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.
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.