Three smaller cabins were also dismantled that first day, enough to make the scale of the project visible without pretending the work would be easy. Summit's crews spent hours disconnecting utilities and separating materials that could be reused or recycled. Some components were salvaged for other projects under the supervision of the parties handling the bankruptcy assets. What could not be reused had to be hauled away and properly disposed of. I watched a truck leave carrying sections of cedar siding that had been installed only a few years earlier.
I had expected satisfaction, and there was some. Every removed wall meant a piece of my shoreline was no longer occupied without permission. But the sight also filled me with a deep weariness. Men had spent months building these cabins, and other men now had to spend months taking them apart because the people who authorized the project had ignored the most basic ownership questions. The waste was extraordinary. Garrett had built something beautiful in the wrong place and persuaded more than a hundred people to help pay for the mistake.
Ray found me beside the staging area after his third week. He said the cabins were well constructed and that their materials were sound. "I've demolished buildings that needed to come down because they were falling apart," he said. "These are coming down because they never should have been here." He looked toward the empty pads where the first units had stood. "Makes a man think about how much trouble one signature can cause."
I told him I had spent thirty-five years in engineering and had learned to fear any project in which someone said the paperwork could be fixed later. He laughed without much humor and said construction crews heard that phrase all the time. Then he asked whether I was the man who drained the lake. When I said yes, he looked out across the open basin and whistled softly. "That's a big decision," he said. "It was," I answered.
By the end of February, twenty cabins were gone. The cleared sections revealed bare rectangles of compacted soil, concrete remnants, and the marks of buried utilities. Ray's crew worked six days a week, adjusting around weather and making up time when snow kept the haul trucks off the steep access road. I visited once or twice a week, leaving the daily supervision to the people trained to do it. Whenever I wanted to demand faster progress, I reminded myself that hurrying heavy construction on a fragile shoreline could create damage the settlement was supposed to repair.
March brought thawing ground and an astonishing amount of mud. The crew installed temporary drainage controls to keep runoff from carrying disturbed soil into the remaining creek channels. They recovered old construction debris that had been buried outside the cabin pads and documented several places where the resort's parking areas had extended farther into the natural bank than the plans suggested. Those findings added work, not drama. The goal was not merely to remove buildings that cameras could see; it was to eliminate the hidden infrastructure that would otherwise remain beneath new grass for decades.