You don’t have the right to lock us out of our own neighborhood. That’s what Diane Wexler screamed at me through a bullhorn while standing on my property, ten feet past my fence line, in front of thirty witnesses, being recorded by cameras she didn’t know were running. She had organized the community safety watch to protest the fact that I had installed a biometric security gate on my own private driveway. A gate with no key, no keyhole, no code, nothing she could demand, copy, or send someone to cut in the middle of the night, which by the way she had already done twice with my old padlocks.
“We need to have access to our property.” What she was actually doing was committing criminal trespass on camera in front of a newspaper photographer she hadn’t noticed parked on the county road behind her. Have you ever watched someone build their own case against themselves?
My name is Curtis Bain. I’m forty-seven years old and I work as a cybersecurity consultant out of Asheville, North Carolina. Before that, I spent twelve years in the Air Force working signals intelligence and electronic security systems. I know locks. I know access control. I know how to keep people out of places they don’t belong, and I know how to document every single attempt they make to get in.
My father, Earl Bain, bought twenty-six acres on the western slope of Pisgah Ridge back in 1989. Dense hardwood forest. Oak, hickory, poplar, with a seasonal creek running through the northeast corner and a gravel access road that connects to County Road 9. He built a cabin there in 1991. Nothing fancy. Twelve hundred square feet of post-and-beam construction with a metal roof, a stone fireplace, a wraparound porch, and a view of the Smokies that would stop your heart on a clear morning.
He used that cabin every weekend for twenty-five years. Hunted deer from it in the fall. Fished the creek in spring. Sat on the porch in summer and read Louis L’Amour novels until the lightning bugs came out. When the Ridgecrest Meadows subdivision went in around 2008, the developer bought one hundred acres east of Dad’s property and carved it into sixty-two residential lots. Cookie-cutter houses on half-acre parcels, community pool, walking trail, the whole suburban package.
The HOA was formed the same year. Dad’s land was never part of the subdivision, never part of the HOA. The properties shared a boundary line, about four hundred feet of split-rail fence along the eastern edge, and that was the extent of the relationship. Dad passed in 2016 from pancreatic cancer. I inherited the property free and clear. The cabin became my retreat, my decompression chamber after long consulting contracts. I drive up on Friday afternoons, turn off my phone, and spend two days doing nothing but splitting wood, grilling steaks, and sitting on the porch watching the ridge change color.