My grandfather, Raymond Earl Cutler, came to this valley in 1938 with a surveyor's transit, a leased mule, and a letter of intent from a timber company that went bankrupt before the ink was dry on the second payment. He was 24 years old, and when the timber deal collapsed, he did not leave. He had looked at the land—the way it folded down from the eastern ridge into a natural bowl, the way the spring-fed creek ran clean and cold along the lower boundary, the way the soil held moisture even in August—and he had decided it was worth staying for.
He stayed. He worked it. He filed a homestead claim on 340 acres in the fall of 1939 and spent the next 11 years paying it off in increments that my grandmother kept in a ledger she covered with brown paper and labeled simply The Account. The deed came through in 1950. Raymond framed it and hung it in the kitchen, where it stayed until the frame yellowed and the glass cracked, and my father took it down and put it in a flat archival sleeve in the bottom drawer of the oak filing cabinet he kept in the back bedroom. That is where I found it when I was 12 years old, and that is where I put it back, and that is where it remained for the next four decades.
My name is Garrett Cutler. I am 63 years old, and I have lived on this land for all but four of those years—the four I spent at a technical college in the state capital studying mechanical systems and propane distribution infrastructure, which turned out to be exactly the education this land eventually required. I came back in 1984, and I have not left since.
I run a small mechanical services operation out of the equipment barn on the north end of the property, mostly agricultural equipment and commercial heating systems. I know propane the way a carpenter knows wood: not as a subject, but as a material I have worked with every day for 30 years.
The land itself is 340 acres, same as Raymond filed. The eastern boundary runs along the base of the ridge, marked by a fence line of cedar posts my grandfather set and my father maintained, and I have replaced in sections three times over the course of my life. The lower boundary follows the creek for about 900 feet before turning north at the old stone corner marker, a granite post Raymond set himself in 1941 and which has not moved a quarter-inch in 80 years.
The western boundary is the one that matters most to this story, because it is the boundary that runs along the back edge of what is now the Ridgeline Pines subdivision: 61 homes built in phases between 1987 and 1994 on land that was sold off by a development company called Harmon Ridge Properties, which purchased it from my uncle in 1985 after a long and complicated family dispute that I will not detail here, except to say that the sale was legitimate and the boundary was recorded correctly.
What was not sold, what my uncle did not own and therefore could not convey, was the strip of land along the western boundary where the old propane infrastructure sat. That strip, roughly 2.4 acres, had been deeded separately to my grandfather in 1947 as part of a mineral and utility rights agreement with the county, and it had passed to my father and then to me through a chain of title that was clean, unbroken, and recorded in full at the county recorder's office.
The development company, when they built Ridgeline Pines, had entered into a service agreement with my father in 1988 to use the existing propane infrastructure—the tank, the distribution manifold, the buried supply lines running beneath the access corridor—to serve the new homes. My father had agreed to a 25-year service easement documented in a recorded instrument: Easement Agreement Number 1988-0447, filed with the county on September 14th, 1988.
That easement expired on September 14th, 2013.