I had never paid an HOA fee in my life. My parcel was not in the HOA, but I let her keep reading. The dashcam was rolling, and a woman with a clipboard is rarely as careful about what she says as a woman with a lawyer.
"Per section 14 of the Cedar Ridge HOA covenants," she said, "where dues are unpaid and assets are present, the board is authorized to recover value against the offending structure. You refused to pay, so we are recovering."
I almost smiled. She had just told my camera, on the record, that she was using demolition as a collection tactic.
"Karen," I said, "that dam is the only thing standing between the back half of your subdivision and a foot of water. You sure you want to do this?"
She smirked. She actually smirked. "We own this watershed, sir. Don't lecture me about my own neighborhood."
Behind me, the excavator's claw came down one more time. There was a wet, deep ripping sound, and the front face of the earthen dam cracked open along the line I had engineered nine years ago to be the strongest part of the structure.
Water did not gush out. It trickled.
For a second, Karen looked confused. I think part of her expected something dramatic: a wall of water, a wave, something cinematic she could blame on me later. Instead, the dam I'd built leaked out slow and wrong, the way a man bleeds out from somewhere deep.
I knew exactly what that meant. It meant the upper reservoir, the part that held back the storm runoff from the ridge above Cedar Ridge, was now uncontained. The next time it rained—and the forecast had been calling for rain all week—that water was not going to be slowed and dispersed across my 40 acres of overflow basin the way I had designed it to be. It was going to take the shortest, steepest path to the lowest point.
The lowest point was the east end of Cedar Ridge. Karen Whitfield's house was at the east end of Cedar Ridge.
I didn't tell her any of that. I just watched.
The excavator operator climbed down out of his cab and walked over to Karen. I caught the word "permit" out of him. She waved him off. I caught the word "state" out of him next. She told him, very clearly, in front of my dashcam, that the HOA had reviewed all relevant authority, and that he could file his concerns in writing with the board.
He shook his head and got back in.
Karen turned to me with the satisfaction of a woman who had just won a fight she didn't yet understand she'd started. "I'd suggest you take this opportunity," she said, "to clean up the rest of this eyesore voluntarily. The fines won't stop until the property is in compliance."
And then she laughed. She actually laughed—a short, satisfied little chuckle, the way someone laughs when they've finally taught a difficult dog to sit.
I made sure my phone caught every second of it. Because in about nine days, that laugh was going to cost her everything she owned.
I should probably back up. The morning Karen Whitfield demolished my dam wasn't the start of the story; it was the day she finally walked far enough out onto a limb that I let her keep walking.