Karen Proudly Called Wildlife Officers on My Fishing — Her Face Dropped When They Shook My Hand
Chapter 10
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I mounted them at six points: both gates, three spots along the fence line where Brenda's workers had installed signs, and one overlooking the creek inlet where it entered my property from the Ridgewater slope.In Tennessee, you have an absolute right to install surveillance cameras on your own property: no permit, no notification, and footage with authenticated timestamps is admissible in both civil and criminal court. I'd testified in dozens of cases using trail camera footage; I knew exactly what held up and what didn't.Week three was water testing. I hired Appalachian Environmental Labs, a certified independent laboratory out of Oak Ridge, to collect samples at twelve points across my property and the drainage path from Ridgewater Commons: four from my lake, four from the creek at different elevations, two from the drainage ditch below the Ridgewater slope, and two control samples from upstream above any development.Results came back in twelve days:My lake: clean.Creek upstream: clean.Creek below the Ridgewater slope: atrazine at four times the EPA aquatic life benchmark, phosphate levels consistent with synthetic fertilizer runoff, and sediment load indicating active erosion from an uncontrolled stormwater outfall.The contamination source was a straight line from Brenda Faulkner's manicured HOA lawns to my fish.Week four was the attorney. I called Jim Roth, a property and environmental attorney in Knoxville I'd worked with during my TWRA years. He'd handled three of my biggest enforcement referrals and won all three."Jim, I need you to open a file.""What have you got, Dale?"I told him.He was quiet for a long time. "Dale, you've got trespass, harassment, false reporting to state agencies, and a Clean Water Act violation from an HOA that was accusing you of contamination. This isn't a case. This is a gift.""I want it airtight.""Bring me the file. All of it."Most people would have gone quiet after two wildlife officers shook the man's hand and warned them about false reporting. But Brenda Faulkner wasn't most people: she was the kind of woman who watches her own ship sink and orders the crew to row faster.She hired an attorney: a Nashville real estate lawyer named Richard Cahill who specialized in HOA disputes and subdivision development. Cahill sent me a letter—not a threatening letter, exactly, but the kind of letter that has teeth hidden behind the smile. It claimed Ridgewater Commons had prescriptive easement rights to Blackwater Lake based on continuous and uninterrupted community use of the waterway.Here's what Cahill was hoping I didn't know: under Tennessee law, a prescriptive easement requires open, continuous, exclusive, and hostile use of another person's property for at least twenty years. Ridgewater Commons had existed for three years. The lake had been in my family for sixty-seven.The legal basis for Cahill's claim was thinner than the paper it was printed on.I forwarded the letter to Jim Roth. He laughed out loud. "Dale, this is a first-year law school exam answer, and it's wrong. I'll send him a response that makes his malpractice insurance nervous."