Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

Outside Magazine July 2001

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AFTER I PUT the matter of Gary behind me, I was soon embroiled in more serious hostilities. As the new lord of Dark Acres, I felt compelled to take on the matter of sprawl in the neighborhood, my position being that there shouldn't be any more. (It's always the most recent immigrant who wants to bar the gate.)

One day, when I heard the clamor of pounding hammers coming from Junior Dugan's place, I strolled over to investigate and discovered that he had dug the foundation for a new house and was busy building a frame, the spring sun glaring off his white T-shirt. I checked the zoning and discovered that he didn't own enough acreage for another home. When I phoned Junior and informed him of this fact, he replied that because the family's occupancy on Dugania predated the zoning laws, he could do what he liked. After a local lawyer advised me that there weren't any grandfather clauses in the zoning system, I filed a complaint with the County Board of Adjustments. The hammering at Dugania abruptly stopped. Junior filed an appeal. One hot night three months later the board ruled 3-0 in his favor. At midnight the lights in his unfinished house suddenly blazed on—a message to me, the new crank on the lane.

I looked at Kitty, expecting her to be embarrassed, as usual, by my rude behavior. But she was smiling.

Still, the most aggravating of the local government's failures in the Squalor Zone was its inability to do something about the gunfire emanating from an evil quarry everyone calls the Gravel Pit. Owned by the state but leased to the county, this trashy amphitheater, gouged from a ridge above the river within rifleshot of Dark Acres, has served as a shooting gallery for two generations of plinkers and vandals. We've heard automatic weapons up there, Uzis, maybe AK-47s, and watched as tracers cut through the night sky like meteors. Then there were the impromptu "turkey shoots," that burgeoning Squalor Zone sport in which contestants detonate sticks of dynamite by plugging them with bullets. Occasionally some of these madmen fired at the bottomland, figuring that if it looks uninhabited, it must be. But if you hike up on the ridge and stare long enough you'll begin to notice signs of life down there, down where we live—horseback riders, dog walkers, firewood cutters, coeds in gaudy float toys, anglers in drift boats, old men on the banks casting for whitefish. Finally some longtime Zoners grew weary of dodging bullets and clenching their teeth from all the noise and circulated a petition demanding that the county enforce its own no-trespassing policy at the Gravel Pit. Everyone was pleased when the county surveyor ordered the construction of a wire fence to keep out the riffraff. But the very night it was finished someone backed up a truck, hooked a chain to a post, and yanked the entire fence right out of the ground.

The trouble at Dark Acres was in the soil, waiting for us long before we arrived. Because swamps divide the place into two provinces it had always been easier for trespassers to access the more distant half of our property than it had been for the residents. For decades the savviest of these interlopers would make three pilgrimages a year to this sweet land for reasons that had nothing to do with the soul. In May they arrived to creep around in the snowberry bushes searching for wild morels. When these mushrooms pop up after a warm spring rain they look like little brains on sticks, and are a savory delicacy in soups or stuffed with wild pheasant. For the first couple years we were so happy to be living in the boonies we never objected when we saw people trespassing with their ubiquitous goody bags. Besides, I didn't know a morel from a toadstool. But after a friend pointed out one and then another and persuaded me to take a taste I finally understood. We discovered that the richest beds were clustered on the banks of a swamp that we immediately named Lake Morel. The next day while I was riding Timer, our bay brood mare, with Kitty close behind on Rolex, a paint, we came across a middle-aged guy making his way from Lake Morel to his canoe with a pair of bulging pillow slips.

"What's in the bags?" I asked cheerfully.

He looked at them as if they had just jumped into his hands. "These ones? Oh, heck, nothing much."

"Here's the deal," I advised him. "Don't come back. Ever."

The arrogant, self-righteous tone in my voice of the overprotective landowner surprised me. But I had to admit that I liked the way it sounded. In truth, I was full up to here with trespassers who thought they could treat Dark Acres like a public park simply because the tangle of forest made it impossible for us to see them from the house. (It'd be like walking out your back door one day to find a stranger plucking flowers in the garden.)

I looked at Kitty, expecting her to be embarrassed, as usual, by my rude behavior. But she was smiling. Because of all the shooting in the vicinity, Kitty had become even more anxious than me about our animals' safety. (When Kitty was growing up on her family's ranch, a trespassing hunter once shot a prized Hereford bull claiming that he thought the behemoth was a deer.) Because Kitty was a cool and collected moral arbiter, she had always impressed me as the voice of reason. So if she decided something could no longer be tolerated, that was the only mandate I needed. Henceforth, I would be unforgiving in my enforcement of a strict no-tread zone around Dark Acres.

Riding alone the next day, Kitty flushed out a thirtysomething couple dressed in shorts and periwinkle pile pullovers hiding behind a juniper. Spooked by their persons, and by the gunnysacks they were hefting, Rolex suddenly shied sideways. When Kitty recovered her composure she ordered the couple to get lost and told them to spread the word that this place was now and forever off limits.

In early July the wild raspberries begin to ripen. Even though the bushes grow in briar patches they share with stinging nettles and hawthorns bristling with spikes, fruit poachers steeled by experience regularly managed to find their way in and out. And when they emerged from this prickly maze with the goods their eviction was swift and sure. Dark Acres, our trespassers were learning, was no longer the neighborhood commons—it was our beloved backyard.

Far more menacing than the produce thieves were the bow hunters who invaded the floodplains those first few autumns to prey on the whitetail herds. Their presence was confirmed by the proliferation of tree stands all along these happy hunting grounds.

When I rode upon the first buck in the fall of 1991, dead long enough to have been stripped by the way of the world, a broken arrow lodged in its bleached shoulder bone, I felt bad for his suffering, but these herds wouldn't be diminished by his loss. Besides, scavengers need dinner, too. The next season, after we found a doe and then another, both showing evidence of arrow play, I wasn't so sanguine. As a response to these first dead deer I bought some red-and-white No Hunting signs and mounted them on conspicuous trees. We had debated blanketing our horses with Day-Glo during hunting season, but in the end we simply turned them out into the forest for a few hours, crossing our fingers and hoping our signs would save them from the killer monkeys above. One day during bow season, I went out to bring in the horses and happened to glance up at a ponderosa onto which I had nailed a notice. Perched on his little steel shelf right above the sign was a hunter aged no more than 20. He was dressed in camouflage fatigues and his face was smeared with camouflage makeup. He wore a camouflage hat and camouflage boots. I admired his zeal.

"I see you!" I called out merrily.

"What?" he whispered.

"Get your ass out of my tree and take your spikes with you."

"What?"

"Here's the deal, dickhead," I explained. "I'm going to the house for the chainsaw, and if you're here when I get back I'm going to cut you down."

"Is this place posted now?" he asked, feigning innocence.

Maybe I had overreacted to wasted deer or all the gunshots across the river, but again, I liked the sound of menace in my voice. It seemed like a way to scour all the trouble from the soil.

But in the fall of 1995, another dead deer sparked a skirmish that nearly led to open warfare. This time it was a doe, gut-shot with a steel-tipped GameGetter, the wounds as precise as the sutures of a surgeon, punched like crosshairs on opposing sides of her belly. The gluttonous Radish, along with coyotes or foxes, had already eaten into her anus and stripped her gut of all its freshly digested greens, rich with vitamin C.

Whose work this is I think I know.

Seething at the neighbor who, I was certain, had shot the doe across his fence, I walked back up to the house along a canopied path through water-birch thickets to get a rope and a horse.

After I hauled the whitetail into an ancient ponderosa with the help of Timer, I secured the rope to the trunk with a square knot. Suspended there from a limb, the doe transcended the nothingness of death and became a message for the living, fraught with the stark poignancy of Andrew Wyeth's 1961 watercolor Hanging Deer. Nearby, just across the fence, was another old ponderosa. Spikes driven into the green wood led to a steel tree stand 20 feet up. The sign I pinned to the fence post was brief: "Doe gut-shot by a bow hunter and left on the ground to rot."

The phone rang a day later. It was my neighbor, Jay Zank, patriarch of Zankland.

"Hey, chickenshit, a real man would come to me first."

"Real men don't waste game," I said.

"It ain't me!" he shot back. "Them woods are full of hunters. So fuck you, asshole."

"And the same to you, sir."

A few days after we raised the dead whitetail I found her carcass on the forest floor underneath the dangling rope, which had been cleanly sliced with a knife. While Kitty took charge of Timer I took charge of the rope, and we soon hoisted this forest billboard back in the tree. Around Thanksgiving, after the first heavy snow, three shotgun blasts and then the whine of a retreating snowmobile shattered the hush. Trudging from the house, I wasn't surprised to see that my No Hunting signs had been blown away.

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