Four days after that, a letter arrived on association stationery addressed to me at my own mailbox requesting that I cooperate with the community revitalization plan. The letter was a small masterpiece of implication. It referenced architectural review. It referenced setback consistency. It referenced the board’s authority to approve improvements within the community. And then in the very next line, it described the front entrance improvements as including removal of obsolete overhead structures at the northeast approach.
Nowhere did it say the association had authority over my land. It just arranged the sentences so a careless person would assume it did. I wrote back a numbered response because numbered responses are harder to misquote later.
One, my parcel is not a member of the Silver Pines Association and is not subject to its covenants. Two, the land has never been annexed into the community, and no assessment has ever been levied against it. Three, the pole in question sits inside a recorded utility corridor, and the equipment belongs to the electric utility, not to me and not to the association. Four, any request regarding that equipment must originate with the utility and be documented before anyone sets foot on the parcel.
I attached the photographs of the paint marks and asked in one plain question at the bottom whether the association had contacted the utility. She ignored the question. She answered everything else and skipped that one line. I noticed. I saved the email.
The next confrontation happened at my fence, which is where most of them happened because Vanessa liked to stop her vehicle on the shoulder and talk to me across barbed wire as if that made it informal enough not to count. She had a rolled set of drawings in her hand. And she wanted me to look at the rendering, and honestly, the rendering was handsome. Stone wall, brass letters, the pear trees in bloom, a soft wash of light on the sign at dusk.
It was also drawn with no pole in it at all, which is a very easy thing to do in a drawing and an extremely difficult thing to do in reality. I asked her again whether she had contacted the utility. She said, “We have a contractor.” That is not an answer to the question I asked, and both of us knew it.
A contractor is a set of hands. A clearance is a piece of paper that says those hands are allowed to be there. I have watched men with twenty years of experience refuse to touch a pole without that paper. And I have watched what happens on the rare day somebody does not wait for it.
Then Vanessa said the sentence that I would end up repeating to more people than any other sentence in this story. She looked out at the tree line behind me at the rooftops of phase one just visible through the gaps and she said, “One hundred eighty families cannot be held hostage by one man because he is fond of an ugly pole.”
I did not argue with her. I asked if she thought I was fond of it. She said, “I think you enjoy having something we want.” There was nothing to say to that. So I said the only useful thing left. I told her that if the utility had not signed off on it, nobody should be near that structure with equipment. I told her the third time would be in writing. Then I walked back up to the house.