She said their letter was not a legal strategy. It was a pressure campaign with a legal costume on. She was right. And the campaign started in earnest that month. The association newsletter, which had spent years covering mulch and lost cats, ran an item titled a community asset at risk.
It said that one homeowner’s claim threatened decades of neighborhood tradition. That families who had taught their children to swim in Brier Lake now faced uncertainty and that the board was defending the interests of all residents against a private demand. My name was not printed. It did not need to be. Two hundred eighteen households knew which house had the aluminum boat.
That is the part nobody prepares you for. I had spent four months being the man who did not matter. And in about ten days, I became the man who was taking something away. A woman I had helped jump a dead battery in February crossed the street at the mailboxes rather than walk past me. Somebody left a note under my wiper blade that said, “Think about your neighbors.”
A boy of maybe nine asked me at the end of my own driveway if it was true I was closing the lake. And I told him it was not. And I stood there afterward for a while feeling worse about that conversation than about any letter the board ever sent because it was such a clean piece of work.
I had never asked for the lake to be closed. I had never asked anyone to stop swimming or fishing or floating a raft on the Fourth of July. I had asked one question in an email in May, and by autumn that question had been rewritten by a woman with a distribution list into a threat against children in inner tubes.
And the beauty of it, from where she sat, was that if I responded by insisting on my rights loudly, I would prove her version. And if I responded by backing off, she would get everything she had wanted in the first place. So I did not do either.
Dileia and I wrote a proposal and we kept it under two pages and we sent it to the board and to counsel and to every household in Cedar Glenn by mail at my own expense because I was not going to let it be summarized by anyone else. Residents would retain access to the southern waters for swimming, paddling, and fishing exactly as they always had, memorialized in a recorded recreational easement, running to the association and its members in perpetuity at no cost.
No new permanent structures would be built on parcel C without written agreement. The lake access fee would be suspended and the collections reviewed by an independent accountant. The outstanding fines against me would be voided. The members only sign would come off the walkway that crossed my ground, and all association records concerning the lake, including any surveys, reports, or title work, would be made available to the membership.