My family has owned this land for five generations. Not the ritzy new-money kind of ownership, but the hard-scrabble, dirt-under-the-fingernails kind. My great-great-grandfather, Angus Mloud, bought over 2,000 acres of what was then considered undesirable Appalachian hill country. It was rocky, steep, and nobody wanted it for farming. But Angus was a civil engineer, and he saw something nobody else did. Water.
In the 1920s, he built a dam—a respectable, over-engineered cyclopean masonry structure using stone from the land itself. The result? Lach Mloud, a 700-acre lake where once there had only been a muddy valley. He built a small stone and timber lodge on a high promontory overlooking his creation, and that’s where I live today.
The dam wasn’t just for a pretty view. It was a feat of engineering designed for flood control and theoretically hydroelectric power, though he never installed the turbines. For generations, my family were the quiet custodians of this land and lake. We paid our taxes, maintained the dam, and enjoyed the solitude. The deed and, more importantly, the riparian rights were ironclad.
Fast forward to about 3 years ago when the world discovered our quiet corner of the mountains. A developer, Pinnacle Living, bought a thousand-acre parcel of land adjacent to ours—a plot we had sold off back in the ’70s to cover some estate taxes. They carved it up into a high-end gated community, Lake View Pinnacle Estates.
At first, I didn’t mind. People have a right to live where they want. I was just the quiet guy up the hill in the old stone house. But then came Karen. Well, that wasn’t her real name, of course. Her name was Brenda McLofflin, but she was a Karen in the most profound, elemental sense of the word.
She was the inaugural HOA president. A woman in her late 50s who drove a white-on-white Escalade and wore expensive resort wear, as if she were perpetually on a veranda in Palm Beach instead of the Appalachian foothills. She had the kind of brittle, sun-damaged smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
And she looked at our ancestral land not as a place of history and quiet beauty, but as an amenity to be monetized. Brenda saw my lake, Lach Mloud, as the crown jewel of her new kingdom. It was right there in the name, wasn’t it? Lake View Estates. She started treating it as if it were hers.
First came the passive-aggressive newsletters: We remind all residents to enjoy the beautiful community lake responsibly. Then came the direct emails addressed to me: The HOA board has noticed your personal dock is in need of aesthetic updating. Please see attached bylaws for approved color palettes.
