Ep. 454: "The Ghost Bushes"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Oh, look who it is.
It's Merlin Mann.
Hey, buddy.
How's it going?
Oh, wow.
Hey there, Officer Mann.
Moo-hoo.
Moo-hoo.
Moo-hoo.
Moo-hoo.
I had a long conversation with Dan about Britpop, and then halfway through I realized, oh, Dan's not Merlin.
Oh, no.
People do that all the time.
That's pretty common.
Yeah, that's okay.
That's okay.
You know, that's always welcome here.
I have strong feelings.
I know you do.
Forgive me for talking about the show on the show, but I need to just... I've mentioned this, I think, to you before, but...
They're doing some road work.
Oh.
Oh, pardon my saying.
Oh, see?
Sure.
See what I did there?
There it is.
Okay.
Outside of your secret lair?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they're replacing tracks for the streetcar, but they're also doing lots of things.
And I won't go into too much detail, but...
In keeping with the mood internationally right now, things have escalated.
I see.
Has the San Francisco Transit Authority started threatening nuclear war?
Well, they're on standby.
And there was one guy, this real piece of shit, standing by a tank, telling civilians to stay calm.
Then he got shot with a fucking grenade launcher.
Ha ha ha!
come here you remain calm oh let me i gotta tell you i gotta tell you about oh yeah i know you're not on twitter but i found the uncut shit i found a really good list of rah rah ukraine writers and it's really i don't know maybe i'm going all louise mensch but like i i'm really excited to go and they do post videos of like people throwing molotov cocktails and tanks that are out of fuel
I want to see that.
It's so fucking funny.
I don't want to go on Twitter, but I do want to see that.
Well, it's worth it.
It's worth it.
Anyway, the escalation, I just need to say, I need to get this out of the way.
I've been calling it the bang bang machine.
Are there jackhammers?
Well, imagine a super jackhammer.
Okay, I can.
Where you get a big old John Deere yellow, you know, one of those cool ones where you can change the kit on it.
You can put different stuff at the end of the big claw crane arm.
John Deere's signature color is green.
Well, I only mention that because I erroneously refer to it as a caterpillar.
And I just want to make sure I don't get fact checked.
But anyway, imagine a caterpillar, like a big bobcat, right?
Let's call it a cat, yeah.
Yeah, and, you know, it's got all the different kit.
It's really cool.
It's kind of like the way they did tanks in World War II where everybody laughed when they made scissors on the front of the tank.
So this one has a little jackhammer adapter that goes on the front.
Oh, I wish it were little, John.
John, imagine what we have historically called a jackhammer.
You got a fella, and he holds it.
Now imagine, though, you say, oh, we got a cat.
Let's put...
a bob or let's put a caterpillar sized jackhammer on the end of the arm i'll send you a photo and that's been real loud because they use that to break up the pavement and then they bring in a different cat to scoop up the pavement which is i just go out and watch it it's amazing each one of these little pieces must be several hundred pounds and it makes short work of it well i don't want to monopolize the show with this but i'm sure at some point this will become obvious but
they've escalated.
And now they're doing that thing.
You know, they do that thing like you'd see in Manhattan where they put down giant pieces of metal because they don't close up a big hole.
But now they've also started putting in these, you might know the name for this.
Clank, clank.
Clank, clank, like a super rebar.
They put in these planks of metal to like keep an area open.
Yeah.
Like a surgeon.
Yeah.
And, and that made the entire block rattle like thrice the worst earthquake I've ever been in.
Yeah.
Today, enter the concrete cutter.
Epic saw?
Well, this is new to me.
Exactly.
This is new to me, but there's a company, and it says on the side of the truck that it's a concrete cutter, and you can tell I went outside with a noise gauge, and it was about as loud as a Who concert.
Wait, you have a noise gauge?
It's built into the watch, buddy.
Okay.
You just click on the ear, click on the ear on a watch.
It'll tell you how loud things are.
So anyway, I don't want to monopolize it.
You know, bet on me.
You know, I should.
Yeah, but, but, you know, but Steph, I'm going to incorporate it.
I'm going to lean in.
Oh, also one last thing.
There's a fellow out there directing traffic and he's got him an air horn.
so sometimes you'll hear oh really yes it sounds like a donald trump he's he's air horning uh traffic to get him to pay attention i think that's i i haven't talked to him about it but i'm pretty sure they seem real friendly i've been trying to like strike up a relationship because they're gonna be here for two years sure but um yeah so you might hear a monk and
That's exciting.
So much action.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let me see this Ukraine list.
Um, it's pretty, it's pretty great.
I'm going to be making, there's some sounds that are going to be happening here too.
Oh, please tell me about it.
Talk about the show on the show.
Well, you know, we're, uh, we're getting another atmospheric river.
Oh, again?
Yeah, another atmospheric river.
You guys can't catch a break.
I know.
This one is not one of the Gaia bombs that we had earlier, but we did have record... Oh, a Genesis storm.
A Genesis storm.
We did have record freezing temperatures only last week, 22 degrees, and it warmed up just in time for a tropical cyclone to dump unprecedented amounts of water.
And unlike the last...
rain event.
This time, I have my sump pump functioning.
Sump pump functioning?
Yeah, I got the sump pump functioning.
Oh, it's so important.
John, I know this because I'm a homeowner.
Could you please tell our listeners what a sump pump is and why it needs to be functioning?
Hmm.
I mean, really dumb it down.
Give it to me in pigs and bunnies.
Well, so my house is built on the side of a hill.
It should have good drainage because it's on top of a hill.
Water goes downhill.
It should have been built.
You're utilizing gravity, if I could say.
Yeah.
It should be a situation where the water goes around the house.
But the house is a thwart the hill.
And on the uphill side,
something about it.
It's one of these mid century houses.
That's, that's built like a train station.
It's, it's very long and narrow water collects on the uphill side.
And then, uh, because the, because the downstairs is half buried, um,
Sounds kind of like a hobbit hole.
Well, in major rain events, which the Northwest has, it has been known to collect water against that uphill side of the basement wall, and then the water seeps in.
Now, before I bought the house, the family that was selling it tried to remediate this problem.
And I'm not an expert, as you know.
Hmm.
Hmm.
But there's a thing called a French drain.
Yeah, let me tell you.
That's a little sexist.
Knock three times.
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She's my French drain.
And the French drain is a thing where you dig down along the foundation.
You lay a bed of gravel.
It's an elaborate thing.
There's a pipe in there that has holes drilled in it.
The pipe...
The water that's seeping down through the ground then will go into the pipe.
The pipe will run the water out and around.
Is this like Roman technology?
It's Roman technology.
It's not purely Gaelic.
No, because it's from a time when the French were who we turned to for new technology.
So, yeah, right.
I mean, you know, Caesarean era.
Oh, yeah, they had their day.
And so I assumed when they went to remediate this problem that they had done this.
They'd excavated.
They'd built a French train because they had excavated.
But then inside the house, in the basement floor itself, in what would have been the corner closest to the problem, they slammed a giant hole that they put a pump in.
And then a basin.
And when water would, the water that normally would come into the home would instead go through a series of pipes and tubes and
to this basin, and then the pump would be an automatic pump.
So basically it's like a bucket.
Like I would put in my very, very old rented house.
But in this case, it also has the pump part.
The basin fills, and then the pump part, one hopes, gets the water out of the basin and consequently out of the house.
There you go.
And the bucket is...
dug deep into the ground, so the water goes into the bucket.
Now, what I don't understand, because I can't see it, I don't have x-ray vision, even though people think I do, I'm here to say I don't.
Write that down.
I don't understand what's happening, and I suspect what's happening is that the French drain, rather than run along the outside of the house and around the corner and down, somehow the French drain
collects the water on the outside of the house, brings it into the house, and then into the basement and pumps it out, or into the basin and pumps it out.
It looks like from these photos that I found on the internet, it looks like there's usually some kind of gravel in a trench, la la la.
Gravel in a trench, la la la.
Oh, like big rock, and then water get around big rock and goes into the perforated pipe.
And then you got landscape fabric, a trench, gravel, and then you got the pipe.
You got it all.
Those are all the elements you need.
But you're really going to want that pump to do something.
Well, what happened, I guess I didn't talk about this when it happened, but in the summer, the pump, the sump pump pump started beeping at me because it needed a 9-volt battery.
Oh, and I replaced the nine volt battery.
Maybe maybe a year and a half ago, it started beeping.
I replaced the nine volt battery.
And then a year later, it started beeping again in July.
And do you know what it was?
Is it beeping a warning?
No, it's the exact beeping that the smoke detector does, which is just like, I have a battery.
Oh, everything's fine.
Everything's fine.
And yet I need a new battery.
And this is one of those, like the smoke alarms that actually are hardwired into the home.
That's the new kind.
But still need a battery?
Yeah.
yeah i mean the smoke alarms we've got because of san francisco code stuff it's supposed to be like unreplaceable and you just throw it out and get a new one every however long isn't that nice this is a thing that was plugged into the wall but still needed a battery and still and ran out of battery like oh no and so i i tried to take the battery out
It was, it was complicated.
I was, I was getting frustrated.
I couldn't figure out how to make this thing stop doing what it was doing.
I unplugged it.
Oh,
Oh, yeah.
Fast forward to... My kid does things like that.
Yeah.
Fast forward to the atmospheric river.
Oh, Johnson, you didn't know there was no beep.
There was no beep to tell you.
I was like, you know, problem solved in July.
Yeah.
Fast forward to November, December, whatever the big atmospheric river was.
I woke up one morning, I went downstairs, and there was six inches of water up.
Oh, no.
I walked over to the sump pump.
To say, what's going on, sump pump?
And I realized I have unplugged the sump pump in July.
I unplugged it six months ago.
Oh, God.
Thinking, why would I ever need this?
Everything seems fine.
I plugged it in.
The sump pump immediately went... And pumped six inches of water out of the basement in 30 seconds.
Like, it was crazy.
I was standing ankle deep in water, and the water just went...
But, of course, the damage had been done.
I'd ruined everything.
Oh, no.
I'd had stuff stacked on the floor of the basement as I was sorting through all of the, you know.
They weren't on, like, pallets or anything.
No, I had 15 copies of the Bible that I was trying to reconcile with one another.
Wait a minute.
On this one, it says this.
On this one, it says that.
How is there a second, John?
Exactly.
They're all floating around in the water.
So I spent, you know, I spent, it took me a few weeks to, to solve that problem.
And now the sump pump is like a magic machine.
Like I wake up in the... It's almost like a child.
I wake up in the night and I go down and I look at it and make sure it's still peaking.
How you doing, buddy?
Doing okay?
Just checking in.
Need some water.
And it's very random when that sump fills up enough to activate the pump.
Can you hear it upstairs?
Does that.
That sounds satisfying.
And when you're down in the basement and looking into the...
the sump and you watch it slowly fill up with water from whatever source, whatever French drain got built that routed the water into the house.
But it's like, it's like, it's like a medication issue in the sense that now that I'm taking this medication, it says right, you know, Dr. Spichemin says right there, just take it 24 times a day for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
To quote the canceled comic, Louis C.K., no, that's just a thing you do now.
That's a thing you do now.
If your ankle's all fucked up.
So I've got this house.
I love this house.
It's a wonderful house.
It's a wonderful life.
But anytime there's an atmospheric river event, which there are more and more of, of course, because God has decided...
Not anything to do with man.
God has made up a choice about how life on earth is going to be now.
Yeah, we make plans and God laughs.
He does.
He or she or they laugh.
Thank you.
Have a little water, scarecrow.
And so now I go down and I'm like, I guess nine volt batteries, you know, like I buy them now by the case because I don't want this beeping at me and it needs to be on.
And it needs to be on even in the summer when there's no rain, because if I unplug it, then I'll forget.
Yeah.
So we're having an atmospheric event right now.
Looking out my window here at the creek, it is flood stage four.
Well, it's just water everywhere.
It's just like, it's a giant waterfall.
It's super saturated.
Yeah, it's just very exciting.
Well, you get a thing.
I know from living in various places in the United States, there's a condition you reach sometimes where it hasn't rained for a long time.
This happens here a lot in that park with the Confederate soldier ghosts.
where, first of all, they're all invasive exotics.
It's fucking eucalyptus and shit with these really shallow root systems.
It'll be dry, dry, dry, dry, dry.
And then I don't want to steal valor by saying it's a torrential, what's it called?
Superstorm, what's it called?
Yes, torrential superstorm.
River.
I don't know if it's a river exactly, runs through it, but suddenly you get dumped and the water overwhelms the land.
The land can't absorb it.
It gets confused.
The snails and ants get thrown out of their house and they move into my house.
But like you can only absorb so much.
And then once again, other side of that, you get super saturated.
And then the eucalyptus fall over.
Oh, no.
What happens when the eucalyptus fall over?
You better not be on the path.
Right.
It's a bunch of shitty ass and, you know, invasive exotics.
They were cheap to get a long time ago.
Listen, I don't want to be racist about this or ableist.
I know.
But you get a shallow root eucalyptus and that's eventually that's going to be your undoing.
And over time, if I'm being honest, they've taken down a lot of them sort of preemptively.
Because they know they're going to come down.
Also, I could send you more photos.
I could send you some photos of the Bang Bang machine.
I don't know if you got this.
But I could also send you some photos of a felled eucalyptus.
Knocks out the fence by the baseball park.
Don't be creepy.
But now you're just dealing with that.
You know what I'm saying?
I do know what you're saying.
And then also you get all the oils.
I just sent you a video of the river.
Oh, good.
I sent you a video of the creek.
There are a couple of tall ladders in the shot because I've got ladders that I had up that I was using to look at stuff.
So don't, it's not, it's not the most beautiful video, but that's, that's, I took it from where I'm sitting.
I took it, I took that video right now.
Okay.
I haven't gotten it, but I'll keep looking.
I sent it as a text.
I don't know what's going on.
Oh, there it is.
Okay.
Oh, here we go.
Okay.
I got it.
I got a ladder.
I really like, I got the best ladder.
Okay.
Oh my God, John.
You got a crick.
A river runs through it.
Absolutely.
You got a crick.
Yeah, it's going.
It's going.
Huh?
Huh?
What are those stakes for?
Oh, well, those are the stakes that the hippies left.
I thought it was the thousand advertisements for the first Wire album, Pink Flag.
That's what the hippies leave.
All the little plants that they put in.
The 900 plants.
Oh, this is a place I would hang out.
I love places like this.
This really takes me back.
I mean, my in-laws live out in gold country or what's increasingly becoming fire country.
And they are on a body of water that looks very much like this.
And I just love to go and walk around because it reminds me of my childhood when you go walk around the creek and you throw things in the creek.
That's right.
Is it usually this creaky?
It varies.
I should just say, because I'm not going to put this anywhere.
It's John's video.
But there's a bunch of pink flags.
But then there's some trees.
And then there's a body of water that is, it looks like something in a national park.
It's really going.
It's a rager.
And it doesn't rage like that all the time.
But it is a year-round creek.
There's always water in it.
A lot of creeks.
There's always water in the creek.
Yeah.
A lot of creeks dry up in the summer.
And this is one of the ones that always has, there's always something happening.
It's not always a torrent, sometimes it's a trickle, but it's always got little ponds.
It's a live crick.
It's a live crick.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had a, you know, I had a very, I had a weird couple of days involving- Would you share it with me?
Involving invasive species.
And I would- I'm talking about people?
I would share it with you.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, talking about people, and it was one of those, Merlin, where halfway through this process, I had to say, wait, is the invasive species me?
If you don't know who the invasive species in the room is, it's probably you.
It's probably you.
Yeah.
So, you know, this whole land here that I've been restoring the native habitat and so forth, I'm very involved in it.
I've got two neighbors, and I've been in...
low-key disputes with them over their conduct.
Just in terms of bringing our listeners up to date, if memory serves, you've got two neighbors, and they're both nuts in similar but different ways, and you are betwixt them in several ways, including that you're sort of, it seems like you're almost expected to be the go-between two, a Hatfield and a McCoy that will not talk to each other, and puts you in a weird position.
And one of them is the person who keeps throwing garbage in your yard.
So of the two of them, you know, they both encroached on the property years and years ago when the old owners were old and they couldn't defend the other side of the river.
That is huge.
They got away with it for so long it started seeming okay.
Yeah, they did.
And one of them, the lady that runs the daycare center, actually throws real garbage, bags and bags, a dumpster and a half worth so far of...
Actual, pure... Coffee cups.
She has the drug-using sign, bless his heart.
Right.
And they just would throw stuff over the fence.
Bags of garbage.
John, I don't like to say this word.
I know we don't say this anymore.
They're acting like hillbillies.
You know what I'm saying?
Big time.
No, big time.
I'm from Ohio.
I'm from hillbillies.
I know.
And I know how to throw shit over a fence by a crick.
I know.
It's bad.
And in interacting with them over the last two years and then finding their garbage...
She's very nice.
She's the one neighbor that always leaves a little tin of Christmas cookies on the holidays.
She's the type of person that learns your birthday and gives you a gift, even though you're not friendly with each other.
I'm so intimidated by people like that.
She does that, but it feels very insincere when later that afternoon I'm up in the backyard and I'm pulling out old...
like Dr. Pepper bottles where someone has put seven cigarettes and then pissed in it and put the cap back on and threw it over the fence?
That is very disrespectful to the doctor.
Which is it?
Are you the one that pisses?
A piece of advice I've shared with people from hard-won experience is to be careful who in life you permit...
Who in life you're willing to owe a favor to, either implicitly or explicitly?
Is it that kind of thing?
Are they trying to kill you with niceness?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What kind of bullshit?
Yeah, that's not fun.
She's somebody who gets through life by remembering your birthday, and everybody's like, oh, she's so wonderful.
But then behind the...
Behind the curtain.
I mean, if you're capable of throwing that much garbage into a forest.
And playing it off legit.
Then you are a dangerous person.
And the friendlier you seem, the more dangerous you are.
But no, the other neighbor is a little lady who used to be a stewardess.
And although she threw a lot of food waste down the ravine.
She never has thrown any garbage, as far as I can tell.
She just used it as her yard waste dump.
She was like a compost lot.
But she also landscaped an area probably...
15 feet deep.
And that can be a very passive-aggressive move.
This bush is on my land now.
30 feet by 15 feet long part of the yard that she just claimed over time.
And fully claimed.
Built grass, installed in-ground irrigation.
like uh like sprinklers the whole obviously thinking that it would not i mean based on the previous owners tell me if i'm sure right but like like nobody's going to make a big deal about this i can totally get away with this expenditure of effort and money and i'm basically doing you know what you're doing you're doing doing a little bit of a doing a little bit of a ukraine in some ways yeah you are
And that's exactly right.
And there was nobody here for decades that even was aware of what they were doing because it was on the other side of the forest.
And when I showed up, I tried to be friends.
With a surveyor, maybe?
I did.
I showed up.
I was very friendly to everybody.
Hi, I'm the new neighbor.
I'm a guy who's here now, not the old people.
And I, and here's my surveyor, I know where the property boundaries are.
Both of you are well over the line, and I'm going to claim the land back because, hey, it's part of what I bought, and I'm being taxes on it.
Yeah, you're an insurgent.
And you guys, et cetera, et cetera.
And I've been here two years.
I've tried to be friends with them both.
Little by little, the relationships have deteriorated, in both cases, in different ways.
And I...
came up with what I thought was an elegant solution.
I said, look, and I wrote them both, and I said, I don't want to build a fence.
It's too intrusive.
It's a bad vibe.
What I'm doing is I'm planting all native plants here in the ravine, and I want to build a giant hedge along the property line between our properties.
The hedge will be made of all native bushes.
So
plants that support our native wildlife and the birds eat the seeds and then nature grows the seeds and then circle of life.
Yeah.
Then the owls eat the, eat the mountain beavers and the coyotes climb the trees and then the, and it'll be, it'll be a wonderful thing and I'm going to help.
I'm going to spearhead this.
I'll, I know where to get the plants.
I know how to get them in the ground.
All I need from you to neighbors is that you not fuck this up somehow.
Bye.
Just jog my memory.
Wasn't there a neighbor... Gosh, I think this is you.
It was a neighbor who basically did the equivalent of showing up at your house and presenting you with a bill to have something removed, like a tree?
Is that the second neighbor?
This is the second neighbor.
She said, this tree...
is threatening my driveway or something.
And I went up there with a couple of arborists and we looked at the tree and we were like, no threat detected.
I don't know, man.
Seems like if the top of that tree does break off and fall to the ground, it might,
Touch part of your driveway, but that's not really an emergency.
We'll deal with that when it happens.
Sorry, so just curious.
I'm trying to get the personalities right.
Same lady, same lady.
So you've gone through and you said, look, you're John Roderick Appleseed or John Birdbush.
Yeah.
I don't hate that.
John Birdbush is going to, like, you're going to Gaia bomb this whole area and bring it back to its original splendor.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it's going to have an implicit natural fence that won't be an ugly fence.
And then the birds can eat that and shit.
And on the other side of the fence, you can have as much of a putting green grass yard as you want.
But on this side, it's going to look like a forest in the Pacific Northwest.
Oh, that sounds nice, John.
That sounds so nice.
I thought so, too.
Well, I got a message from...
We're going to call them the daycare.
Neighbor number one, neighbor number two, maybe?
Yeah, the daycare is neighbor number one.
The stewardess, the former flight attendant for Alaska Airlines is neighbor number two.
Okay.
I got a message from her son, who's in his 30s, and he's a big guy with a long beard who actually says, actually.
Oh, so he's like a Unix guy?
He lives at home.
Oh, good.
And it's a lovely home.
Mm-hmm.
I get a message saying, hey, we really want to figure out what your plan is with this hedge.
Do you want to come over and walk the ground with us and tell us what you're going to do?
And I was like, oh, exciting.
I'm finally going to meet the son.
He seems like a reasonable guy.
Yeah.
I'm going to tell him about this plan I have.
It's going to be great where I'm finally going to get this
Because, you know, I get a little monomaniacal.
I get a little single-minded about it because I'm... People like us who spend a lot of time almost by ourselves, I think that's very natural.
It's a great way to have your mind just run wild and stuff like that.
But then, you know, when you're confronted with reality in your plan, sometimes you feel some pushback.
And in this case, it sounds like they're being collaborative.
Yeah.
A good neighbor, if you like.
You know, I've read 40...
graduate student research papers on creek restoration in the last two years.
I'm a little bit in the weeds, literally in the swampy weeds of this whole idea.
I know not everybody else is on the same page.
A lot of my neighbors are still...
gardening in what I would describe as the old school, Merlin.
You know what reminds me of, John?
A French garden versus an English garden.
There you go.
See, it's exactly that.
Do you want to have Versailles or do you want to have something where the queen owns the swans and everything goes wild, right?
The queen owns the swans.
Exactly.
You come through and you say, like, listen, this is the king's hunting area.
Oh, yeah.
Don't shoot that deer.
So I go over and
Like, like, hey, I'm going to meet.
And they invite me into the house and I sit there and they talk about, you know, their refrigerator was, was leaking and they had to do this.
And ever since dad died, et cetera.
And I'm like, great, of course I know.
And oh boy, talk about, have you heard about my sump pump?
Let me tell you all about the French drain.
Homeowner bonding.
And then the son gets serious and he says, so let's talk about the, the hedge that you want to build.
And I was like, okay, let's talk about it.
And he said, we'd like to keep everything just as it is.
And I said...
Oh, well... We'd like to keep everything... Huh.
Huh.
The same thing you say about your right to punch stops at the end of my nose, that seems to imply that they get some kind of a vote that is contra your position vis-a-vis surveyors.
It sounds like they're trying to, like, wheeze your juice a little bit.
Oh, more than that.
Oh?
I said, well...
You know, it's, here's the, I mean, there's survey stakes in the ground.
It's, but it's also just line of sight.
You can see where her, where the fence that I built between my house and hers ends and then where the street is.
And so you can see that your thing, you go, you go all this way over the line.
And he said, you know, and his mom is sitting there jaw clenched and he says in a very well actually way.
He says, well, we've been here 30 years.
We've been using this property for 30 years.
And we're prepared to sue for adverse possession.
Sue for adverse possession.
Now, adverse possession is...
That sounds like one of those things, that's a cool term.
One of those things like, you know, posse comitatus, where I just, the sound of it, like I would get a little shivery down my spine if I were you.
Well, it's pretty punk.
Say what it is again, adverse?
Adverse possession, which is a... Is that like tortious interference?
I don't know what that is.
Me neither.
But it's a thing enshrined in English law back to the olden times, which is just that if I've been...
using your property as though it were my property.
Oh, it's like capitalist eminent domain.
It's eminent domain for capitalists, right?
If I built a windmill on your property and you didn't do anything about it for a period of 10 years and everybody that looked at it knew that that was my- I'm suing you because of what I got away with.
Yes.
Pfft.
And so I'm sitting in their living room and I'm like, wait, you invited me over and served me cookies, biscuits on a tin in order to talk about my plan.
But what you were really telling me was that I could go screw myself.
That's not cricket.
And you're going to sue me to take possession, legal possession of the land that you have been, that you stole, basically.
And they're like, well, I wouldn't put it that way.
We're here to negotiate.
And I was like, what's your negotiating position?
And they said that everything stays exactly the same because we've been here for 30 years or we'll sue you for adverse possession.
And I was like, well, well, and I was so excited about my
bushes and my native berries that I didn't see it coming.
And I feel this happens to me a lot where I get into a situation like this and then I feel like a noob.
Like I came over here with my little brochures of all the native berries and you're talking about suing me to steal some corner of my property.
To like adjudicate the official theft of your land.
And so I said, well, I don't know if that is going to fly.
And, you know, I'm trying to keep my cool and just like, I see what you're saying.
Yes, you've said that you've been here for 30 years.
You've said that now 30 times.
I understand that you have.
But I don't understand why you don't see the beauty of my bushes.
It's a wonderful plan.
And they were like, well, you can plant your bushes anywhere you want, except in the 30 by 30 foot area that we claim as ours that we have.
I don't think inconvenience is a law.
Well, I'm looking here at the Washington State Legislature, RCW 720807, the adverse possession under claim and color of title.
Yes.
Every person in actual open and notorious possession of lands or tenements under claim and color of title, made in good faith, who shall be for seven successive years continuing possession and shall also, during said time unpaid, pay all taxes legally assessed, shall be held and adjudged to be the legal owner of said lands or tenements.
Your house is nicer than a tenement.
The thing about the law of adverse possession is that it absolutely favors the stealer.
You would think living as we do in a capitalist society that is based on
fundamentally and at its first principle on private ownership of land.
But possession is nine-tenths of the law.
There you go.
Is that right?
No, no, I'm pulling it out of my ass.
Is that what they're saying?
Yes.
They're doing some fucking Gilligan's Island-style legislation here?
The law says if you have been squatting on somebody's land for 10 years and they haven't done anything about it, and the statute that you just read says seven years, but it's really 10.
It looks like in California, it's 10.
Um, if the, if the person hasn't done anything about it, if it looks like, you know, if it looks like it belongs to you and you act like it belongs to you and nobody stops you, then you can file suit and basically demonstrate that, that it's yours.
Okay.
Now this is a thing that of course has to end up in front of a judge.
So it's like, as soon as it goes in front of a judge, it's anything can happen day, but it's,
Recently, Washington passed a further law that said the loser in a property dispute of this kind, in an adverse possession, the loser pays the legal fees.
Now, before... Oh, so there's some skin in the game.
Yeah.
Before, when both people had to pay their own legal fees, just the pain in the neck and expense of it kept people from suing their neighbors over a 30-foot piece of grass.
This is why a lot of my friends end up paying patent blackmailers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because, and there's been some good podcast episodes about this, to defend yourself against a patent troll is, it's going to be well, well into the six figures, where if somebody says, hey, you know, I have a patent, there is actually somebody who has a patent on hyperlinks.
So like you've, you've, uh, they wait till this has happened to my friend Marco a bunch of times.
They wait till your app gets real popular and well-known.
And then you get something from FedEx that says, Hey, you need to give me $20,000 or, or I'm going to take you down.
And I don't know if Marco's ever done that, but I have heard a lot of people say it's just cheaper to make it go away because it's so, it's so heavily favors.
Get it tried in East Texas, you know, Bob's your uncle.
Sure.
Well, in this case, I say, well, here we are sitting in the kitchen of your house.
Yes, you invited me as your guest.
Where you graciously invited me in.
Yeah, to parlay.
And you've now explained to me that you don't want to compromise.
You want either to keep using my land for your putting green.
Um, or if I don't want you to, then you're going to sue me and actually try and take legal ownership of it.
And continue to live next door to each other.
Why don't we go look at it?
And I can tell you more about the bushes with the berries and maybe, so we go out into the yard and I'm like, look, see here where you have this grass and, you know, and again, I'm coming from this position of having read a thousand articles that say, I mean, I did an omnibus episode on, or Ken did on like,
Grass lawns are an environmental catastrophe, the water that they squander, all the pesticides.
And I'm looking at their yard, and in my eye, I look at it and I go, this was a fashionable way to do a yard 30 years ago, but times have changed.
60 years ago.
We don't do this anymore.
Yeah, part of having your little enclave in a suburb is you get the control of it.
You get to have it look the way you want.
It could be gravel if you want.
But that is an idea that has not aged well.
Right.
And, you know, and so I look at their yard, which to them is this, you know, this beautifully landscaped place.
And I say, you know, what this is, what your yard is, is a habitat for rats.
You didn't say that.
No, I didn't.
But that's what I'm thinking.
You know, and in my mind, I'm like, surely you can see that this muddy patch of grass where you never step.
Right.
Is not better than.
a beautiful hedge that is made of... Okay, but you're kind of eliding the explicit legal threat and saying, oh, well, before we talk about all that, let's not get lawyers involved.
Let's just go outside and just cohabitate with the berries for a little while.
And I think to see what I'm going for here is nice for everybody.
Right.
And so we're standing there, and he's, you know, erm, actually me.
But you can tell that they're both very emotional.
And they're emotional because this is what they perceive to be their yard.
They've lived here for 30 years, as they've said now, 50 times.
I'm the new guy and I don't even live anywhere.
You know, I live on the other side of the river as far as they're concerned.
Why am I even up over here?
You might as well be one of the hill people.
Yeah.
What the heck am I even doing in their yard over here?
And I'm like, no, you don't understand.
It's a habitat.
Yeah.
And the owls and the habitat, you know, it's got berries.
Like, let me tell you, have I, there's so many articles I could share with you right now.
But you're also, you're not going to well actually them in the same way that Beardo does.
Well, because I'm, because again, this is the thing.
You're persuading.
But I feel like a noob in the sense that I'm so persuaded that I don't even remember what it was like to be back in a place where I would look somebody in the eye and go, English ivy is a welcome decorative plant that we have trained.
You know, they actually said like, well, we trained the ivy.
And I'm like, the ivy that you planted in your yard 30 years ago is 50 foot up in the trees around here because you can't train ivy.
It got away from you, my friends.
And it is an environmental catastrophe of your making.
And they're like, well, right here, you can see where we trained it.
And I'm like, you guys are training, training your ivy in a 15 foot by 15 foot planter box.
But if I can direct your attention, 20 feet over there outside of your yard, do you see that, Ivy?
That came from you.
And that is a freaking, like it's a scourge on the land.
It's murdering things.
It's a habitat for rats, my friends.
But I can't get far enough back to a time...
before i knew all this stuff right to a time when i would walk around the campus of an east eastern college and go look at the ivy it's so beautiful all right you can walk through our park and say oh look at those beautiful large trees if you're looking at it purely aesthetically but you can't unknow you can't unsee you can't think this
eucalyptus but hmm okay yeah yeah yeah but you're still you're playing you're you're being cool about it you're not being confrontational about it you're not gonna be like bellicose lawyer guy but they're holding firm they're they're doing the thing where they're obviously very upset and he's talking to me in the very slow pedantic like hyper rational online libertarian style yeah he's gonna defeat me with logic
And they've lived there for 30 years.
30 years they've lived there, John.
Did they mention that?
And they're prepared to sue for ownership.
And I'm like, you're going to sue me over 15 by 15 feet of grass?
And he turns the tables and he goes, you're going to make a big issue over 15 by 15 feet of grass?
And I'm like, well, it is 15 by 15 foot of grass.
That's on my side of your grass that I'm going to determine the future of.
And he's like, actually, actually, no, it's not going to be on your side of the property line.
If you force us to sue over the, and I'm, and I'm standing there and I'm like,
This is one of these suburban issues.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, right, the Russians are on the outsides of Kiev and people are starving in the, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
But here I am in the suburbs arguing with the son of a lady about this, about whether or not I'm going to put in
some local berries or they're going to keep putting roundup on their grass and they're not gonna they're not seeding so to speak they're not going to give you any of these points so he says well so you know so i'm i'm like trying to list the reasons and he's like well you know i don't understand why you're not willing to compromise and
And I said, well, here's what a compromise is.
It's where two parties each come with an idea and then they meet in the middle.
And what you're saying is you want me to compromise by agreeing with everything that you want.
My kid used to do a similar, which when my kid was a toddler, barely able to talk, when they first learned that phrase, compromise, would say like, oh, you know, you can have like half a cup of juice or whatever.
Well, how about we compromise and I get a whole cup of juice?
And we'd say, well, that's really, I understand you're starting, you're kind of escalating your initial position here.
Yeah.
The compromise is between a cup of juice and no cup of juice.
But it sounds like you got a vibe that they were trying to intimidate you.
Oh, for sure.
And they have money.
This is a wealthy neighborhood.
They have money enough to live in this house, which neither of them work.
She's retired and he is, I don't know what he is, but he's living in the basement.
He's probably got a tumbler.
But when dad died, he left a bunch of money to them and they're living there and they seem, and oh, and the thing is they, it was very clear.
They had already talked to a lawyer, their lawyer.
They had his phone number.
They had, they'd, before they invited me over for tea and crumpets, they had already done the legwork.
So when they were threatening this suit, I had a binder full of pictures of bushes that I printed out from the internet.
And they're like, here's our binder that we're going to sue you for your property.
And at a certain point, he says, well, you know, we're trying to negotiate.
And I said, well, you're not negotiating.
You're just stipulating.
And he said, no, we're negotiating.
And Merlin, I raised my voice.
Oh, well, you know, it sounds like you were a gentleman about it as long as you could be.
I raised my voice and I said, that's not what negotiating is.
And he said, I feel unsafe now.
Okay.
I'm going to say something about this fellow that if memory serves, you probably said about me in the first year of our friendship.
I feel like you said this to me.
There's nothing wrong with you that couldn't be solved by a pretty solid ass kicking.
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And I think Beardo needs a punch in the nose.
Well.
He needs to pump the brakes.
So he outweighs me by 100 pounds.
Yeah, but you're Wiley.
I am.
You can get that guy on the ground.
Well.
He's going to be like a turtle.
But he's doing this in the libertarian internet atheist argument way.
Sure.
I feel it's safe.
As a way of... Just like when I said to the guy at the Firestone, are you fucking with me right now?
And he said, there's no need to use profanity, sir.
And I said, well, wait a minute.
You don't have to go there.
You're telling me that you're not... Do me a favor.
Be an adult and don't tone police me with your bullshit.
Because he's... Now he's... But, you know, now he has the moral high ground, right?
Because I used a bad word.
And he's been to a training where they tell him what to do when someone gets...
Profane.
You know, when someone uses a bad word, here's what you do.
And he goes right to his book.
This kid, same situation.
And he says, you know... You know this guy's on Reddit all the time.
You need to track this guy down.
I bet they both have accounts somewhere that involves... Nextdoor?
They're probably on Nextdoor.
They're probably on Reddit.
I think you need to track these people down and you need to learn more about this fella.
Well, so...
So he pulls his phone out and says, I don't want to have to call the police.
Oh, please.
And I said, you know, and I immediately got very calm.
And I said, I'm terribly sorry that I raised my voice.
And he said, I don't believe that you're sorry.
Oh, my God.
I feel really deeply dislike these people.
And I said, well, in that case, I think you should call, please.
And he said, I don't want it to go there.
And I said, no, no, no.
You feel unsafe.
I really think that you should call the police.
Yeah, like if you're going to dig up the kimchi and open the jar, you might as well take a bite.
Go for it.
If you're going to hold up your phone, because I said that's not what negotiating is in a loud voice.
And tell me you're going to call the police because you feel unsafe.
Well, let's just get let's just get that out of the way.
Let's get the police here.
I hate more than anything a specious theatrical call to the police.
But I do know that we live in the suburbs where the police are basically out there.
I see what they do.
I drive around this neighborhood and see what the police do.
They're not busy.
Let's be honest.
They're like watching somebody get a cat out of a tree.
I don't think they're going to bring the paddy wagon, John.
Right now, the police here in Normandy Park are across town dealing with another property dispute between two 65-year-old men.
where someone else's... Karen versus Karen.
Someone else's planter box is six inches over the line.
Someone else's son is holding his Razor phone.
This is 99% of what living in the suburbs is, apparently.
So he's like,
I'm calling his bluff and he's like, Oh, you know, he doesn't want to, but, but he's got to stick to his guns.
So he calls the police.
His mom actually say beep, beep, beep.
So he called, he called, he did the thing where he punched in a bunch of numbers and then he looked at the phone and he was like, well, what's going on?
He couldn't get it to work, you know?
And at one point I had to say to him, does your phone not have nine one one?
And at that point, I think I pushed him too far.
Oh, John, unleash the hounds.
Give him the wit.
Take him down.
Is your phone?
I'm sorry.
Is that a different model?
Do they make them for men?
Does that not have 911?
So then he gets on the police scanner, and the person that answered the police, he gives them his address.
And they're like, okay, well, we'll call it.
We're going to pass you through to the Shoreline Police Department.
And both of us, he and I, now we're on the same team because we're dealing with someone at the police and fire who doesn't know where they are.
And we're both like, no, Shoreline would be the wrong police.
That's like...
50 miles from here.
And they're like, well, then we'll send it over to the Edmonds and we're like, nope, nope, we're both talking to them.
Nope, you're in the wrong zip code.
Because he didn't want to sit there and stare at each other for two hours.
So eventually it gets sent to the right dispatcher and then I have to listen to him explain, yes, hello, I have a...
There's a, my neighbor is here and he spoke to me.
I was just trying to negotiate logically with him.
He spoke to me in a threatening manner.
I feel unsafe in this space.
911 operator is like, are you in a safe place right now?
And he's like, and we're standing here.
you know, I'm on one side of, of the property.
Isn't there part of you where you're the hairs on your neck?
I feel like this is so farcical.
I can't believe that I'm.
Oh no, I'm loving it.
I'm just sitting.
Yeah.
I'm like, I'm, I have a, I have one hand on my chest.
I'm looking up.
I'm like, I'm like red Fox.
I'm like, Elizabeth, I'm coming to join you.
And so the 911 operator says, well, why don't you and your mother go back into your home and
get into a safe place and we'll send a, we'll send an officer.
So they both, you know, go back into their home and I'm like, well, he's called the police.
So now I'm, I got to stand here.
I'm not going to go home.
You know, I don't, I'm going to have a male relative.
I could call to say that you're being a giant pussy.
So, so now I'm standing there.
It's kind of lightly raining and I'm standing on the putting green on my side of the line.
kind of towing the grass and looking at the bushes and, again, picturing my bush.
But more than anything, wondering how it got here.
Right.
Because I honestly... Like an hour ago, things were so different.
But two years ago.
Oh, right, yeah.
I believe I'm a friend... And I'm sorry to interrupt, but you are bargaining in good faith and you are trying to find... You do have...
I mean, you've got something on your side.
I guess it's the law.
But you're also trying to be a cordial neighbor who, as I mean, in the negotiation like there, it's just that they're opening gambit in this negotiation is that, you know, we've got squatters rights on your property and we'll sue you to pursue that because you're going to be mean to our grass.
Which is just, it's just, that's what's wrong with everything.
But I'm, I'm replaying dragged into it in my mind.
And I'm thinking, where did I go wrong?
Because I do think I'm a friend to all birds and animals.
I do believe I've done all this research.
I think I'm doing the right thing.
I think what I'm doing is logical and sensible and explainable.
And yet, and also, I have tremendous powers of persuasion personally.
I am articulate.
And yet, I'm in a death spiral with both of my neighbors over the same issue, a thing that seems to me to be
like very basic don't throw garbage into a forest uh respect the the property boundaries and and and try and eradicate the the radical step eradicate invasive species you know like it all
But I'm standing there in the rain waiting for the police and asking myself... How did my life come to this?
Yeah.
Is this a situation where I, somewhere back up the stream, made some assumptions or have behaved in a way that...
created this problem or or fuel that would be i my mind would be riddled with that question because of how i am yeah but i yeah and and i and so i play i play it and i know a lot of people in the world a lot of my friends a lot of people avoid conflict by avoiding conflict
And that's me.
They would, they would come into this situation and they would, they would say that neighbor that throws the garbage over the fence is awful.
And they would see about it, but they wouldn't confront them.
And the people that had put the putting green over, they would be upset about it, but they wouldn't confront them.
And there would be no confrontation because there would be no confrontation.
And I, you know, I'm never able to do that, but I,
But I'm standing there and I'm just like, this now, yesterday, I did not have this in my life.
And now I'm standing here with the police on the way.
In the rain.
In the rain.
And my neighbors threatening to sue me for adverse possession of a corner of my property.
Is a man's home not his castle?
Y'all are brutalizing me.
That's right.
I mean, I do feel a little bit like Larry David.
Or like Ronnie Dobbs.
Or like Ronnie Dobbs.
Well, I can make a remark.
I want to make a remark and a sub-remark.
First, like, I don't want to talk about social media, but, okay, first of all, I think something, and I know you know this, I think one thing you've got going against you is you're the new guy.
New guy.
And so you are, you're basically, you're the invasive, like you say, you're the, sorry, I'm repeating what you said, you are the invasive exotic.
You came in out of nowhere, and now you've got a bunch of fancy ideas about how you're going to change the way it's always been.
Yep.
And that, I mean, maybe that won't put you back on your heels, but like as somebody who really, one of the things I would like to think is a good thing about me is I think I have a pretty good facility at reading a room, which is that I try to be very non-assertive until I get a feel for what happened before I arrived and how it felt.
And I would like to think that makes me a better person, easier to get along with.
Like, I don't go in and just start yelling and changing the whole temperature of the room because, you know, that's kind of a dick thing to do.
But yeah, you are, on the one hand, you are the new guy.
Okay, that's what you're, the implicit thing with this whole we've lived here X years thing.
Like, we're going to skip right past your own sort of claim on your position on this negotiation.
But the other thing, John, this is apropos of the social media stuff, the everything stuff, is like, it just feels so gross to find yourself in a position... Well, I'll speak for myself.
I hate... One reason I hate social media, I don't like being dragged into a position where...
I have an adversary who has defined the frame for the situation, who has defined the context for a situation.
Put another way, like, you know, if a 12 year old, if a gang of 13 year old boys start making fun of you, like, and saying you got wide hips or something, like, what do you say?
You say, well, that's not very nice.
Well, no, like you get, as they say, pulled down to their level.
And you say like, well, maybe you and your girlfriend want to come over here and feel my hips or something like that.
When I was a less evolved person, I would say withering, things like that to people who I knew I could, who were vulnerable.
I don't do that now.
But I really, these are related.
You're a new guy and the framing.
They have a frame for this that you are not allowed to.
to acknowledge, let alone pop out of.
And there are tactics in negotiation that I am aware of.
I've heard some very good podcasts about how to do this from like FBI hostage negotiators, how to do it.
But it's still, you're always in this position of being around people, being around people who are used to being able to define the whole mise-en-scene.
the whole frame for how this is going to work.
And now you're in a position where like the only way you're going to get out of this, it's almost like talking to a cop.
The only way you're going to get out of this with them, the cop seems like he's trying to help you.
Oh, we can make this easy on you.
Never talk to a cop.
Because that frame is like anything you say to a cop literally will be used against you.
That's why they read you your Miranda rights.
And in this case, they have established a frame for this that it sounds to me
I'll follow up later about the relationship between these two.
But it sounds like they both really believe that frame and that they've been patient and they've been gracious, but you keep getting on the grass.
Isn't that part of the frustration is you feel sort of dragged into this problem that they've defined?
You know, I've been here two years.
And the entire two years, I believed about myself that I was gently...
helping my neighbors understand what my vision was.
You know, I didn't move in and three weeks later have a team of people up there throwing up a cheap fence.
I was over there all the time.
Every time I encountered them, I was like, hey, you know, how are you?
It's great to see you.
You're not throwing garbage on their lawn or parking on the grass.
Let me tell you what I've got in mind.
You know, here's why I'd rather you not throw the garbage over the fence because this area is going to be a snail sanctuary.
And so for two years I've been saying, well, for two years I've watched their faces harden at the suggestion that the property we're talking about is mine.
And so as soon as I start talking about Butterfly Sanctuary, I've already lost them.
I can see it in their eyes.
And in both cases.
The one that is throwing the garbage is a sociopath.
But the other lady, she's just, like you say,
Absolutely.
She has a way that it's been.
And she had a whole career as a younger person or a middle-aged person.
She has a whole career of dealing with difficult people and knowing that, again, like a cop, one way to get control of the situation is to be, look people dead in the eyes and be unerring in letting them know that this is the frame and it's not going to change.
Sir, I'm not going to serve you again.
Sit down or we will duct tape you to the Alaskanares.
Well, she was a she was a flight attendant in the 60s when people did not stand up and throw their yogurt and piss on the floor and scream about vaccine.
She was she wore a pillbox hat and had white elbow length gloves and served people steak tartare on flights.
where a first-class ticket costs $70,000 or whatever it did in 1975.
Right.
So her way of dealing with things is to get very sweet, to bat her eyelashes, and to appear to be... She's tried from the moment I moved in.
Charm offensive.
Charm offense, right?
But in a weird... You know, it's weird.
She's trying to be cute, right?
She's trying to, like... That's creepy.
Be cute.
And like, oh, but I can see in her eyes that I'm a threat.
And as soon as I start talking about Butterfly Sanctuary, she's back to this narrative of, well, I've trained all the ivy.
Well, and you're the Auslander.
Like, you're the one who's come into this situation from the hill country and are trying to screw up, you know, this mature community.
But in talking to myself about it, trying to figure out, like,
how could I have done this differently?
I've done two years worth of patient tiptoe around the fact that she's lived here for 30 years and believe she's trained the Ivy.
And yet here I am still.
She's going to die.
She trained me.
She trained it.
Yeah.
I'm standing here in the exact position, you know, where I'm standing on the property line and the cops are on their way.
I could have, just two weeks after I moved in, thrown up a shitty fence.
What could be worse?
They would have called the cops then?
The two years that I spent trying to be good has resulted in me being in the exact position vis-a-vis the police and my neighbors as I would have been if I had showed up as the biggest imperialist
Dick of the universe.
If I just showed up on day one and taken a can of day glow spray paint and sprayed a line right across their grass where my property line was and put a sign that said, keep off.
I couldn't have been in a worse situation than I was right now.
Oh, jeez.
Where I'm being sued.
That's such a crummy feeling.
So the cop shows up.
Oh, jeez.
Can I come out in the prowler?
In the prowler.
I'm standing out here in the grass.
I wave.
It's a kind of sad wave.
Is it still raining?
It's up here.
It's kind of raining.
Hi.
She pulls up.
She gets out of the car.
This particular individual.
She's five foot one.
Mm-hmm.
Blonde.
She kind of looks like the McCain lady from the TV.
Oh, yeah, like from that TV show.
Yeah.
Miss McCain.
She's solidly constructed.
Well, but she's, you know, she's blonde.
She's like a go-getter kind.
And like all police now, you know, she would be a yoga instructor.
But she is wearing... She's got a smokey-the-bear hat, so now she's basically... She might as well be a soldier.
She's wearing 700 pounds of tactical gear.
Bulletproof vest, 17 different clips, four different weapons.
Yeah, like a jet pack, all this stuff.
She gets out...
She comes over, you know, smile.
Put the stick in the belt when she gets out.
She does.
She does.
The mace, the taser, the, you know, the lasso.
The net.
And she's like, how's it going out here?
And I'm like, well, you know, just standing here.
And she's like, are you the, you know, did you call?
And I said, no, actually, I'm the one that
the property owner called about.
I'm the neighbor that raised his voice.
And she's like, oh, okay, well, why don't you fill me in?
And I was like, well, not much to fill in, really.
We're having a little boundary dispute here.
You must have felt like such a fucking idiot.
I'm just, well, and I'm trying to communicate to her.
You know, you don't want to be the person that's like, hey, cop, be my friend.
Right.
But I'm trying to say like,
I'm standing out here because I didn't want you to drive up and have to come find me.
And had they gone back to their lair?
They're in their house.
Okay.
Oh, because they're so scared, right?
But he called you because I said that's not what negotiating is in a raised voice about the fact that we're having a little property dispute.
And at that point, he and his mom came out.
And he said, yes, well, I have to call the police.
And they'd worked on their story in the house.
And he said, he lunged at me.
What?
And I was like, lunged.
I lunged.
And the officer's kind of looking back and forth.
And she said, well, let me just stop you right there.
My job in a situation like this, you might be surprised to learn that in Normandy Park, we do a lot of
uh, property disputes.
Huh?
And she actually said a lot of, a lot of situations where two 65 year old guys are upset at each other over where the recycling bins are.
Wow.
So we get called out a lot and I deal with this a lot.
And here's my job.
I'm, I'm basically going to mom this situation.
Um, I'm five foot one and you guys are both huge.
So I, you know, I,
I can't really make you do anything, but I want you both to look at each other and say right now in front of me that you're not going to shout at each other and you're going to try and work this out.
Wow.
De-escalation.
I was like, I'm really sorry that I shouted at you.
And I really do want to work this out.
He was like, well.
And just to be clear here, you did not add a but.
Nope.
No.
You did a serious gentleman's apology.
Well, and I'm also just like, are we seriously?
Are we seriously?
Right.
I mean, yes, we are.
And I made you do this.
I made you call them because I didn't want you to wave your razor phone in my face about how you're going to call the police.
Because I don't want, because if you're going to threaten to sue me, like I'm not going to,
This isn't going to be one of these Putin situations where you talk about your nuclear arsenal.
Like if you're going to sue me, well, let's see whose lawyer is smarter.
Yeah, it's not my day to watch you.
Like if you're going to do that, that's, and again, this is, I'm sorry, I keep quoting myself.
There's a big difference between a warning and a threat.
And I think we've lost a lot of that in America.
There are so many things now that we call a warning that are actually a threat.
A warning is something that you proffer to someone to keep them safe.
And a threat is something that you do to intimidate somebody.
And I think what they were doing was not a warning, it's a threat.
And if somebody threatens you, well, you're like, you know, I don't control you.
Like, if you're going to sue me, I can't stop you from doing that.
But I'm not going to get so wound up in this that I'm bowing and scraping and begging you to please just keep your grass and leave me alone.
I mean, it's just unseemly.
Yeah.
But I'm standing there and I'm not embarrassed for myself.
I'm just embarrassed for the world.
For America, yeah.
Where am I?
And I'm looking at the grass and I'm looking at the ghost bushes that I've pictured in my mind.
Think of all those birds, John.
All those birds.
Yeah, and the birds that are living in the ghost bushes and the owls that are feeding on the mountain beavers.
And I'm like, where am I in this?
Like, what have I done?
How much did my vision of this thing put me here?
And how complicit am I in the fact that I'm standing here talking to this police officer who is talking to us like we're children, because from her perspective, we are, and from anyone's perspective, we're
You know, she's, she's like, do we know where the property boundary is?
And we both, both he and I are like, yes.
And she's like, okay, well that's a great place to start.
And she sounds like she's pretty good at this.
Oh, she's great.
Like if she had to like go deal with a drunk, it sounds like she knows how to handle that.
Oh, she's great.
And, and the fact that she's small and blonde and, and, and dare I say, dare I use the word perky?
No, I know what you mean.
Like a Reese Witherspoon type situation.
She's absolutely owning the, with the withers, she's witherspooning the shit out of this situation.
Yep.
Well, so I go back to my house.
I slink back through the forest.
My hand kind of just grazing over the tops of all my other native bushes.
Oh, look, it's the mountain huckleberry.
Oh, geez, John.
It's the salmonberry.
And look over here.
You can see where the birds are going to love this.
And I sit in my living room, and I'm like, well, now, two years in, I'm in a situation where the neighbor and I are at war.
I called a good friend who's a lawyer who deals with property, and I said, you know, I've read the statutes of adverse possession, and I'm afraid that I feel like they have a really good shot at it.
Just, I mean, not based on, well, based on the law.
Based on the law that's on the books, they have a case to make.
There are five criteria, and honestly, they meet all five.
Because even if they've only been there for 10 years...
the property was unguarded by the old people that lived here.
I could stand in front of a judge and say, look, they were 95 years old.
They weren't capable of climbing up the side of the hill.
Yeah.
But it's shit about dinner.
Yeah.
And the judge is going to go, well, that meets the definition of not guarding your property.
And the law has it written to make it easy for someone to do this under certain, certain circumstance.
Now there's a whole urban school of adverse possession that,
coming from a kind of punk rock squat mentality where it's seen as a way of reclaiming
abandoned buildings in downtowns.
Right.
If you, if you move in and you live there.
It's a big deal here.
We're like, there's been so much occupancy open again before COVID, but there's been so much occupancy open in, in businesses.
And I think there's some kind of a weird monetary reason why people do that rather than just take less rent.
But they eventually got to a thing where they're going to, they're going to fine you per month.
If your place is open for longer than X months.
I mean, I think that's from an urban perspective,
urban liveliness standpoint, that makes a lot of sense.
Like, we're not here to be your property bank.
Like, people need to live and do things and buy things, and you can't just, you know, be a land baron and wait for Salesforce to buy you.
But as you can imagine, a judge...
is going to be a lot less likely to award adverse possession of a San Francisco townhouse to some squatters than a judge would out in the suburbs to say, well, they do have it nicely.
She did train that ivy.
She's been there for years training that ivy.
It can heal.
So I sat in my room and I was just covered in this feeling of sadness.
Oh, God.
And like...
well, now am I going to have to deal with a lawsuit?
Like all I wanted were these bushes.
I don't understand what happened.
And I'm, and I'm realizing like, well, I don't want them to legally get title to the land.
And so all I can do is like,
Back off.
Well, did your lawyer friend have initial reactions?
Because, I mean, the good thing about a lawyer, well, good or bad thing about a lawyer, mostly a good thing, they are your advocate, and they will show you the strengths in your case and the weakness in the other person's case.
And if they're really good, they'll also show you the weaknesses in your case.
Was this person able to give you, like, a little bit of a take on how it was likely to go?
Yeah.
He's a buddy and he forwarded, he made an online introduction to an actual guy that does this actual work who he says is really good.
But he and I just sat and talked about the law in a kind of funny way where he's like, well, this is what the statute says.
And I was like, Bill, look at this statute.
And what it came down to was if the loser didn't have to pay the legal fees, why not let him sue?
Let him spend 60 grand to try and get 10 feet of land.
But if the, if the loser has to pay, I don't want to spend 60 grand to give them.
This is the kind of thing where it's not a criminal case, but I mean, are there things like, would you have to do things like depositions?
Oh, sure.
They'd have to do all kinds of things.
Oh, that's no good.
And so I'm sitting here, you know, and last night at 11 o'clock at night, sitting in my bathtub, I get an email and the, and the,
The subject heading is an olive branch.
Hmm.
And it's a long email from the son.
What?
Where he says, things have gotten so crazy.
You know, I remember when I was just a boy, five years old, my parents in our old suburban.
And I was like, you had a suburban?
We went up into the forests, the mountains of Washington, and we collected a thousand baby ferns.
Again, a thing that would not be kosher now, but totally kosher then.
And we brought the ferns and we planted them all around the ravines.
And I remember when we first trained the ivy.
Again with the ivy.
Okay.
The olive part of the olive branch is he's making himself a little bit more vulnerable, it feels like.
Yeah.
He writes a long email saying, here's where we're coming from.
This is how it's always been.
We love this land and this property.
We've looked out the window and it's been exactly the same for my entire life.
And now you've showed up.
And one morning I woke up and there were 30 hippies in the bushes in Carhartts planting little pink flags all around with these scrubby little trees that I don't understand.
And now you're standing here telling me that you're going to put, you're going to take away our garden or, you know, some corner of our yard and put in scrubby bushes that are supposed to attract birds.
So it's not just that you're new, it's that you are to them, whether this is right or wrong or otherwise, you are the invasive exotic.
You're coming in and you are unintentionally upending even a certain kind of history or nostalgia.
Yeah.
All of it.
He talked about his, he talked about his dying father.
He talked about the, he had all this, all these stories about when he was a little kid and, and I was moved.
I was moved.
Not, it was interesting to hear the stories, but I was moved that he had this humanity that after, you know, after like standing there full of bluster with the police and the whole thing,
He was also saying to himself, I don't feel like the hero of this story somehow.
And I don't understand why not, because it seems to me my position is very understandable.
We're not hurting anybody.
Why are you trying to hurt us?
And I'm reading his letter, and I'm like, I also feel like I don't understand why.
I'm not the hero of this story because I'm not trying to hurt you.
So I woke up this morning and looked out across the ravine.
And for the last two days, I looked out across the ravine and it looked to me like a battleground because on the other side of that stream, there was a family that was going to sue me.
And I,
I woke up and I looked out across the rainy ravine this morning, and it no longer felt like a battleground.
Because I think from his letter, I'm going to write him and say, I don't need to build a hedge there.
Really?
I got all the native bushes I can handle.
And all I'm trying to do is make a habitat for the mountain beaver.
And if you guys want your putting green up there to stay the same, I'm not going to, I'm not going to be the one that makes you change your lives.
Like I read too many articles about habitat restoration and I believed everybody in the world had read all those articles and that I could, and if you hadn't let me, do you have a half an hour?
Let me tell you all about it.
And instead what happened was I'm,
You know, like I'm walking across your dad's grave out here and that's not anything.
That's not a thing.
That's not what I'm doing.
That's not what I want.
So I'm going to, I'm going to let them keep their windmill.
Yeah.
Do you feel like, just because this has got me a little emotionally charged, do you feel like that could be the end of this?
And I guess there's this part, I'm niggling in the back of my mind, which is like, well, yeah, I mean, they're still probably kind of pretty irrational people to deal with.
I mean, you can't obviously guarantee future returns.
Are you going to be okay with that and feel...
uh, a sense of security that you're not jeopardized down the road.
I mean, I think you're being, I think you're both being pretty cool about it considering, but like, are you, are you, do you want to keep talking to your friend just to cover your butt?
On the one hand, um, if you have granted a,
a person the right to use a part of your property, like, like formally granted them the right.
Yeah.
They can't sue for adverse possession.
Oh, okay.
Because you've allowed them to be there.
And that would sort of head off future action if there's been a meeting.
Sorry, now I'm being totally with Judge Wapner.
If there's been a meeting of the minds about this and you've reached an accord and made your peace with each other, at that point, that brings down the temperature, but it also potentially makes it less likely to be actionable?
Having read the law, having read the magazine articles in the form of the law,
It seems to me that one of the only paths I have to avoid being vulnerable to this kind of suit is to, in writing, say...
I allow you, I grant you the right to have this intrusion onto my property because the whole thing about adverse possession is that it's adverse.
And it's like, and like not ad hoc exactly, but that's something that started out as a
I don't know.
I don't know if it retroactively applies to all... Yeah, but it sounds like you're not that over-concerned.
I mean, they'll probably continue to be really annoying, and you'll have to, like, you know... But it does bring down the temperature, which, by extension, should kind of let the waters cool a little bit.
The other thing I'm hoping is that he's in his 30s.
He has a long beard.
I don't...
And for 30 years, he's listened to his mom talk about how she's trained the Ivy.
I believe in his soul, he's closer to me.
than his mother in terms of how he feels about the moon beaver.
Yeah, well, we didn't have to go to that, but that was the moon beaver.
I'm always the one, I don't want to become known for this, but this would be the second time that I suggest trying to play people against each other in your neighborhood.
But that's what I was wondering, is he just trying to be supportive of his mom?
He has not read the articles, right?
No, not like you have, no.
As soon as I introduce the idea that, look, man, I'm not against...
You know, like, it's not about me wanting to subdivide this property and build townhouses here.
Right.
It's that... It's good faith.
It's all good faith.
It's that a grass lawn is an environmental crime.
And if you want that on your shoulders, if you want the rising sea levels to be partly your responsibility...
Because you're putting Roundup on your grass to keep the weeds down.
Like, that's, you know, that's between you and your millennial god, my friend.
That'll just go straight down the hill into the creek.
And probably into your French drain, if I'm being honest.
Well, no, the French drain's up on the other side.
Oh, good.
Seems like there's only really one step left.
I don't want to overstep my bounds.
You need to get them on your podcast.
Oh, wow.
Think how good that would be.
Think about how many mouths.
Then you can play him against his mom.
Because now you have a project.
Show me how to train the Ivy.
Well, actually.
Actually.
Actually.
My mother trained the Ivy too.
My father's grave is gone.