The next two weeks became the busiest stretch of my retirement. On July 19, Martin drove up with an assistant and a truck full of instruments. David arranged for a licensed boundary surveyor, Elena Vasquez, to inspect the recorded corner monuments and reestablish the eastern line in the field. I requested the permitting and ownership files for the Mountain Vista construction through the county. My caretaker, Luis, brought me the notes he had kept while I was in Portland, including photographs of delivery trucks and the names of contractors who had passed through the neighboring development.
Luis was sixty-four, quiet, practical, and usually more interested in trail maintenance than confrontation. He had noticed trucks moving toward the eastern shore but believed the HOA was working on its own upland parcel. On several occasions he had asked a foreman whether crews needed access across the Whitmore boundary. Each time the foreman told him the resort project had already been cleared by the county. Luis had not thought to call me because the activity appeared well outside our regular maintenance areas, and because I had asked him not to disturb Emma's new family unless there was an emergency.
"I should have gone down there," he told me while we studied his photographs. I shook my head. It was my job to make the property lines clear to the people maintaining the place, and I had not imagined a development company would cross them on such a scale. We reviewed his notes, identified the vehicles, and dated everything he could remember. David later said those modest photographs would help show when the construction crews first appeared and how openly the association had been operating.
Elena began at the northern boundary marker, where a steel pin lay beneath a granite boulder my grandfather had marked in a handwritten map. She and her crew worked southward for two full days, establishing control points and comparing the physical monuments with the recorded legal description. I walked with them along portions of the shore where construction crews had torn out old growth and poured foundations. At one site, the edge of a cabin deck stood over the flattened remains of a stand of willow shrubs that used to attract songbirds in spring.
By the evening of July 21, Elena had a preliminary result. The boundary was not where the HOA's construction drawings placed it. The drawings appeared to use a simplified county geographic-information layer that treated the reservoir's high-water line as a property edge and misidentified the adjoining bank. The actual deeded boundary extended uphill beyond that line. Several buildings lay more than seventy feet within the Whitmore tract, and none of the 109 cabins appeared to be safely outside it.
"How does somebody pour a hundred foundations without a title survey?" I asked. Elena kept her answer careful. The contractor might have been given an incorrect base map, the developer might have made assumptions about ownership, or the relevant information might have been ignored.
We could not yet say which. She did say that the recorded boundary monuments were not obscure or inaccessible; a qualified surveyor had enough information to find them. Somebody had built a twelve-million-dollar project without doing that work correctly.