The Great Off Grid Ozark Adventure: part 8

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.

The last post ended with me being extremely frustrated with the neighbors who are supposed to be helping us with the road. They had a friend coming that night to work on it. I thought that in my frustrated state of mind, it would be better for me to switch gears and work on something else and not be present while someone I didn’t know worked on the road. I wanted to be there, but I wasn’t sure it would be wise. I decided to back off for the moment.

The next morning, I went down to look at the road. I expected the culvert to be gone. To my surprise, that wasn’t the case at all. The culvert had been reburied and the road had been somewhat smoothed out from the “work” the last guy had done. Whoever had been there, had actually done pretty good work. He had brought in some dirt to make the transition over the culvert more smooth. It was actually a pleasant surprise, but I felt like I had whiplash from these people. As I saw it, the next step was to spread the rest of the large gravel I had ordered back in April. The tractor I bought came with a rear blade that works great for this. I hadn’t really used it so I put it on and started testing it out. I was spreading rock and it was actually starting to look like a road. It was exciting.

Then it happened. The one difficult neighbor pulled up. She had a nasty look on her face and she pointed at me and signaled for me to come over. My first reaction was to totally ignore her. I didn’t really want to talk to her and I had set my boundaries through text. I didn’t want her to think that she could just summon me at her whim and I would obey like a dog. However, something happened that I wasn’t expecting. It was like a fierce lion sleeping deep inside me woke up and roared. I felt a strange power well up from within. Something told me to go deal with that woman. I got off the tractor and went over. With the biggest scowl you can imagine she said, “You owe me an apology!” I won’t regurgitate everything that was said, but if someone demands an apology for setting appropriate boundaries, they have crossed into abuse. The lion in me roared… literally. I’ve never in my life spoken to anyone the way I spoke to her. I raised my voice and I said what I needed to say with power and language my friends and family have never heard come from my mouth. I’ve always been more on the timid side. I’ve always been a peace keeper. But I realized at that moment, that I needed to be a peacemaker. Sometimes some aggression is needed to make peace. She tried her usual tactics of interrupting me and talking over me. I told her that the issue here is that she doesn’t listen but she interrupted me again. I told her to shut her mouth and listen to me. The issue here is that I had agreed that we could remove the culvert temporarily but she didn’t listen to me. I needed her to listen. That is when the conversation took a turn. Amazingly, she realized that she wasn’t going to bulldoze me and she listened. When I saw that, I changed my tone and spoke more softly again. We actually had a productive conversation! She still grimaced and rolled her eyes, etc. However, I at least felt like she gave me a chance to speak and that is what was needed. We still don’t agree, but at least we were able to communicate.

The strange thing is that she changed the whole story. The day before, they were in a huge hurry to tear it out so they could get their stock trailer up there. When I told her that without exception, they would not be able to drive through our property except for the easement (which they hadn’t worked on at all and it nowhere near usable) she was now saying that they didn’t actually need it. Her son, who lives on their property next to us, started to walk up the creek every morning and night. For clarity, the family lives on 5 or so acres about a half mile up the road and they bought 30 acres next to us to graze their animals. Their adult son lives there but he does pretty much all the farm work so he spends most of his time at the 5 acres.

In the end, I told her that I see that a lot of water had come through there and that I wanted a culvert to be able to drive over it when it rained hard. She told me that the rain they had in the spring was abnormal and that they wouldn’t get any rain until at least February and even then it wouldn’t be that much. Well, she was wrong… but I’ll get to that later!

My previous interaction with this person had left me emotional and unsettled. This one was different. I was very surprised at my own reaction, but I calmly got back on my tractor and went to work. I spread out the gravel and admired my work. It looked good. Ok, so it totally looks like an amateur road but I have zero experience. I won’t pretend to act like I know what I’m doing but I’m willing to jump in and get it done. Even if that means making mistakes. And that is exactly what happened.

It was August 1st, the first day that our old access road had legally expired. We now needed to use our new road even though it wasn’t done. The property owner had actually given me permission to continue if needed so I wasn’t terribly worried, but I wanted to do my best to get it driveable by the date legally set. We needed to pick some things up from town so I took our truck down the trail and everything went well until we got to the last hill, the one where I had spread the rock. My truck is a good farm truck, but it is two wheel drive and had bald tires on back. It didn’t stand a chance. The loose gravel was too deep and we just spun out. We couldn’t make it. One of the issues was that where the road had been dug up by the first guy who was trying to help our neighbors, he made lots of gouges and ruts. The 2nd guy who fixed it used our rock to smooth that out so there were places where the larger rock was quite deep. On top of that, I had spread it too deep and hadn’t yet added smaller gravel on top of it to lock it in. At the time, I didn’t realize how much that would help! I texted the property owner and she gave written permission to use her access road. I felt really frustrated at this and I didn’t know what to do. However, after having some conversations with people smarter than me, I realized it just needed to be thinned out for now and that with time and a little rain, the rock would compact and that adding smaller gravel would be helpful.

Some of the friends we met are owners of Blue Ribbon Custom Butchering. Check them out if you’re in Southern Missouri! They offer mobile slaughter and butchering. https://brcustombutchering.com

Not all our interactions with people were negative. In fact, the very opposite is true. We were invited to several potluck dinners by the lady who was our real estate agent and we met some fantastic people. She introduced us to a family that lives near us and it turns out that their good friends were our neighbors in Utah! They offered to come and help us on our property so I took them up on their offer. We continued to meet new neighbors and I’ve found that the area is a melting pot of people from different backgrounds and from different places. They all seem to have some similar core values though and they get along very well as they accept each other’s differences (minus the one family I’ve already written about). Each of them has a different story about how they landed there, but each one of them actually has the same core. God called them to be there. These social interactions were incredibly helpful for us! We really REALLY needed to talk to sane people! We found that as a whole our neighbors are incredibly helpful, caring, and kind.

To be continued…