The distinction became my anchor. Margaret kept speaking about a county-approved project, but the county's approval concerned engineering and construction on land the developer controlled. It did not mean a neighboring ranch had been transferred, and it did not mean a contractor could send a crew through my gate. If someone had wanted the right to cross my property, they could have approached me, negotiated, or taken whatever lawful steps were available to an entity actually authorized to seek such a right. The HOA had chosen none of those paths.
The facility was moving ahead anyway. Each day I passed the western fence, there was something new on the horizon: another row of steel, more concrete, cooling equipment rising behind a service yard, a cluster of temporary generators waiting to be installed. The scale impressed me despite myself. I knew enough about construction to respect the planning involved in putting that many trades into a shared work area without having them stumble over each other.
The more impressive the site looked, the less sense the missing easement made. It was like building a dairy barn without checking whether you had water or constructing a bridge whose far end stopped in somebody else's pasture. People with serious budgets had approved schedules, mobilized equipment, and signed contracts without resolving the one piece of property they needed to complete the electrical connection. I could not decide whether that reflected spectacular carelessness or a belief that a rancher would eventually be easier to move than steel and concrete.
One evening I saw workers unloading a reel of underground cable the size of a small shed. I stood by the fence until a man in an orange vest came over and introduced himself as Luis Ortega, a site superintendent. Luis was in his fifties, with a tired face, a pocket full of pens, and the expression of someone who knew that construction disputes were never as simple as the person signing the check wanted to believe. He asked whether I was Daniel Mercer.
"That's me."
"I've heard your name more times this week than the project number," he said. "I came over because I want you to know my crew isn't looking to fight with anybody."
"I'm glad to hear it."
"We're being told the legal issue is resolved. I haven't seen the document myself. I can keep people off your side until somebody puts something in my hand that I can verify, but there's pressure to move the schedule."
I looked at the cable reel. "Is that what goes through my ranch?"
"Some of it," he admitted. "We have a planned route to the existing utility tie-in. The corridor on the drawings is the straightest one. That doesn't make it the only possible route, but it makes it the one priced into the contract."
"Who priced the land rights?"
He gave me a look that was almost an answer before he spoke. "That isn't my department."