She didn't wave. She didn't even glance in my direction. She just drove through my property like it was a toll road she'd already paid for. Her dust cloud covered my flatbed, my fence, and the first three rows of soybeans along the road edge. The beans were 6 inches tall and just starting to set pods.
By the time the dust settled, they looked like they'd been spray painted. That afternoon, I drove to Ridgewood Estates. I knocked on Diane's door. She answered in yoga pants and a glass of white wine, even though it was 2:00 in the afternoon. "Diane, people from your subdivision are driving through my farm.
It needs to stop." She leaned against the door frame. "Oh, honey, it's just a dirt road. Nobody's hurting anything." "You're running over my crops.
You're creating ruts that damage my equipment. My cattle hear the traffic and they're breaking fence." Nate, can I call you Nate? It's a quarter mile shortcut that saves people 11 minutes. You really want to be the neighbor who makes a hundred families drive an extra 22 minutes a day?
"It's my property." "It's a dirt road." She took a sip of wine. "Relax." Behind her, I could see a decorative wooden sign hanging in her entryway that said, "Kindness is free.
Sprinkle that stuff everywhere." She was standing on the porch of a house she'd owned for 5 months, telling a third generation farmer to relax about his own land. The next Monday, I put up signs, four of them. Professional-grade aluminum bolted to pressure-treated posts that I set in concrete. White background, red letters.
Private property, no trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted. I placed one at the south gate where the road met County Road 118, one at the north fence line near Ridgewood, and two along the road itself, spaced evenly, impossible to miss. Tuesday morning, the traffic continued. Every car that passed my signs did so at full speed, without slowing, without hesitation.
11 vehicles between 6:30 and 7:45. Diane's Escalade was the 7th. Wednesday morning, the Southgate sign was gone, not knocked over, removed. The bolts had been unscrewed and the sign taken. The concrete post was still standing, naked and pointless.
Thursday morning, the north fence sign was gone, too. I replaced them. Heavier posts, carriage bolts instead of hex bolts. I added two more signs for good measure, six total. I also added a camera, a stealth cam trail camera mounted on a fence post 30 yards from the south gate, aimed at the road entrance, motion-activated, timestamped with a 32GB memory card.
Friday morning, four signs were still standing. The two closest to Ridgewood were gone, and the trail camera had captured at 5:47 a.m. a figure in a pink hoodie and white sneakers unscrewing the signs with a cordless drill and loading them into the back of a white Cadillac Escalade. Diane Prescott, the woman whose Facebook bio said, "Warrior for standards, stealing my signs in the dark like a teenager swiping yard decorations on Halloween night. the HOA president of 112-home subdivision creeping onto my property before dawn to remove legal postings with a DeWalt 20-volt drill. The same