Walt, there's a crew back there tearing your fence out. Whole thing, they've already got 200 ft down. I told him to call the Orangeburg County Sheriff's Office immediately and report a trespass and property destruction in progress. He did. By the time a deputy arrived though, the crew had already ripped out nearly 400 ft of cedar panel and posts.
And worse, they'd torn the buried hardware cloth skirt straight out of the ground with an excavator bucket, leaving open trenches along the boundary line like fresh wounds in the soil. Curtis sent me photographs. I still have them. Splintered cedar stacked in a pile like kindling. 6x6 posts snapped clean at the base.
Concrete footings still clinging to the broken wood and running the length of what used to be my fence line. An open channel of disturbed earth root mat exposed, leading in an unbroken line straight from the cypress marsh into 41 manicured backyards. But here's the detail that still makes my blood pressure tick up when I think about it. Curtis told me that while the crew was still working, Denise walked the length of the demolished fence with her phone held out in front of her shooting a panoramic video. She narrated it like a home renovation reveal.
"And just like that," she said on camera. Curtis heard her clearly. "The lake is back. Isn't it gorgeous?" She posted it to the neighborhood Facebook group within the hour, captioned, "Sighteline restoration complete.
Your lake view is officially back, Heron Point. You're welcome." 27 likes before sunset. I counted them later once everything else had happened because I wanted to remember exactly how many people applauded the demolition of the only thing keeping venomous snakes out of their children's backyards. I drove home from Asheville the next morning, 8 hours with Carol quiet beside me, both of us thinking the same thing without saying it out loud.
The barrier I'd spent four months building, the barrier that had kept an entire ecosystem exactly where it belonged for nine peaceful years was gone, and the marsh behind my property didn't know or care whose backyard came next. When I got home, I walked the full length of what used to be my fence line. The buried skirt was the worst part. The excavator bucket had torn it out in long, ragged strips, pulling the galvanized mesh free of the ground and flipping it over like old carpet. The 12-inch trench I dug by hand was now a shallow, continuous channel of loose soil.
A perfect, unobstructed runway from the marsh straight into the subdivision. A fence can be rebuilt, but a disrupted barrier, even for a few weeks, changes the equation. Snakes that discover a new travel route don't forget it. They lay down scent trails that other snakes follow. It's not a faucet you turn off and on.
It's a highway, and once it's open, traffic starts flowing. Carol was standing at the screen door when I walked back. She didn't ask what I'd seen. All she said was, "How long?" I told her the truth.
"Days, maybe a week." I want to be honest with you. I wasn't surprised by what happened next. I was a field biologist for 34 years. I knew almost to the week how long it would take.