Friday, September 13, 2013

Trip Home (4 of 13): Private property.

Everyone where my parents live is talking about how people bought up the point this little sliver of land that you can't build on, but has a nice little beach sticking out into the lake that everyone swims or boats to and brings their kids and let them play in the sand...

The guy who owned it got behind on taxes for 3 years, and then 2 people from the lake bought it, this one guy who had been (rightly, my dad says) accused of murder years ago and sued the county and made some money, and this one guy who's kind of crazy and has an office job at a big state university in the state and is an inveterate gambler, preferring poker.

So, they got the land, and put up six signs all around, saying -

 PRIVATE PROPERTY 
NO TRESPASSING

- and then, in the prefab area where you can write on the bottom of the sign -

NEW OWNERS

So, that's what we're all talking about.

I swim over there a lot when I'm at my parents, and so I just stand in the water there now to rest (riparian rights), before going back.

"And make sure you stand there and piss on it," my dad was like. "That'd probably fall under riparian rights!"

My dad even heard through people that the university guy, who has a summer home on the other side of the lake, says he wants to make it a private beach, and takes out binoculars and checks to see who's going on the point despite the signs.

"Why would he do something like that?", I asked my dad.

"Because it's like [our neighbor the judge] said," my dad said, "That man's strange and an asshole."

The judge's husband even counted the signs, and was telling everyone that there was 6 of them.

When I talked to the summer people next door, this (older) (white) wealthy biz guy from Detroit and his (older) (Polish) wife, both kind of conservative and always going to mass, the wife even brought up the point, and how she can't take her grandkids there.

"Did you hear there's new owners?", she said, wryly.

"I say we nationalize it," I told her, and I got her to laugh.

I bet in her youth in Poland, people always talked about nationalizing this and nationalizing that.

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