A man in a ranger uniform got out, put on his hat, and walked down to meet them. Vanessa began talking before he had reached the bottom of the ramp, one arm already extended in my direction. I did not paddle away. That was a decision, and I made it on purpose. I had spent four months answering paper with paper while the price of my mornings went up in fifty-dollar increments. And here at last was somebody with an actual badge, somebody whose job was the water instead of the property values around it.
I set the rod down across the thwarts and let the boat drift while she told him her version. I could hear pieces of it across the water. Repeated use of a private lake, warned multiple times, refused to obtain a permit, a homeowner who did not respect the community.
Ranger Mason Trent was maybe forty, built like a man who walks a lot, and he had the most useful quality a person in a uniform can have, which is that he did not seem to be in any hurry. He listened to all of it. He asked her one clarifying question I could not hear. Then Vanessa raised her arm again and said the sentence loud enough to reach me and everyone else in a voice that had been waiting all summer to be used in front of an audience. “Get him off that lake.”
I paddled in slow because I wanted him to see a man cooperating and not a man fleeing. When I was about twenty feet out, Vanessa said to nobody in particular, but plainly for my benefit that some people believe they can do anything simply because nobody has bothered to stop them yet. Two of the board members made a small approving sound.
I put a hand on the piling and held the boat steady and told the ranger good morning and gave him my name and I said I lived at the South End and had been fishing here since before the clubhouse was built. He said, “Good morning, Mr. Reic,” and he said it the ordinary way which after four months of hearing it the other way was almost strange.
He did not order me out of the water. He turned back to Vanessa and asked whether the association owned the entire lake bed. She said of course. He asked for the parcel number. She said the community had held the lake since the development was platted. He said again patiently that he was asking for a parcel identification number.
Vanessa handed him the glossy map, the same one she had held up at the meeting, and I watched him take it and look at it for about five seconds. “This is not a property map,” he said. It was the first time all summer I had seen her lose the beat. She started to explain that it was the official community plan produced by the developer and that every homeowner received one at closing.
He nodded while she talked, which is a thing patient people do that is not agreement, and he was already tapping at the tablet he carried on his hip. He said the county keeps a public parcel map service and that it would take him a minute. Somebody on the dock asked if this was really necessary. Nobody answered.