“Your brand has been defined.”

Okay, look, I’m just looking out for my friends. Got a problem with that?

So this afternoon some rain clouds rolled in. I waited till the brief flurries passed, then loaded the boys into the Jeep and went over to Landlady’s by way of the wash to tend her chickens.

As we drove through the wash the boys alerted to something weird up on the ridge above us, but I couldn’t see anything and told them to settle down. I watered and fed the hens, collected eggs, and went back toward home by the road because the sand in the wash is getting deep and hard to drive through. That meant I had to climb up to the top of the ridge, where I found myself confronting the ‘something weird.’

Okay, this is a little hard to explain. Bear with me. Where we live is ‘open range’ country, which means that in specific strange ways the cattle have more civil rights than the property owners do. Landlady owns a specific parcel here, but off in one corner of it is an ‘exception’ which she technically owns but which allows the person who owns grazing rights to maintain a water well for the purpose of watering cattle. For all the time we’ve been here, the exception has held a shallow well, broken windmill and dry watering tank. I’m aware of it, but it hasn’t been a big factor in my life. Be that as it may, I really am Landlady’s caretaker and when things change there it really is my business. I’m not just sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong.

A couple of times in the past week I’ve noticed vehicle tracks in the exception. Never saw anybody, but I made note of it. This evening there were new tracks. Then I climbed up the ridge in the Jeep and saw many new tracks, culminating in a scene of moderate devastation. Somebody had bulldozed a bunch of junipers out of the way, and in the cleared space somebody had parked a drilling rig. On what I was pretty sure was not the exception, but rather Landlady’s free-and-clear property.

The drilling rig had a well-known name on it. There’s only one drilling company in the little town nearest where we live. Somebody was getting a phone call.

The message of the phone call was basically, “What the hell are you doing bulldozing trees and parking a rig on [Landlady’s] property?” As far as I could tell the location of the rig was well off what I’d always taken to be the exception. I could be wrong, but then what was all that ancient fencing for?

The guy I spoke to was really quite reasonable. He told me exactly who had called for the new well, and why, and it made sense as long as the new well really was within the exception. And he seemed very concerned that maybe where they’d parked their rig wasn’t really inside that boundary. He promised to check on it before they started drilling holes.

Then an hour or two later I got an email from Landlady. To their credit, the drilling company touched base with her.

They’ve apparently been asked to drill a well on the exception, and removed some trees from the property in preparation. Then they got a call “from one of your neighbors … I think it was the guy that drives the yellow jeep?” saying the trees they removed were actually on my property.

They’re contacting the assessors office to find out the property line, but in the meantime, anything you want to add? 😀

Thanks,

[Landlady].

“The guy that drives the yellow jeep.” As we say at [redacted,] your brand has been defined. 🙂

I never identified myself as ‘the guy that drives the yellow jeep,’ but I guess there aren’t that many people here.