The Great Off Grid Ozark Adventure: part 7

Note: This content was written out long before it was published here on the blog. So although this post is being published in early 2025, it was written several months ago. If you’re just finding this post, I recommend starting with part one here to get more background.

At this point, I felt like I had removed the obstacles needed to finally get some work done on the road. However, there was one more. This obstacle was a little more complex. If you’ve read all the previous parts to this, you’ll know that I have to work with some neighbors on this road and that they aren’t wanting to cooperate. In fact, sometimes it seems like they want to hinder any progress. They had a friend with a tractor come to dig out the large culvert we had installed back in April. It pretty big and wasn’t dug down quite far enough so it created a big hump in the road. They were afraid that they couldn’t get their animal trailer over it. I was all for fixing it, in fact that was my plan. But the neighbor lady wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell her that and so she was fighting with me even though we were more or less on the same page with that. I was more than willing to take it out and fix it so they could use the road. But they didn’t want to fix it, they just wanted to remove it and leave it out. The friend they got to come dig it out got stuck in his little two wheel drive tractor and didn’t make much progress. He left quite a mess. I took my tractor and was working to finish what he started. My plan was to take it out, dig down a little more and put it back in. Or if needed, I would take it out, smooth out the road, then get a smaller one to replace it. However, when I actually inspected it, I saw that a very large amount of water had gone through it during the spring rain. We needed a culvert, and it needed to be somewhat big. Maybe not as big as what we have, but enough that I decided to keep the culvert. After observing the runoff during high rains, I don’t regret this decision.

I worked on this for w while and then took a lunch break. The road had been all chewed up from the last guy, and I figured my tractor would be fine sitting there for an hour or two so I left it in the road and walked back to the trailer. We decided to make sandwiches and go down to the creek and eat, cool off, and fill our water jugs. That was what we did almost every day during the heat of the day. As I was getting down to the creek I got a text from the neighbor lady. She said. “We’re at the easement your tractor is here” OK, I replied, “I was working on it but needed to take a lunch break. Is it in the way?” The response. “We’re coming there” What??? I replied, “Coming where? To the road? No response. At this point we had finished our sandwiches and were getting in the water to cool off. I kept my phone close because of this issue and I got another text: “we’re at your trailer”. I replied and said I’m not there but I can be back in 20 minutes. I needed some recharge time and if she wasn’t willing to be clear with what they actually needed from me, then I wasn’t going to drop everything because they say so. She said, “where are you?” I ignored that text. It wasn’t any of her business! If she needed me to move my tractor she could have just said so and I would have done that right away. I decided to cut our break short and head back to the trailer to change. They had gone back to the easement road. When I came back I expected to see them ready to work. Nope. They had driven all over our property, made me cut my break short, and they were just there to look at it. They were having a friend come later that night to work on it, but all the urgency, lack of clarity, and demanding me, for nothing. I was already super annoyed, but I had no illusion that the situation would get better.

At this point, I’m inserting a picture of my favorite spot on the property to remind myself that this place is worth the effort! It isn’t my only favorite spot but it’s probably the most favorite. It is peaceful, rejuvenating, refreshing, and just perfect. There are some deeper spots for swimming, perfect skipping rocks, and clear water. I’m sure we’ll find some water moccasins there but we were there nearly every day and never saw one.

The mother of the family was accompanied by two of her adult children, plus a family friend of some sort. The son is the most reasonable one and stayed in the truck. The mother and daughter immediately surrounded me and verbally assaulting me. The friend lingered back until he was called on to tell me how terrible culverts are. Mother and daughter took turns telling me that they are right and I am wrong as they physically came closer and closed me in against the fence. Then, the mother snapped at the daughter and told her to shut up and then they began a yelling match. I consciously knew I was not in physical danger. Well, they did shoot at another neighbor once, but I checked them over and they were not armed. However, when you corner someone physically and begin yelling at them, it’s going to trigger a fight or flight response. I have a very strong fight response and I knew fighting was not appropriate so I chose flight. I walked away to go move my tractor. The daughter followed me and continued to talk at me. I interrupted her mid-sentence by starting the tractor and it didn’t even phase her! She just talked more loudly. I finally told her to get out of the way so she wouldn’t get run over. They told me that some other friend was coming to work on it that evening and then they left. I felt like it was such a waste of time and energy! I had to go do something else because I was really quite upset over it all. The thing that bothered me the most is that she kept saying that they were in a hurry to get the culvert out so that they could get their stock trailer up there. Well, they have an easement across our property as well. It goes along the very edge and it goes through a small patch of thick forest, and a large pile of dead trees and brush that the bulldozer made when the pasture area was originally cleared. It’s going to be a lot of work and we made sure they knew what needed to be done, and that it was their responsibility to do it. We don’t need it. They hadn’t done a single thing to clear a path so it was evident to me that they planned on driving around it, through our property outside of the easement. I was not OK with that. These are the kind of people that do not respect boundaries unless they are strictly enforced. So, we took bright pink ribbon and used GPS to mark out as exactly as we could the 30 foot boundary that they have to work within. I sent her a text after we were done explaining the boundary and that if they stray from that then they are trespassing and we will enforce it. It felt good to set boundaries but as I later learned, clear boundaries was not enough for her. She needed something stronger.

To be continued…