They forgot to tell the weather app that it’s fall, but the mountain knows. The cool air flowing down from the high country each morning is liquid refreshment. The hummingbirds are feeding constantly and getting fat. The yellow jackets are in a permanent state of road rage and the snakes are irritable. The birds are on the move.
The sourwoods have already begun the warm‑up act for the colorful concert that arrives later in October, but sometimes the opening act steals the show. Sourwoods are my personal favorite. They are generous with their honey producing nectar and beautiful the entire year. While other trees manage red and yellow and orange in the fall, the sourwood offers a full progression: crimson, garnet, oxblood, vermilion, and burgundy fading to mahogany. And when the leaves are gone, the tiered branches give us a seasonally spooky Halloween decoration with a hint of old East‑Asian garden style.
This is the time of year when I’m grateful for the money I spent on a good pair of boots and proper socks. Once, when I walked the woods for a living, my right knee began giving out on the steep southern slopes of Blood Mountain. My new boots were not living up to their reputation. Fortunately, the trail passed right by the outfitter where I’d bought them, and we discovered that one insole was flawed—about 2 mm thinner than its mate. The outfitter replaced the insoles, and my knee quickly returned to normal. Always buy the best boots you can afford. Never skimp on socks. It makes the difference between limber and lame.
These days my boots are getting their workout during the yearly ritual my family has followed for generations. During the fall and winter months we walk the property lines and check the boundaries. The reason is simple: human nature.
Surveying is a precise discipline, now accurate to about one foot over 100,000. But if you own anything from a backyard to a pasture to a patch of woods, there’s a good chance that during your time on that land you’ll have a neighbor who disagrees with your survey—and the facts won’t matter to him.
My dad used to quip that the metal pins marking mountain property lines tend to disintegrate or travel, almost as if pulled by the earth’s magnetic field. Curiously, when they do travel, it’s always toward you and never toward your neighbor. Dad routinely addressed this by burying a second pin adjacent to the visible one. For reasons known only to the universe, the visible pins wandered while the buried ones—found again with a metal detector—stayed put.
My entirely unscientific theory on the roots of this phenomenon points to a combination of “manspreading” and “elbowing out.” You know the guy at the stadium who has to maximize the distance between his knees, or the airplane passenger who commandeers both armrests. Women do it too. Translated to property lines, it’s the territorial imperative plus a measure of simple theft by taking. Many thieves justify their actions by rationalizing some form of entitlement. The embezzler tells himself the company owes him for some slight. The greedy neighbor knows where he wants the property line to be, and that for some is justification enough. And of course, some people are just crooks.
Among the stories our families have collected over the generations: the livestock fence my grandfather allowed a neighbor to build on his land, only to discover that when the neighbor sold out, he used that fence as the property line. Then there was the cousin who cut and sold several acres of old‑growth timber he did not own. And the neighbor who, denied permission to widen a road for his development, hired a dozer operator to widen it anyway—without informing the operator of the trespass.
Before we were married, Tracey came home to find that the trees in her backyard had all been cut by a new neighbor who contracted the trespass so he could improve his view of the lake. All of these cases involved “plausible deniability.” The contractor did it. The dozer operator did it. I’m sorry, I didn’t know.
Fortunately, Tracey and I are blessed with neighbors who don’t inspire the watchfulness needed in the past. Our adjoining lands are fenceless and feel more like a commons than a defensive position. And yet this year another absentee neighbor contracted for an undergroving on a parcel common to us and our good neighbor to the north. All at once the flagging tape, marker pins, private‑property signs, and conservation‑easement signs disappeared en masse. An old wire fence vanished, shredded by either a bush hog or a mulcher. Having picked a few feet of barbed wire out of a bush hog myself, I can only consider what happened divine justice.
This sort of thing has happened so often and for so long that it hardly moves the needle of my contentment anymore. As long as there are humans, there will be those who have to elbow out. And a healthy walk in the woods on a beautiful fall day with a compass and a roll of flagging tape – is a small price to pay to adjust for human nature.
