Yet another reason my brother is cool...

My brother went back to where we used to live today, to hike about and potentially catch a salmon and get the eggs from it for our Russian guests. At any rate, he and his girlfriend decided to follow the creek back out (I hate it when he does that, but it figures. He loves it. Nutcase.) Anyway, they were traipsing along when they suddenly come upon this fellow standing on the bank with a shotgun over his shoulder and just staring at them. As they draw closer, they are informed that they are trespassing.

It's really kinda hard to find a better way to piss off anyone in our family by this point. After living back there for years and years, in fact, being the ONLY ones to have lived there longer than a month at a time, much less every day of the year like we did, the last thing you want is some podunk two bit individual trying to educate you what lies where. We know, thank you very much, intimately and well, and we belong here more than you're going to when you die and your body gets entombed on your property.

Alex replied that technically, they were NOT trespassing. This is true - you can walk in streams wherever you wish around here, because you can navigate waterways. And they were smack dab in the middle of the creek.

The fellow replies that is only true for navigable waterways, by which I can only assume he means ones on which you may travel by boat, or hovercraft, or perhaps scuba gear. And, he further explained, deception creek had not ever been a navigable waterway.

I have zero clue if this is true, but when Jen was relating this to me, I winced, because I knew that was an excellent way to make Alex mad. And you see, that is something that, unless you know him quite well and don't CARE already, only really stupid people do. Alex projects an aura of extreme geniality and ultra niceness, which is true, up to a point. He also houses a nuclear generator of rage.

So my brother goes on to explain that we had lived there for many years, which property we had owned, and that he had been down that creek almost every day... and that he wasn't about to stop. All delivered in perfectly modulated english with the slightest hint that he was barely under control. I wasn't there, but I KNOW that voice. Oh yes.

"Well, I've been here since 1952 and I've never heard of you."

Oh man, at this point, I would have launched into a diatribe that perhaps he hadn't really been here longer than a few days since 1952 since I had been on that friggen trial every day for fifteen years. My brother responded otherwise.

"Well?"

And that was it. And then he simply stared at this fellow. So here they were, in the middle of the woods, standing in the creek, in an angry staring match with a fellow ready, apparently ,to defend his property to the death using his shotgun.

Ahh, I can see it now. The beetled brows. The clenched jaw, the air of expectation, and the seething, smoldering, bubbling, lava like anger simply waiting to erupt out of Alex eyes and leap across the few yards remaining to incenerate this unfortunate moron.

Apparently, the fellow got the message, because after several minutes of increasingly uncomfortable silence, he backed down and started making excuses for his idiotic overreaction. His cabin had been robbed several times in the past, he explained. Well, this is true, since we actually know exactly where his cabin is, have talked to his father and brother (both equally annoyingly anal about their property) and have in fact kept tabs from time to time for them on anyone going in there to report later. But whatever. Excuses excuses. When you have property out this remote, you do get defensive about people simply traipsing over it, and for good reason. However, what you do NOT do is act like a jerk weed about it, but simply ask why someone is there. If their explanation is 'oh, just going down/up the creek' then you know what? Who cares? You let them on. We've done it many a time.

At any rate. It brought back memories of property line wrangling back in the day, and it gave me the warm fuzzies to know some jerkweed tried to bully the wrong person about. ::snickers::