But that was a separate question from the legal one, and I had learned over the course of my life to keep those questions separate. The legal question was whether the HOA had any recorded interest in my land. It did not. That was what the record showed, and the record was what the court would read.
I told Warren I appreciated the information. I told him to keep attending those meetings. He said he intended to.
The thing about a title search is that it does not argue. It does not have a position. It does not care who is right, or who is confident, or who has a laminated lanyard and a clipboard and a title that she created for herself. A title search is simply a reading of the record: every instrument filed, every deed recorded, every easement granted, and every easement expired, laid out in chronological order with instrument numbers and recording dates and the names of the parties exactly as they appear in the original documents.
It is, in that sense, the most democratic document in a property dispute, because it gives exactly the same weight to a handshake and a deed—which is to say, it gives no weight to the handshake at all.
The title search was 43 pages long, and it told its story the way all good records do: without argument, without inflection, without any interest in being believed. It simply was:
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Raymond Earl Cutler to the County, utility rights agreement, 1947.
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Raymond Earl Cutler, homestead deed, 1950.
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Raymond Earl Cutler to Harold James Cutler, by inheritance, 1971.
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Harold James Cutler to Garrett Raymond Cutler, by inheritance, 1991.
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Easement Agreement Number 1988-0447, recorded September 14th, 1988, expired September 14th, 2013.
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No subsequent instruments of any kind.
Four generations, one unbroken line, 43 pages to say what the land had always known. Patricia attached it to the petition as Exhibit A, and it sat in the court file with the patience that paper has always had—the patience of something that does not need to be believed to be true, because it is simply there, waiting to be read by anyone with the authority and the willingness to read it.
The October hearing arrived the way important things tend to arrive in a life spent working land: not suddenly, but after a long season of preparation, the way a harvest arrives after a spring of planting and a summer of maintenance and an autumn of watching the sky.