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.
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.