Brennan Whitman Cross is a bully who only works for clients who can write big checks. Tessa Hulcom does not have an unlimited budget. The HOA's reserve fund is under $50,000. Roland's paving company has a credit line, but it's not infinite. Cross will charge them $300 an hour and bill them 60 hours a month.
They will tire out faster than you will. The trucks kept coming. Concrete trucks, roll-off dumpsters, lowboy trailers carrying excavators. By the third week of November, I had documented 41 commercial crossings of my bridge, all with photographs, license plates, and timestamps. 41 separate trespass events.
41 separate violations of NC General Statutes 20-118. I crawled under the bridge again on a cold Sunday morning with Tully home from her mother's. Three more stress fractures along the south truss. One tree nail had backed out of its hole by almost 3/4 of an inch. The center cord was showing a hairline split that had not been there in October.
I sat down on a rock in the creek bed and looked up at the bridge. my great-grandfather had built. Tully was on the bank above me with her notebook. Daddy, what does it sound like when a bridge gives up? I told her the truth. I told her my father had once described it as a slow, mournful groan, like an old dog easing down onto a porch.
She thought about that for a moment. Daddy, the bridge is not going to give up. Granddad would be mad. I climbed up the bank and we walked back to the truck together, hand in hand, while the November wind pulled the last of the sourwood leaves off the trees behind us. That night, I started building the trap.
Prenel Bighgam showed up at my office on a Friday morning in December. He was 73 years old in a faded olive forest service jacket he had been issued in 1991 and had refused to give back. Retired hydraologist with the US Forest Service. Pisgah National Forest District, 38 years walking the watersheds of western North Carolina with a pH meter and a notebook. He had read about my declaratory judgment in the Wesville Mountaineer that morning.
He set a thick green folder on my desk. Mr. Carver, I have been waiting 2 years for somebody to take Tessa and Roland Hulcom to court. I would like to show you something. He unfolded a topographic map of the headarters above Sourwood Creek. He pointed to a hollow on the back side of Eagle Ridge Mountain, well inside the HOA boundary, but on land that did not show up on any public development plat.
He pulled out a series of aerial photographs taken from a small fixedwing aircraft over the last 22 months. They showed a steadily growing mound of demolition debris, construction waste, drywall, painted lumber, old asphalt, PVC piping. The mound had grown from about half an acre to almost 3 acres over 22 months. The fill was sitting in the headwater seep that fed Sourwood Creek. Pernell tapped the map.
Mr. Carver, that hollow is an unpermitted class 3 construction and demolition landfill. Under the North Carolina Solid Waste Management Act, you cannot dispose of any construction or demolition waste outside a permitted facility. Roland Hulcom is dumping material from Atlanta tearown jobs in that hollow. He is running it across your bridge. He is charging contractors a tipping fee to bring it to him.