Trouble in Eden
I got a couple of friends who live back off the blacktop down a dead end dirt road, a place they could be left alone in peace and quiet. They’re pretty typical
South Enders, grow their gardens and plant orchards, live in co-existence with nature and the nettles. An angry God didn’t kick everyone out of the Garden … or so it seemed.
No, sometimes He just sent neighbors instead. The new couple didn’t like how dark their new property was once they’d moved in and the winter monsoons pulled the shade. At first they tried a little pruning, mostly on the southern side where my pals lived. Mostly my pals’ trees, not the seasonally affected couple’s. Well, mistakes happen, my friends thought, probably just some small confusion concerning property lines, no big deal.
When pruning didn’t let much extra sunshine into their place, the new folks cut all their trees … and a few of the adjoining neighbors. My friends’ old cedar was felled while they were out working so imagine their surprise finding a favorite cedar laying in their yard. Words were exchanged. The new couple claimed the trees were on their property, they’d even moved the old survey markers to help prove their contention.More words flew, but post-logging, and those trees would only take 100 years to grow back. My pals hired a survey anyway and their neighbors served them with summonses. For trespassing on their newly expropriated property and also for harassing their kids.
Lawyers were hired, money began to leave faster than trees, a judge asked the couple why they’d filed a suit against one of my friends after the other was acquitted for lack of any evidence, and the husband testified, “because he lives there.” Case dismissed, money lost, peace and tranquility too. The husband put his own non-survey stakes in this week and now my friends wonder what’s next???
There are people who will take an inch, then grab for the mile. The law is an expensive remedy for those like my friends without much money. I don’t advocate taking the law into our own hands, usually, but there are folks who could use a little frontier justice, who thought maybe if we were this gentrified they could take all they wanted while Law and Justice took its own sweet time. They don’t know the South End. But they will shortly.
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