He had to walk the lower bench to confirm. He walked it for an hour. He came back to my porch and pulled off his hat to wipe his forehead. "Mr. Ardmore," he said, "this is the cleanest 40-section pasture I have surveyed in this county in 3 years.
There is nothing here. I'm marking the complaint as unfounded and I'm flagging it as potentially harassing. This is the second false report I've gotten on adjacent ranches this year. The other was against a sheep operation up near Story." He told me, off the record, that the complaint had been filed under the Vosberg name.
The next visitor, a week later, was Kit Bensenhurst, the regional manager of the Powder River Rural Electric Cooperative. Kit was 62, lean, careful, the kind of cooperative manager who had spent 30 years balancing the demands of ranchers and small towns with the regulations of the Wyoming Public Service Commission. He had known my uncle Garth since the 1980s. He drove out personally because he had received my certified letter. And he wanted to see the easement corridor with his own eyes.
We walked it together. He took photographs. He took voltage measurements at the nearest line transformer. When he finished, he stood in the cleared right-of-way with his hat in his hands and looked at me with an expression I have not forgotten. "Quinn," he said, "I'm going to tell you something I should have known and did not.
The cooperative's records list this line as a 4,160-V distribution feeder. The line itself, today, is operating at 24,900 V. Somebody upgraded the conductors and reset the regulators in 2010 without filing the upgrade with us, with the PSC, or with anyone else who should have been notified. My understanding has always been that the upgrade was the cooperative's responsibility. It was not.
It was filed under a private engineering firm contract, paid for by the developer of Cloud Peak Estates. It was never properly inspected, never properly permitted, and it has been running outside spec for 15 years."
I asked him what that meant for me. He looked at the cleared corridor. He looked at the distant rooflines of Cloud Peak Estates against the foothills. "Quinn," he said, "it means the easement on your land is being used in a manner the original deed does not permit. It means Cloud Peak Estates has been receiving power across your land under unauthorized infrastructure. It means a lot of paperwork is about to get filed, and it means your grandfather, in 1958, may have written a deed clause sharper than anybody who came after him bothered to read."
He gave me the cell number of his counterpart at the Wyoming Public Service Commission, a senior staff engineer named Annette Pillsbury, and told me to call her on Monday morning. He told me to bring everything. Before he climbed back into his pickup, he stopped at the gate, took off his glasses, and looked at me with an expression I had not seen on him in the 30 years I had known him. "Quinn," he said, "I'm going to be candid. The cooperative is going to take a black eye out of this.
We should have caught the upgrade in 2010, and we did not. I am asking you, on behalf of 1,500 member ranches in this region, to do this carefully. Don't pull the plug on Cloud Peak Estates' grandmothers in February. Use the legal clock. Use the regulatory process.
Do it the slow Wyoming way, the kind that holds up later." I told him I would.
That night, I sat on the porch with a glass of my uncle's whiskey, watching the sun go down behind the Bighorn skyline. The cottonwoods Della Vosberg had cut 3 weeks earlier remained as a row of broken stumps along the river bottom. The wind moved through what was left of the upper bench grasses. A nighthawk called once from the ponderosa ridge. I thought about my grandfather Hollister, sitting at his kitchen table in 1958, with a yellow tablet and a fountain pen, writing a clause in plain English that he hoped no one would ever need.
I thought about my uncle Garth, who had kept that paper in a fireproof box for 67 years without ever needing to open it. And I thought about Della Vosberg, who in the morning after a funeral had stood in front of a logging skidder and told me my objection was emotional.
I went inside. I called Wren in Bozeman. I told her I was about to start something that was going to take a year. I asked her to come down the next weekend if she could. She said she'd be there Friday.
That night, I went up to my uncle's office for the first time since the funeral. The fireproof box was where it had always been, on the second shelf of the locked cabinet beside his old rolltop desk. I took the key off the brass hook above the door, the way Garth had shown me when I was 14, and I unlocked the cabinet. The box was dustier than I remembered.
The lid opened with a soft metallic sound that, for some reason, almost made me cry. Inside, in a manila envelope on top of every other paper, was the 1958 easement deed, written in my grandfather's careful hand, on yellow legal paper that had not been touched by daylight in 67 years. I read the termination clause three times by the desk lamp. I closed the box. I put the key back on the brass hook. I sat on the floor of the office for 10 minutes in complete silence.
The lawsuit arrived the following Tuesday. The Cloud Peak Estates Homeowners Association had filed a declaratory judgment action in Sheridan County District Court, asking the court to confirm that the existing right-of-way and operational scope of the power line through my property was, by long-standing practice and reasonable interpretation, a permanent and unchangeable feature of the parties' relationship. They asked, in the alternative, for a court-ordered modification of the original 1958 easement to reflect current operational reality. They also asked for a temporary injunction restraining me from any action that might interrupt, impair, or interfere with the existing infrastructure. I read the petition twice on my front porch, with the wind moving through what was left of the cottonwoods.
Then I called Vernon Crowell, a small-town country lawyer in Sheridan, who had handled my grandfather's, my uncle's, and now my land issues across three generations of Ardmores. Vernon was 63, soft-spoken, and one of the sharpest contract lawyers in northern Wyoming. He read the petition slowly over the phone. When he was done, he said one word, "Brazen." He told me to come to his office at 8:00 a.m. the next morning.
He told me to bring the original 1958 easement deed, my uncle's correspondence file, the photographs of the right-of-way clearing, the cooperative's voltage findings, and a thermos of dark roast from the diner on Main. I brought all of it.
Vernon's office was a single-room practice on the second floor of a 1922 brick building above a saddle shop with one window that looked out onto the Burlington Northern tracks and a slow ceiling fan that had been turning since the Eisenhower administration. He spread the documents across his conference table the way a poker player spreads a winning hand. He read for 2 and 1/2 hours. He muttered.