The Survey Stakes Marked a Route Nobody Had Asked Me to Surrender

"Did you approve this fence?" Nina asked.

We were still beside Mara's car. Owen held the folder open so the wind would not take the pages.

"No. I saw the crew digging and asked what they were building."

"Did you sign anything?"

"A delivery slip for a package they left at my shed. Nothing about a fence."

The application didn't show my signature. Felicia had signed a statement that the affected owners agreed. My lot appeared on her list of affected properties.

That was bad enough. Nina told Owen to keep the original file intact.

"Get a copy from the city too," she said. "We want to know exactly what was submitted."

On Friday, Tomas returned with a second instrument and an assistant. I offered coffee. They accepted it after the first set of readings, not before.

"Spill one cup on this book and I have a very bad morning," he said.

He set orange stakes along the recorded strip. He checked the road end, the old concrete marker, and the ramp approach. Then he checked back to the starting point.

I knew that kind of work. On a ferry, you didn't call a shaft straight because one gauge liked it.

Felicia arrived as he was taking pictures.

"Those stakes are on association property."

"Yes," Tomas said. "I'm marking the easement within it."

"You need our permission."

He gave her Nina's card and kept his hands away from the fence.

"I'm measuring. Any disagreement about access can go through counsel."

"Mr. Park is paying you."

"He is. The measurements still have to close."

She waited for him to add something. He didn't.

By lunch, the orange line ran straight through the space her fence occupied. At the tightest point, the fence took four feet four inches from the twelve-foot route. Only seven feet eight inches remained.

My trolley was six feet eight inches wide. On a straight path, I could inch it through. At the bend, with the bollard on one side and water beyond the edge, I couldn't make a safe turn.

Tomas photographed the trolley without moving it into the gap.

"We can show the problem without making one," he said.

Felicia took pictures of us from her phone. Then she went away.

That afternoon Nina received the city's copy of the application. It matched Owen's. A note in the file said the permit did not settle private access rights.

"Her permit doesn't erase your agreement," Nina told me. "And her statement about consent needs a written correction."

She sent the survey, the deeds, and a proposed resolution to the board. Cancel my seven hundred twenty dollars in fines. Stop the license charges. Move the fence outside the route. Provide the billing records so the other owners' refunds could be worked out.

She gave them ten days to answer.

For those ten days, I brought engines into my shed from the water side. I turned down a repair that needed the trolley. It was a ninety-five-dollar job for a man who needed his boat for crabbing.

"I'd lend you the ramp if I could," I told him.

"Thought it was already yours to use."

"So did I."

I kept his message with my notes. A lost job was a small thing, but it had a date and a name. I was learning to keep those.

Mara helped the other owners sort their payments. Nina found the same easement in every title record. None of the six old lots had joined the association.

None of the other owners had approved the fence, either. They each wrote down when they first saw the posts and signed their accounts. Nina kept those pages with the application.

I also sent the board a sketch of a safer place for the fence, outside the access strip. The lawn could still be enclosed. The ramp could still be reached. Tomas checked my sketch and corrected one distance before I sent it.

"You gave them an option," he said.

"I gave them the one that doesn't scrape my trolley."

We kept a copy of that offer with the others.

Owen told us the board had voted to hire an outside accountant to review the charges. Felicia had voted no and called the review a public insult.

"Three people disagreed with her," he said. "She asked which one of you had put them up to it."

I was at my bench when the tenth day ended. I folded a boat from the unused corner of a survey print. On its side, a faint orange line ran from bow to stern.

At six, a truck backed toward the ramp. Two workers unloaded a steel gate panel.

I walked outside.

"Where's that going?"

One pointed to the opening in the cedar fence.

"Order says secure the ramp tonight."

He showed me his work sheet. Under special instructions, Felicia had written: Install Lock. No Keys to Park.