"You know this as well as I do, James," he told me. "Owning the structure doesn't mean you get to surprise everybody below it. A drawdown is an operation, not a dramatic gesture." I assured him I was not going to do anything without proper review. He waited a moment, then asked the question I had hoped he wouldn't. "Are you considering this because the dam needs it, or because you want to hurt Garrett Peton?"
I looked at the opposite shoreline. The answer was not simple enough to hide behind an engineering term. The dam was sixty-two years old and due for a deeper examination of surfaces normally concealed by water. That was true. It was also true that I had thought about a full drawdown before, then postponed it because of the disruption to the fishery and the expense. But the cabins had made the question urgent in a way it had not been two weeks earlier.
"Both," I admitted. "The dam has to be inspected eventually. And I'm not going to keep a lake full just to make somebody's trespass profitable." Martin was silent for so long that I thought the call had dropped. Then he said that if we proceeded, the work needed to be real.
There would have to be a written maintenance scope, verified operating limits, independent oversight, and a plan for returning the reservoir safely. If the supposed inspection existed only on paper, Garrett's lawyers would expose that before the first hearing ended.
"Then come out and help me make it real," I said. Martin agreed to arrive the next morning, but he refused to promise that a complete drawdown would be approved. That refusal was precisely why I wanted him involved. I had no use for a consultant who would tell me what I wanted to hear while an entire mountain watershed depended on our judgment. I called David next, and his first reaction was even less enthusiastic.
David reminded me that an HOA's bad behavior did not erase the rights of other people. Downstream users might have water rights. A state dam-safety office might require specific operating procedures, notice periods, or environmental measures. Guest reservations and innocent cabin purchasers would complicate the legal consequences even if the structures were plainly on my land. He said he would support a lawful maintenance operation if the engineering justified it, but he would not describe a deliberately destructive operation as "routine" simply because the word sounded comforting.
"I don't want you to become Garrett's best witness," he told me. "He'll argue that you engineered a financial disaster out of retaliation. Give him a genuine inspection, a documented safety plan, and no reason to claim you hid risks from the public." I asked if he was telling me not to drain the lake. He said he was telling me that the decision needed to survive expert scrutiny, not just my own anger. Then he made me promise to stop using the phrase my dam, my rules as if it were a complete statement of the law.