For the first ten days there was silence. No call, no letter, no response of any kind. I continued my daily log. I continued my boundary walks. I noted that the pipe was still running. I noted it every single day. On the eleventh day, Richard Thorne called my personal cell phone. I do not know how he obtained the number. I let it ring. He left a voicemail.
His tone was not what I expected. He was not apologetic. He was not conciliatory. He was aggressive. He said I was threatening the water security of forty-seven families. He said I had moved onto the land and immediately began looking for ways to cause problems. He said the community had rights that predated my ownership and that his attorney would be in touch.
I saved the voicemail. I transcribed it word for word in my notebook with the date and time. I sent the transcription and the audio file to Patricia the same evening. Patricia called me the next morning. She said Thorne’s voicemail had just added harassment to the file. She said his claim that community rights predated my ownership was legally meaningless without a recorded easement and that he almost certainly knew that.
She said his attorney, whoever it was, would likely advise him to stop making unsolicited calls immediately. The HOA’s attorney made contact four days later. His name was Brett Calloway. He sent a letter to Patricia’s office. I never spoke to him directly. Patricia handled all communication from that point forward. She summarized his letter for me in a phone call.
Calloway had taken the aggressive posture his client preferred. He argued that the well usage constituted an implied easement through long-term continuous use. He argued that the previous landowners’ inaction amounted to tacit consent. He argued that disrupting the water supply would cause irreparable harm to the community. He requested a sixty-day extension to the response deadline.
Patricia denied the extension. She sent her response within forty-eight hours. She addressed each argument directly. Implied easement requires open, continuous, hostile, and exclusive use under a claim of right, and the HOA’s own minutes showed they knew they had no right, which destroyed the hostile and claim-of-right elements. Elton Marsh’s inaction was not tacit consent because inaction by a landowner does not create an easement without additional legal elements, none of which were present here.
And the irreparable-harm argument cut both ways. My property rights were also being irreparably harmed every day the unauthorized usage continued. She closed her response with a single line. The thirty-day deadline remained in effect.
Brett Calloway went quiet for nine days after Patricia’s response. I assumed he was reassessing. Patricia assumed the same. She told me that when an opposing attorney goes quiet after an aggressive opening, it usually means one of two things. Either they are preparing a more serious legal challenge, or they went back to their client with an honest assessment, and the client did not like what they heard. In this case, it turned out to be the second one.