The increase was framed as necessary infrastructure investment. A new lakefront development committee was formed which sounded reasonable enough that nobody questioned what it was actually for and buried in item seven of a 12 item agenda at the third meeting of that committee in language that was careful and vague and easy to skim past was the first written reference to cabin infrastructure along the eastern shoreline.
Nobody flagged it. We are sitting on one of the most underutilized natural assets in the county. Diane told the four people in that room that ends now. My father passed in the spring of 2019 after an illness that moved faster than anyone expected. He had updated his will eight months before he died. I have thought about that timing more than once, whether he sensed something coming or whether it was coincidence.
I have never been able to decide. The land transferred to me without complication. What took more time was going through his study. his desk, his books, the filing cabinet in the corner, and in the fireproof safe behind the cabinet, a manila folder I recognized immediately, the same one he had handed me on my 18th birthday, thicker now with additional documents added over the years.
Inside the original 1963 deed, the easement documentation, two pages with a handwritten addendum, county recorded and witnessed, survey plats from 1963 and 1978, and underneath everything in an envelope I had never opened, a note in my grandfather’s handwriting, four words, don’t let them take the water. I called a property attorney the following week.
She reviewed the easement documentation and called me back the same afternoon. Valid, recorded, fully enforceable. The easement explicitly prohibited in its original language commercial structures, permanent alterations to drainage corridors, and privatization of shoreline access within the defined repairarian zone. The repairarian zone, as surveyed in 1963, covered the entire eastern bank of the cove, the entire eastern bank, the same ground Diane Harwick had been eyeing since the day she took that board seat.
I attended the next HOA meeting, sat in the third row. Diane stood at the front of the room and unfolded a poster board. Fullcolor renderings of Crestwood shores, 14 lakefront cabins, a paved access road, a private boat launch. She was proud of it. The room applauded. I looked at the renderings for a long moment.
Looked at Diane, smiled politely, renewed my dues on the way out, said nothing. The permits started appearing in the county system in early 2020. I checked every single one, filing dates, parcel references, contractor names, scope descriptions. I was looking for one thing specifically. Any disclosure of the recorded shoreline easement in the permit applications.
It was not there. Not in the first filing, not in the second, not in any of the 14 individual structure permits that followed over the next 2 years. Every application moved through the county process clean because nobody on the permit side thought to pull the underlying deed history and nobody on Dian’s side gave them a reason to.
The first cabin went up in the spring of 2021. Pre-fabricated panels, efficient crew done in under three weeks. By midsummer, there were three. By fall, there were six. Diane held a ribbon cutting for what she was now officially calling the Crestwood Shores Community Retreat. Local newspaper photographer, a quote about maximizing the neighborhood’s natural assets, a small crowd of members who genuinely believed they were watching something good being built.
Then they rerouted the drainage corridor. I was not there when it happened. I came down to the water one morning, and the excavator had already been through. The channel that had fed that cove since before my grandfather bought the land, the corridor explicitly protected by a 61-year-old recorded easement, had been redirected 20 yards east to make room for a cabin foundation, and 11 white pines, mature trees that had stood along that corridor for decades were on the ground, cut, gone, in a single afternoon.
