extends along the gravel
road going through our mountain development. At the west end of our property,
the gravel road takes a ninety-degree turn up the mountain. On the east side of
the road just after the turn is a property a guy named Leonard owns. He also
owns a few feet on the other side of the road where it turns, right next to the
small piece of land that is ours across the road where the it turns.
Leonard does not live here, and I have only seen him once
since we moved over a year ago.
A local guy named Roland owns some of the land adjacent to
our property at the northwest corner. He does not live on the property either,
but harvests large rocks to sell to people who want them to resell to people
who want them for landscaping purposes.
I guess.
Anyway, our properties are back to back for several feet
going north-south. Where Roland’s property stops, say twenty feet south down
the west side of our property, Seok Forest begins (I’m making up the name “Seok
Forest”, too).
Seok Forest is owned by a super-rich – we’re talking
somebody worth tens of millions of dollars – businessman who lives in Texas. We’ll
call him Texan. He leases several hundred of the several thousand of acres he
owns (right next door to us!) to local hunters during the two main hunting
seasons around here, turkey and deer. He’s hired a local property manager named
Pete to oversee the maintenance of the roads that go through the land for the
convenience of the hunters. The road maintenance crew consists, as far as we
know, of two guys, one of whom operates a bulldozer, another a track hoe.
The drama
The dilemma has been that Seok Forest cannot be accessed
without going through – just a tiny
bit – of somebody else’s property. For a while, Pete was having his guy go
through this little road that Roland was convinced was his property, even
though the official survey says different. The little road is on our
property. But Roland gave Pete such a big headache about it, that Pete decided
he didn’t want to deal with it for a while. He just wanted to get on the
property and do the work he was supposed to do.
So Pete had his guys go through the ten feet or so of
Leonard’s property. Apparently one of our neighbors – we’ll call him Jed – down
close to the state highway has made himself the sheriff of the mountain, and
told Leonard about what the Texan’s hired men were doing. They set up a
blockade where the road guys had made a little road.
Please remember that Leonard is hardly ever here, and the
little road truly only went over a few feet of his property that he has done absolutely nothing with,
and probably never will because it’s such a small strip.
I started to get the feeling that there is a distinct
prejudice against wealthy people around here. Which is rather dismaying since
Jerry and I aren’t so poor
ourselves.
On the other hand, Pete was
going through other people’s property without asking for permission first. Bad
on him.
Then again, he’s an experienced property manager. Maybe he’s
dealt with situations like this before, and never had anybody get mad at him
infringing on forty square feet of their property in order to get to an
adjoining property.
The solution
Anyway, after talking to the county and making sure of the
boundaries – and yes, he did try to talk to Roland again, but Roland won’t
respond to any of his messages – Pete finally came to us, asking if he and his
crew could drive their pickups and machines up that little road on the
northwest corner of our property to get to the Texan’s property. We’re not
doing anything with that part of the property – are hardly ever back here – and
we believe in giving.
Just tell your guys not to litter or dump, was my only
concession. Pete said he didn’t like that kind of redneck behavior, either.
Jerry, whom I had never known to bargain before, threw in
this little bit: “Would we be able to get permission to explore Seok Forest?”
We didn’t tell Pete that our son had already been there once
by himself, and that subsequently Jerry had gone with him to see the streams
and waterfalls Benjamin had discovered there.
Pete said he thought that could be worked out.
It has been – we have signed liability papers, and are not
allowed to be on the property during the turkey and deer hunting seasons – and
following are several photos to prove it.
The lake in the background we can't see from our property, but it's about a fifteen minute walk away to it.
Pete came back to us a couple of weeks later and said,
“Because you have been such good neighbors, I am going to let you have our
bulldozer for a half a day to do whatever you want.”
As I mentioned in this post, this deal
saved us some money in getting our earth-sheltered house buried. We also got a
nice pond, at least six feet deep in the middle (filled up two feet now, thanks
to the recent heavy rains) and something like thirty feet in diameter.
It pays to be nice to rich guys.
I said this to a friend, and she said, “I’ve learned it pays
to be nice to anybody.”
Yes, I heartily agree. But not everybody can give you the
use of a bulldozer and access to hundreds of wooded acres with roads and
beautiful flowing mountain streams.
