I found out because Wanda Curtland brought one down to the loadout and asked kind of apologetically whether my track was legal. I went to the September meeting. I brought the deed, the recorded operating agreement, and the plat. I sat through forty minutes of landscaping bids. When I stood up, Karen looked at me the way you look at a dog that got into the clubhouse.
โYouโre not a member,โ she said. โYou donโt get to speak here.โ I said I owned the ground she was planning to build on. โWe have a letter from the state,โ she said. โSit down or step out.โ I stepped out.
I want to be honest about what I thought in the parking lot that night because itโs the reason everything after it happened. I thought sheโs got a piece of paper thatโs wrong, and paper thatโs wrong gets fixed. I thought I had months. I thought that at the absolute worst some lawyer would call some other lawyer, and that would be that. It did not occur to me, not once, not for a second, that a woman with a clipboard would simply send a paving crew onto my land and bury the thing.
Two weeks later, she did. And when I got home from the crossing that Tuesday, with asphalt on my boots and that brass plate on the seat beside me, I did what I should have done in September. I pulled the plat. Not my plat, theirs. The recorded subdivision plat for Foxglove Crossing Estates. The one Brightwater filed when they platted those one hundred eighty-eight lots. The one every deed in that neighborhood is written against.
The rail corridor was on it. Drawn, dimensioned, labeled, and hatched out. Excepted. Written right there on the face of their own subdivision map, the strip Karen had just paved was not part of Foxglove Crossing Estates, and never had been. Whoever drew that plat knew there was a live railroad through it.
So I sat at my kitchen table with her state letter in one hand and their plat in the other, and the question came up out of the paper at me and would not go back down. The letter said the Fern Hollow branch was abandoned. Then what exactly had hauled fourteen loaded hoppers off my property on the eighth of September?
I did the reasonable thing first, and I want that on the record because of what it cost me. That night I wrote the association a demand letter. Restore the crossing, remove the asphalt, and Iโd forget the switch stand. I attached the 1948 deed, the recorded operating agreement, and the page of their own plat with the corridor hatched out and excepted printed across it.