The ATV Tracks Across My Land
Brenda got elected board president of the Meadowbrook Estates Homeowners Association about a year and a half after the neighborhood filled in, the kind of election where four people run unopposed and everybody signs whatever gets put in front of them at the clubhouse potluck. Her husband Phil had been the board’s treasurer before that, a quiet, tired looking man who mowed his own lawn and never said two words to me across the fence except to apologize once when their sprinkler system sprayed onto my side. I liked Phil fine. I did not know Brenda at all before that first morning with the ATV, and after that morning I knew more about her than I ever wanted to.
The second morning, same time, same sound, that flat mechanical roar coming up over the low ridge behind my shed before I even had my boots on. I went out that time. I stood at the edge of my own grass with my arm up like a crossing guard, and she slowed just enough to look bored about it.
“This is an HOA maintained trail,” she told me, engine still idling under her. “I have every right to use it.”
“You’re forty yards inside my property line,” I said. “There’s no trail here. There never was a trail here.”
She waved a hand like she was swatting a fly. “All the paths through this section fall under association maintenance. Everyone on the board agreed to it.”
I had bought this land with a survey and a deed and two decades of property tax bills, and I was not about to argue geometry with a woman on a four wheeler. I told her plainly that this was my property, not hers, not the association’s, and that I expected her to stop cutting across it. She looked at me the way you look at someone who has said something almost too silly to bother correcting, gunned the throttle, and rode straight through the soft ground near my fence post, the exact stretch where Rita’s oldest rose bush had been putting out blooms since the week we moved in.
That was the first bush she killed. It would not be the last.
Over the following weeks it became a routine, morning mostly, sometimes evening, once even close to midnight when the engine noise woke me flat out of sleep and I stood at the window and watched her single headlight cut a long yellow slash across my back acre. Every single time I went out to meet her, she had a fresh line ready. The HOA allowed it. The land had always been shared. I was being difficult for no reason. Once, with a smile that had absolutely nothing warm behind it, she told me I was probably just jealous that I did not have an ATV of my own.