The ATV Tracks Across My Land
I never got a letter. I never got a knock on my door with a folder of paperwork and a pen. What I got instead was four more months of a pink ATV grinding a path through my land at all hours, because Brenda had decided, somewhere in that head of hers, that if she simply used the land long enough and loud enough and often enough, I would either give up or give in. She was manufacturing her own easement, one tire track at a time, banking on the idea that a grieving widower living alone on the edge of a subdivision would rather sign a piece of paper than keep fighting a woman who clearly was not going to stop on her own.
She was half right about one thing. I was tired. I just was not tired in the direction she thought.
The camera kept catching her. Weekly at first, then daily, then twice daily as the weather turned warm and dry and the ground held her tire tracks like a signature. And she talked. She talked to herself, she talked into her phone on speaker while she rode, she talked to Phil once when he trailed behind her on foot looking miserable, arms crossed, clearly there under some kind of duress. I sat at my kitchen table most evenings that spring reviewing thirty second clips on a laptop Rita had bought me for keeping track of client orders, and slowly, piece by piece, a woman who had spent months insisting she had every right to be on my land explained, out loud, on video, exactly why she needed to be.
“If he sells before the survey’s finalized,” she told Phil one morning in May, not knowing the camera had range enough to catch her from forty feet, “we get first option on the back two acres. That’s the whole plan. Push him until he wants out.”
“He’s not going to sell his whole property because you rode a four wheeler through his flowers, Brenda,” Phil said, and I will admit that hearing him say it, tired and flat as it came out, was the first moment I actually felt something like relief.
“He will if it stops being worth the fight,” she said. “Everybody has a price when the fighting gets old enough.”