The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

What Lane Wanted

Lane had been out of work since the plant in town cut its second shift. I knew that, and I want to be fair about it.

This is not a story where the man across the gate is a devil.

He had two kids in school and a wife who drove forty minutes each way to a hospital job. The money was thin in his house the way it was thin in a lot of houses on our road that fall.

He had come to me in September with a notebook. He had done the math.

Color weekend, he said, drew a thousand cars a year up our gravel if you counted the ones that just crept by with their windows down.

If a man put up a gate and charged fifteen a rider and ten a car to park and sold cider and a few pumpkins, a man could clear eight or nine thousand dollars in three weekends.

“On what, though,” I had said. “On Grandpa’s ridge.”

“On my third of Grandpa’s ridge.” He tapped the notebook. “I run the gate, I keep the gate money. You want to run your own thing, run it on your third.”

I told him it did not work like that.

I told him the maples he meant to charge for were the same maples Grandpa let stand for everybody.

You could not put a turnstile on something a family had given away free for fifty years and still call it the same ridge.

He said times were different. He said Grandpa was not feeding anybody’s kids anymore and he was.

I did not have a good answer for that, so I went home.

Three weeks later the gate was up, and the padlock had a price sticker on it, and my cousin was sitting behind a card table asking the Prairie Hollow Riders for six hundred dollars to go look at the leaves.

The Phone Call I Did Not Make

Sharon Deeds dispatched for the county for thirty years before she retired to raise Tennessee Walkers. She told me flat out I should call the sheriff.

“It’s an easement,” she said, standing in my kitchen with her coffee. “Fifty years of folks crossing that ridge. That’s a prescriptive easement.”

“My cousin had one on his lane. You call the law and they’ll make him take the gate down.”

I had thought about it. I had lain awake thinking about it. But I knew two things Sharon did not.

The first was that it was not that simple on heirs’ ground. The ridge was owned three ways with no line drawn.

A lawyer my aunt once talked to had said that until the heirs split it on paper, no one of us could keep another one of us off any part of it. And no one of us could promise a club the right to cross it either.

It was a knot. You could spend two years and more money than the ride was worth getting a judge to untie it.