The next escalation came with a person attached. A young man in an association polo, maybe twenty-four, came down the slope on a Sunday morning while I was untangling a leader and told me he had been instructed to ask me to remove my watercraft from the water. He was not unpleasant about it. He kept looking at the boat instead of at me.
I asked him whose property he was standing on right at that moment. He opened his mouth and closed it and said he would have to check. And that answer, more than anything in any of the letters, told me exactly how much of this had ever been checked by anybody.
Vanessa arrived about ten minutes later in a golf cart, because of course the association had a golf cart. She came down the slope carefully in flat shoes she clearly wished were better suited to it, and she stopped at the sign, keeping the sign between us the way people keep a counter between themselves and a customer.
She said, “Do not make a simple thing complicated, Isaiah.” It was one of the few times she used my first name, and it did not sound like warmth. It sounded like the tone a supervisor uses on a man who has been with the company a long time and has started asking about overtime.
I told her I was not going to argue with her on a hillside, and that anything the board wanted from me should come in writing. That request was the thing that seemed to bother her most. She wanted a scene. A scene between the two of us on a slope with a young employee watching would have been a story she could tell in her own words at the next meeting. A written record is different because a written record does not care about tone and it stays exactly the same length forever.
I said it twice. In writing, please. And then I went back to my leader and let the silence sit. She left. The golf cart made a small polite whine going up the hill and the young man walked beside it and I sat in the shallows for another hour and caught nothing at all.
The following Wednesday, I ran into Elaine Foster at the hardware store on the highway holding a package of furnace filters and looking at me like she had been hoping not to. I asked her without any edge in it how long the association had been collecting money related to the lake. She said the lake access fee had been part of the annual assessment since before she joined the board and that it was a separate line item not folded into general dues.
I asked what the money covered. She listed it easily the way you list something you have read on a page many times. Dock maintenance, shoreline landscaping, algae and weed control and the liability insurance rider for water access. Then I asked her the only question that mattered and I asked it gently because Elaine was not the enemy and I already suspected she was going to be the one who paid for other people’s confidence.