She said the board relied on the developer plan. He asked again using her name again. She said title questions were complex. And that is when I took the last thing out of my folder and laid it on the table, the preliminary boundary and feasibility report, opened to page nine with the title considerations paragraph marked. And then I turned it to the final page and set my finger under the distribution list where her name was printed with a date fourteen months old.
Nobody said anything for a while. Elaine Foster leaned over and read the page from where she sat and then she took off her reading glasses and let them hang. And she looked at Vanessa the way you look at somebody you have been defending in conversations you are now remembering one by one.
The board had never seen that report. It had been commissioned under the president’s discretionary authority for preliminary project work a spending category with a ceiling low enough that it never required a vote and it had gone to her and it had stopped there. Vanessa said finally that the report was preliminary and that preliminary findings are frequently revised.
I said that may be true and that I was not a lawyer and had no interest in pretending to be one. Then I said the only sentence I had prepared in advance and I said it in an ordinary voice because I had learned by then that ordinary carries further in a quiet room than loud does. “You told me I did not belong on this lake. It turns out the map remembers me better than you do.”
I sat down. Vanessa moved to table the discussion pending advice of counsel and the motion carried and the meeting went on to the mulch bid. And I want to be honest, I thought that was going to be the end of the easy part. It was because a woman like Vanessa Pike does not lose a room and go quiet. She loses a room and changes the subject.
Two weeks later, the association’s counsel sent a letter to my house and the tone was completely different from anything the board had ever mailed me. It was courteous. It acknowledged that questions had been raised regarding the boundaries of certain submerged parcels, and then it asserted in careful language that regardless of record title, residents of Cedar Glenn Estates had used the entirety of Brier Lake openly, continuously, and without objection for more than thirty years, and that the association intended to assert prescriptive recreational rights over the southern waters on behalf of its membership.
There was a paragraph inviting me to resolve the matter amicably by executing a recreational use agreement. I hired a real estate attorney named Dileia Ror, sixty-one years old, an office above a dry cleaner, three decades of nothing but land. She read the file in one sitting, and when she finished, she said the association’s position was not frivolous, which is exactly what I needed to hear and not what I wanted to.
Long unchallenged use does create arguments. My uncle had never posted the water, never fenced it, never sent anybody away. What the association’s letter carefully did not mention was that their own recorded easement contained an express acknowledgement of my family’s ownership, and use that is exercised under a written easement is permissive use, and permissive use does not ripen into a right, no matter how many decades run over it.