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.
I gave away everything Vanessa had told them I was trying to take. What I did not give away was one line, and it was the only line that had ever mattered. No party would represent, license, price, or police, the use of parcel C except its owner.
That was the end of her and she understood it before anybody else in the room did. She had built her defense entirely on the idea that I was a selfish man taking a lake from a community and I had just offered the community the lake permanently in writing for free. The only thing my proposal removed from Cedar Glenn Estates was her authority over the water. When you strip a fight down that far, everybody can finally see who was actually fighting about what.
The board called an emergency session for the last Thursday in October. Vanessa walked into that clubhouse at seven o’clock as president of the Cedar Glenn Estates Homeowners Association with the binder under her arm the way she always carried it. The name plate was gone from the head of the table. Elaine Foster was sitting in the chair at the head of the table and she did not look happy about it and she did it anyway.