Vanessa moved the meeting on to the mulch bid and I sat down with my folder unopened on my knees and the man beside me leaned over and said kindly that it was probably easier just to pay it. That is the sentence that keeps places like Cedar Glenn running. It is probably easier just to pay it.
Two days later, a fourth notice arrived, and my fine had gone from two hundred fifty dollars to four hundred dollars with a paragraph explaining that continued non-compliance could result in a lien against my property. She had not answered a single question I asked, and she had raised the price of asking.
That night, I did something I had been putting off since my uncle’s funeral. I got out the original deed, the one from the transfer, and I read it line by line under the kitchen light with a straight edge under each row, so my eyes would not skip. Legal descriptions are written to be unreadable. All of that bearing north and thence easterly language, and I had glanced at this one a dozen times over seven years without truly reading it.
Halfway down the second page, after the description of the house lot, there was a clause I had always treated as leftover boilerplate from some old farm division. Together with parcel C, as shown on Brier plat number two. I sat back. There was no parcel C in anything the association had ever sent me. There was no Brier plat number two in the glossy map Vanessa had waved at the room because that map had no plat reference at all.
I did not know what parcel C was. It could have been a strip of scrub behind the fence line or an abandoned right of way or nothing at all. But it was recorded and recorded things live in a building downtown with a counter and a clerk. And I had a Thursday off coming. I wrote the words parcel C on the back of the fine notice and I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet where I would see it every morning while the coffee ran.
Vanessa did not wait for me to find an answer. On the Saturday before my day off, a work crew showed up at the head of the walkway behind my property and set two posts in the ground with a sign bolted between them. Private association members only. No public access. Enforcement by authorization of the board.
The lettering matched the clubhouse signage down to the color. The posts were sunk on the grassy slope maybe forty feet from my back fence. On ground I had always mowed myself because nobody else ever did. I stood in my yard with a cup of coffee and watched two men in association polo shirts tamp the dirt down around a sign that told me I could not walk to water I had walked to for seven years.
Three days after that, a camera appeared. It was mounted on a cedar post near the picnic area and it was angled in a way that had nothing to do with the picnic area because the picnic tables were behind it and the only thing in front of it was the slope where I put the boat in.
I got the photographs in the mail the following week, printed on plain paper and stapled to a violation notice. Section 14 again. There I was at six o’clock in the morning in a gray sweatshirt pushing the bow off the mud. There I was again with the rod across my knees. Somebody had gone to the trouble of printing my mornings and mailing them to me and had written a case number on the corner in blue pen.