The tank stood where it had always stood, white and slightly domed, the same vessel my grandfather had commissioned in 1962. It looked in the February light exactly as it had looked on the October morning when Diane Coulter had stood at the edge of my gravel drive and told me I had 14 days to comply.
I checked the pressure gauge. I checked the regulator. I noted both readings in the spiral-bound notebook in the same mechanical pencil with the same initials at the bottom of the entry. Then I stood there for a moment in the cold: the ridge to the east just catching the first light, the creek running somewhere below me under its thin skin of ice, the cedar fence posts along the eastern boundary standing in their long, patient line.
The valley was quiet.
Somewhere in those 61 homes, people were waking to warm kitchens and lit burners, and the gas that made that possible moved through lines I had laid and fittings I had tightened and a system I had maintained for 31 years, on land my family had held for 84.
Here is what I have come to believe, standing on that land:
When an institution with apparent authority makes a claim against you, the first question is not whether they seem confident, and not whether they have a laminated lanyard and a clipboard and an attorney who can cite statutes in a courtroom. The first question is whether their claim has a legal foundation.
And the answer to that question is never in the confidence of the person making it. It is in the record: the deed, the easement, the plat, the chain of title going back to the original filing. It is in the county recorder's office, in the instrument numbers, in the dates and the names and the metes and bounds. It is in the paper that does not argue, and does not perform, and does not care who is in the room.
Know your documents before they are challenged. Keep your records as if someone will one day ask to see them, because someone will. And when the challenge comes, let the record speak.