Dawn's future... and today's fire threat

[altivo]

With a great sigh of relief it gives me pleasure (after a vacation week from hell) to announce that Cherokee Dawn's future is secured for at least the next few years, as much so as I could possibly make it. Good friends John and Linda from Rolling Ten Acres will come for her on Tuesday evening and I will sign all ownership over to them. They have a larger place and many more horses, and they will make sure that Dawn learns rank and position both from the other horses and with respect to humans. John wants to make a driving horse of her, and I agree she will be showy. Show quality in fact. Her American and British pedigree makes her an excellent candidate for breeding later on, and she would have little chance of that remaining here.

Although this lifts a great burden for me, it is also a sad event. Originally I had intended to let her go before I got attached. Linda asked early on if I would consider selling her to be a brood mare because of her pedigree, and I said I was reluctant. She was so pretty and so cute, we made the mistake of thinking we could raise her. This is the outcome of that error, and now I have the pain of letting her go. At least I will know where she is and be able to visit her reasonably often, and we will hear of her progress regularly. John has, of course, all right to sell her to anyone if he chooses to do so. I retain no control over that. But I know he is careful about placing his own horses, and will do well for her if at all possible. They have many more management and training opportunities for her than I can offer.

So what now? Well, this afternoon we are dealing with a thoughtless neighbor who insists that trees and shrubs "breed mosquitoes". He's from England, do they really teach that over there? He doesn't seem to understand that standing water part of the cycle and that shrubbery just provides shelter for the adults. At any rate, he is bound and determined to clear nearly everything off his five acres of property single-handed. He shares a long boundary with us and is upwind. Two days in a row I've had to close barn doors to keep flying sparks from his ill-planned fires from igniting my hay. The pall of smoke lying over my land is upsetting my horses and making me cough and sneeze. We have 25 mph winds, which is far too much for open burning, yet yesterday he had flames nearly 20 feet high.

He can clear his land, there's no preventing that, even though it will increase our flood burden here (all his runoff comes to us.) I think his open fires are probably illegal, but I'm reluctant to call in authorities. I am stuck living next to him, after all. Gary went and pointed out to him the risk he was creating to our barns, and his only response was that he would "move the fire". I shudder to think where. If there's a worse place, he will find it. Not intentionally, but just because he has all the foresight and imagination of a ten year old. This is the man who thought a 60 foot oak tree that leaned slightly was "Going to fall across his driveway and block his access" so he cut it down. With an axe. Of course, it fell across his driveway and took him a week to clear out. Then he worried about another and nearly knocked the roof off his house when it fell the wrong way. More recently he rented a BobCat with a 12 foot brush hog "to clear shrubbery out" and proceeded, without checking the survey, to cross into our land wreaking havoc. Only after he got the thing stuck in the mud near our vegetable garden did we realize what he was doing, and we had to point out to him where the property lines are and how they are marked. Our pasture fences are deliberately set six feet inside the boundary, and he assumed he owned everything up to our fence. Wrong.

His wife said to Gary, "You must think we are the neighbors from Hell." I would have told her "Frankly, yes," but Gary is too polite.

--edit a couple of hours later--
Yeah, he moved the fire. Now the thick, choking smoke is blowing right into our house, finding its way in even though the windows are all closed. I'm coughing and sneezing like crazy, but at least the horses are no longer panicking.

Comments

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Whew! Dawn has a brighter future. Hopefully she can get with the program. I am happy for you and her.
What an idiot you have for a neighbor. At least you are not living next to a quasi-junkyard, as you would be if I was your neighbor.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, a junkyard would be a lot quieter and the biggest risk would be rats or something. And you would't have been brush-hogging the 20 year growth of blackberry hedge that hid your junk from my view and helped keep the wind off my horses. Yep, that's what he did. Edible blackberries and red raspberries completely stripped from a 100 x 6 foot stretch of MY land, uncovering my privacy and forcing me to look at the devastation he's creating on his side.

Yes, it's actionable. But as I pointed out, I have to still live next to this man and his three manic, screaming kids, two wandering dogs, unfenced chickens and geese, etc. I'm trying to keep relations from going so sour that it becomes impossible to talk to him, but he's making it more and more difficult all the time. I avoid him now and let my partner be the diplomat, lest I lose my temper and say what I really think of the numbskull. Personally, I think he's stuck in that phase some boys go through at about 10-11 years, where they take great joy in destruction of anything just for the sake of seeing it burn, crumble, or collapse.

[fandt4.livejournal.com]

You won't believe this, but that sounds a lot like our neighbor. Except, he does a lot of what you mentioned just to be an ass. Like, the FIRST time we put up our pasture fence, he had the land resurveyed by his three dollar in-his-pocket surveyor, and made us move it off of what was our land to begin with, five feet back, and replace dirt that "the horse ruined." Those were his words, I don't know what kind of horses he's had, but ours doesn't eat dirt.

Good to hear you found a good home for Dawn... I was shocked when I read that you would sell her for slaughter, I knew you couldn't have been serious...O.O Hopefully she will be able to adjust now, your account with her sounded pretty bad.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No, even if she had actually killed someone I would never sell a horse for slaughter. What I meant, and you weren't the only one to see it otherwise, was that by selling her or giving her away, I was creating a situation where she might one day go that way. Not that I would ever do it. I was left with no option other than to sell or re-home her, though. It is simply not possible to keep her here any longer.

Fortunately, with neighbors here, there is a land survey made every time property is sold. I have copies of my survey and the one from the previous sale. The corners of the property are clearly marked by iron pipes driven into the ground with their tops painted, Those are at least 8 feet deep and not easy to shift. As it turns out, I own land under and on both sides of a county road for about 167 feet. I hope they never come up with anything to assess me for by the foot of road frontage. All surveys are on file with the County Clerk, so in a dispute like the one you had, there is a prior record.

I would have filed a countersuit demanding that the neighbor pay for the fertilizer provided on his supposed 5 feet of land. ;P

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear the situation with Dawn is going to work out. Condolences on your idiot neighbor, though. It sounds like he's ruining his property, frankly. Let's hope he decides to move back to the city or something.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, in my view he's ruining his land. But there are those who think acres of barren turf that you mow two or three times a week are "beautiful". Unfortunately, that would mean that anyone else he'd sell the place to would be just as incompatible with me. The former owners had let three acres go wild to encourage birds and deer and foxes. They were more my preferred style of neighbor. Now this guy is in for a major job trying to level all that, and he has no concern about the impact on anyone else. Why he didn't buy a golf course if that was what he wanted I don't know.

[bariki.livejournal.com]

No, we don't teach that nonsense over here... we don't actually have true mosquitoes. At least, we never used to have them. Nowadays in the south-east, some people think that they do exist. My sister for one.. so paranoid. :P

Perhaps the foolish man will have an accident with a bobcat. Whether a real one or a metallic one, I leave at you discretion.

Glad that the Dawn Saga is coming to a conclusion. Still proud of you for making the decision.. not everyone would have had the strength of conviction to do the right thing and just blundered on. *nuzzles*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm finding that an unbelievable number of people really think I meant to sell her to slaughter. That hurts, because every one of them knew better, or should have.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind, 'Tivo, how many surprises you've dropped on us the last few months. I lost track of your enigma score by now. THAT is why no one was entirely sure.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

But those 'surprises' resulted from the same invalid perception that caused this one. You continue to try to put me in a box, to paint me with clear black and white delineations. The world is not drawn at a bitmap level of 1 or 2 or even 10 million.

If forced to choose between two things, where I must choose, I will make a choice. This is necessary.

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Umm, no.

Those surprises resulted in a change of viewpoint, and THAT change resulted in this misunderstanding.

Those surprises made - me, anyway - people think "Hmm, Tivo probably doesn't think the way I thought he did. Let's be careful what we assume for a while." Then you come along talking about not caring if she goes to slaughter ... You can't blame those around you for going "WTF?"

Yeah, I know, this doesn't make any sense. I'm tired and on my way to bed.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You're right. It doesn't make sense.

Believing that you know how someone else thinks is almost bound to lead to error. Unless, of course, you are a powerful telepath.

In this particular case, it was compounded by a communication flaw that was partly my fault. But really, the thing for all of you to have done was to question me directly, rather than to run wild with all this crazy jumping to conclusions and speculation.