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From Magic City Morning Star Down the Road
And even though we can't yet buy anything, we've been looking and have found a nice camp on a small pond, so small no one bothers with huge motor-driven speedboats that make one forget one is on the shore of a small, remote pond. It has camps on both sides of it, is on a gravel road that is plowed year-round, is heated by a propane stove, and has no basement which non-feature Dolores loves. I love a good basement, such as the one we have at home. What a tease. It's been on the market, off the market, and now on again. Maybe we should have our buyers' agent show it to us -- just in case. We've even sat on the porch -- with no realtor around -- and gazed at the pond, "seeing" our canoe there instead of the present owner's. Seems as nice as the one in On Golden Pond. But we can't buy it yet. Probably a good thing. Yesterday we visited there again and noticed what appeared to be a property-line stake within a dozen feet of the camp. Do we want that? Our realtor then sent us a map and disclosure of the property, which states that water is from the pond via a pump located in a crawl space under the slab foundation. A crawl space? Do we want that? The present owners drink bottled water. Okay, we could live with that. We'll go back again and follow the property lines from the deed description, if we can find those metal stakes it describes. But these several things make us question whether this is the dream property we'd like to buy, if we could buy it. We're learning one thing; dream or not, visit and check all property information carefully and repeatedly. A dream could be a nightmare once it's yours. One property advertised as 14 acres of waterfront land grabbed our attention. Because we couldn't yet make an offer, we drove to the property several times and walked what we could walk. A fair amount of the parcel was in wetlands, particularly in the woods leading to the brook -- the "waterfront" part -- where maybe we could keep our canoe and launch it to head out to the lake powered by our "new" used electric canoe motor. When we walked through the woods, as we neared where the brook should have been we encountered five- and six-foot tall wetland veggies. But we found no usable "waterfront." What we did find, while looking at an aerial photo of the site was a structure crossing the mouth of the brook that was advertised as the access to a nearby lake. The structure looked from the air like a dam. The realtor, Greg Doucette of Belfast who can be reached at gregory_doucette@yahoo.com, and who has been sending us potential properties, checked into the structure and the listing realtor told him it was a beaver dam. Yup, a white beaver dam that forms a straight line across a wide area of a stream. The property owners there and an agency were planning to remove the beaver dam, the listing realtor told our realtor. (Of course, that white line falls within the boundaries of the 14-acre parcel at which we were been looking. What other landowners would have any say in removing a dam in the waterway on that property? And since waterways are actually public -- read "Maine Department of Conservation," no local landowners could remove a beaver dam without DOC's permission.) Ever wonder why real estate sometimes sells so slowly. The "waterfront" on that property was along the brook from which apparently we'd have trouble canoeing out to the lake without falling over the "beaver dam." Our Steuben property, which we finally sold to a long-unloved tenant who had violated the lease for several years, had strange corner markings. Soon after we had bought it, I followed the deed description of the unsurveyed six or so acres, I found a boulder at one corner which must be one corner since the deed description said a boulder was there. I followed the compass directions through the woods to the brook, where the next marker of the 40 plus-year-old lot was supposed to be a metal stake in the center of the brook. I never found the metal stake that probably had long before rusted and slid downstream. Nor was there a metal stake was one supposed to mark the third corner in the center of said brook. But deciding on both those boundaries by the shape of the brook on a hand-drawn map accompanying the deed, I followed the third compass line back out to the road. That corner was marked, according to ye olde deed, by a maple tree. I haven't yet decided which of the half-dozen maples at least 40 years old was the right one. I picked one close to where my compass deposited me on the road. From there it was easy; follow the road to the beginning point. I even marked the trees along my compass-found line with orange ribbons and both neighbors agreed with my lines unseen. (One who is not a surveyor may wrap plastic ribbon around trees as markers but not paint or blaze the trees with an ax.) Then, one day I met a surveyor and told him of my line-finding adventures. He informed me that over 40 years, the magnetic compass readings would have shifted a bit. I went back and checked, and found the "bit" not enough to make me go through our woods and change the locations of all those orange plastic ribbons. Although I haven't asked them since talking with the surveyor, apparently the neighbors still agree I'd marked the correct line. Do I plan to ask them, since the tenant has bought the property? You can figure out the answer to that one. Way back when I was a minister, I belonged to a ministers' board. That group may not be found by precisely that description in the New Testament, where I also haven't found any clergy, but I belonged to it just the same. And someone donated a fairly large tract to us that was located on the shores of Lake Whoopdeedoo, although since my memory is not always as accurate as our iMac's, that may not be the actual name of the lake. A neighboring landowner informed our board that she had had hers surveyed and learned that she actually owned part of our tract. We, of course, hired our own surveyor who did his task and then told us that the neighboring landowner's surveyor had surveyed her tract by reading the deed backwards. Actually, he advised us, we owned part of her land and we could have it if we wanted.
That difference between the neighboring landowner and the Nice Guys Board was never argued. The land is still there, as far as I can tell from my Maine Atlas and Gazetteer. Maine is famous for its old deeds, written longhand as long as that maple or oak which marked a corner was still alive and well. I wonder how a surveyor today would know where to begin his survey, using such a description. One of my volunteer -- no one would pay me for the little I know about this chore -- tasks for the Maine Appalachian Trail Club is to check the survey lines along the corridor of the AT in a three-mile-long stretch of unbelievably rough turf in a canyon. At my previous assignment, I one day found a permanent survey monument, because a local person found it by accident and showed it to me. The rest were buried somewhere, where I couldn't find them, although another bunch of MATC guys and gals did one day on a practice search. I wasn't with them so I have no idea where they are. I only know from an old sign I found hidden in the woods, on that line where I did find yellow survey line paint blazes, that the line was run there during an AT relocation in 1975. I used to be able to follow those lines by looking up, where I could see a subtle opening going through the tree tops from when the boundary-line trees had been cut and left that space. Now the other treetops have grown together. So now I go by the moose prints, because those four-legged survey-line specialists love to follow the slight opening the line follows through the trees. If I'm really smarter than a moose, shouldn't I be able to find that same opening. On the one occasion that a moose mooseally (the moose term which substitutes for "personally") showed me the line by trotting along it ahead of me, I had trouble following because I was hotfooting it in the opposite direction. At our home-turf -- Our Final Resting Place -- property, also not surveyed, I found two orange plastic ribbons, one of which when I followed the compass directions was apparently in the wrong place. I suspected both were wrapped around the trees by the realtor who handled the sale to us or by the former homeowner whose guess was as good as anybody else's. A new neighbor, who bought the house above us, asked me one day if I had any idea where our dividing line was. "Right about there," I answered, pointing down the road. "You'll find an orange ribbon." "Good enough for me," he said. This is how Maine property lines ought to be decided, as any wildlife would tell you if you asked them. The turkeys and deer wander across this line without caring what belongs to whom as long as it all belongs to them. Our search for that On Golden Pond-like dream continues, first by a web search and then by driving to and walking on what may or may not be the right land. So far, no one has disagreed with us, that the land we're viewing and on which we're walking is the right land -- the land for sale. That camp we've been looking at and sitting on the porch may be that lake- or pond-side On Golden Pond-like dream camp. It's just not ours. We have our canoe and electric motor, just not the lake or pond or camp. We do own the On Golden Pond video and enjoy the pond by freezing it at a place showing the pond while we view it. That's some water view.
Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com. Milton M. Gross Copyright 2011 © Copyright 2002-2011 by Magic City Morning Star |
