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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Trespassers, dealing with
  • Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 09:09:38 -0600



Years ago I was at a dinner party at a nearby friend's house. Guests included our elected county judge. During after-dinner talk, John noted that the most contentious cases he heard involved property line disputes and charges of trespassing. Serious felonies caused anger but trespassing caused rage.
Something there is in many of us otherwise gentle folk that brings out the base animal within when our territory is invaded. This article by TNYT gardening editor motivates me to ask you how you feel about and deal with those who violate your property rights.

Coming Late to a Call to Arms

By <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/anne_raver/index.html?inline=nyt-per>ANNE RAVER
Published: November 23, 2006

EVEN though I grew up around hunters, I’ve been wary of guns all my life. I’ve never wanted to kill a goose, or a deer.

But here I am, standing in the meadow, inserting a slug into the chamber of my single-barrel shotgun. I lift the gun to shoulder level, left eye closed and right eye open, and sight down the smooth barrel. I try to keep my arms steady as I aim for the middle of a cross taped onto plywood.

The boom of igniting gunpowder, the cloud of smoke, are a shock to the senses. A hole the size of a grape is punched through the target by the slug, which is designed to expand on impact.

“Two inches from dead center,” says my boyfriend, Rock, who is already a good shot, focusing his little scope on the target.

So why is a peacenik garden writer learning how to use lethal firearms?

For one thing, when we first moved to the farm, in central Maryland, we found a number of guns, unloaded shotguns and .22 rifles, stashed in closets, and ammunition tucked into bedroom drawers. We gathered them up, to keep them out of the reach of children and visitors. But handling them sparked our interest, and we decided that learning how they worked was safer than studied ignorance.

When I came back to my family homestead about 15 years ago, no one had been regularly walking the 125-acre property. My father had died after a long illness, and my mother confined her walks to the yard.

I found the tracks of all-terrain vehicles crisscrossing the woods. These machines have come with suburbia, and the houses cropping up on the old fields. The new residents don’t want to walk down to the stream or through the woods. Some of them even joyride through fields of young green wheat.

Sometimes I could trace the tracks back to a particular house, in which case I would try to talk to the people living there and invite them to enjoy our land on foot. I often met resistance.

“Oh, we weren’t hurting anything,” one man told me. “We just like to get out in the woods and enjoy nature.”

When I explained that his machine was eroding the stream banks, crushing wildflowers and disturbing the birds and other animals, and that besides, he was trespassing, his patronizing tone took on a hostile note.

“Well,” he said. “We have a different attitude about nature than you do. We think this woods is for everyone.”

I have often used much the same words, picturing quiet birders, children wading in the stream, even careful hunters, who keep down the deer population. But hearing them from someone who never walks when he can ride filled me with a kind of primitive rage.

Our family has lived here for five generations. We have a deed dated 1761, which granted thousands of acres to the Bond family. My great-great-grandfather, a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, was smart enough to marry a Bond, thus claiming title to about 300 acres. Over time, it was divided among his descendants.

Owning land is a tricky thing, if you are of the opinion that most of it was stolen from the Indians: Who am I to keep people off “my” property? But we have preserved the farm under a conservation easement, meaning it can never be developed, and are trying to be good stewards. Many of my new neighbors do not think of land as something that must be nurtured if it is going to sustain life. It’s a medium, like AstroTurf, for recreation.

When I informed my neighbor that I would call the police if I found him riding through our woods again, our polite sparring was over. “It’s people like you who ruin things for everyone!” he screamed. “Everything was fine until you came here!”

That’s when I considered stretching wire taut between the trees so no one could trespass on my land. The man’s attitude had triggered something deep inside me that was now rising into my throat. I wasn’t exactly proud of this part of me, but there it was, my barking dog.

My brother Jim, who owns a farm in western Maryland, warned me that I could be sued or imprisoned for injuring a trespasser with such a barrier. So Rock and I felled trees across the paths instead. Sometimes, when we hear that familiar whine, we take chase in our ancient pickup. It’s not that we expect to catch anyone. We’re just making things uncomfortable ­ and most trespassers go elsewhere.

But the idea of learning to shoot one of those guns never occurred to me, until two winters ago when I heard what sounded like a chainsaw ripping through the quiet air of a snowy afternoon. I ran out to see a bright blue snowmobile careering over our cornfield, spiraling across its white blanket of snow, a plume of exhaust in its wake. I drove after it in my Subaru Forester, waving my hand as if to say, “Slow down.”

The driver ignored me, roaring past the front of my car, then swerving back, and screeching to a halt a few inches from my window.

When I told him that this was a conservation area, that we did not allow snowmobiles on our land, and that if he persisted I would call the police, he cursed me, told me he would burn down our barn.

As he roared off, I realized how naïve I was being, confronting these strangers.

I didn’t get much help from the state police, who told me that, essentially, I could bring no charges other than trespassing because I had “no proof of intent.”

Like burning down the barn, I guess.

When I called Jim that night, he wasn’t surprised. “The state police don’t want to get mixed up in these turf battles,” he said. “I just walk the property with my shotgun, broken open, so people know it’s not loaded.”

So that’s what we have been doing lately. And maybe it’s luck, but we haven’t had any trespassers.

A shotgun, at close range, can do a lot of damage. And fortunately, in Maryland, it’s illegal to fire one, even up in the air, to scare someone off your land.

I still don’t want to shoot anything, but I’m glad I know how this old shotgun works. In a strange way, it connects me to my great-grandfather, who may have walked these very same boundaries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/garden/23garden.html?_r=1&ref=garden&oref=slogin

Gene GeRue
http://www.PhoenixRealEstate.bz
Success is a By-Product of Helping Others




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