Good fences make good neighbors.
Robert Frost said that, and it’s as true now as it was then. Case in point: our redneck neighbor, who lives adjacent to the southwesterly area of our property.
When we bought the place, the entire rear acre-ish was wild and overgrown, and incidentally had three dumpsters worth of trash that people had been dumping over the years. We cleaned all that out, and took down some of the wild area for what is now the orchard (or the beginning of the orchard, anyway). Since then, we find more trash here and there, either bubbling up from being buried, or just from the redneck and his group tossing trash over the fenceline because they’re too lazy to dispose of it properly.
I admit I will never understand people who can’t be bothered to throw things away. For instance, I have a fascination with the two hoarder shows that are on, and I’m simply amazed at their representation of geologic layers – except instead of rock and sand formations, theirs are formations of takeout containers, pizza boxes, cups, bottles, cans, and any other sort of trash that the rest of us (rightfully) recycle or toss out as a matter of habit. Likewise the people who have mounds of crap all over their property, whether it is things they thing they can “salvage”, junk they’re collecting in hopes of it being worth something (scrap metal, which would be if they actually took it to a center), or just trash (because once again, they’re just too lazy to put it in a trash can).
This is how it is for the redneck neighbor, apparently: some things, like bags and bottles and whatnot, they’re just too lazy to deal with, so they toss it onto our property. Then we wind up picking it up and disposing of it. I should point out that the redneck family is not immobile, nor are they disabled in any fashion. They’re just lazy, trashy people. Other things, they’re simply too cheap to properly dispose of: this includes batteries and tires. Not just any tires, either: the kind of tires that are used on very large trucks and construction vehicles.
The redneck neighbor took down his fence at the very rear of our property for some reason last year. After that point, we had a rather massive issue with deer coming in from the state forest that we back up to, who then got into the back garden and treated it like their personal buffet. We dealt with that by raising the fence around the garden to about six feet. No more deer in the garden. However, we were still left with redneck neighbor tossing trash onto our property as if it was still his personal dumping ground.
So we had a fence guy come out to give us an estimate on getting the back 120 feet or so refenced. This time, with privacy fencing, solid enough that redneck can’t just roll dead tires back to our property, and high enough that they’d need to work to throw things over it. Since redneck neighbor’s kids and the neighbor kids to our immediate east also walk across our property to a sag in the wire on the fenceline we share with redneck, the sag is now completely down. So we added another 72 feet to get that portion fenced as well. When we were walking the fenceline to take a look before the fence guy was here, what did we find? yet another tire. Which we promptly rolled right back across the fenceline to his property. It’s your crap: deal with it.
This leaves us with about 150 feet of fencing that will still need to be redone. We went with the almost 200 feet to start because these are the areas most in need at this moment, and because it looks like I’ll be clearing the room they need to work by myself foe the most part. I don’t mind this, but there is a limit as to what I can get done before the actual fencing workers are due to show up, so this will do. Once this is all up, I’ll work on clearing the remaining line and we’ll get them back to complete the line. It will be a great joy to be at the back of the property and not have to look at redneck neighbor and the miscellaneous heavy equipment he has scattered around his property.
As an added bonus, we also noted that redneck neighbor has (illegally) cleared out a section of the state forest just at the back of our property where the line to the forest begins. Back there, he has huge tires – the really big ones, that go on dump trucks and the like – a big pile of garbage (bikes, pieces of heavy truck gear like cranks and brakes, and just general crap), and a dead log picker. That will be an issue for the state to take up with him, because they’re definitely going to be notified about that.
In the meantime, we’ll have the start of a better neighbor in place: a new fence.
