Clearing Land — Industrial Style

In real life, unlike in the adventure and crime novels I’ve written and read, things don’t change overnight, and a day is not crammed with significant decisions. Except when change takes over.

In January 2021, I shifted from “stuck” on what to do after Dave’s death, to owning a trash-strewn parcel of land less than a quarter mile up the ridge from the Huge House that Dave and I had bought and transformed 15 years earlier. After two years spent tracking down the parcel’s actual owner — an anonymous finance company in a Southern state — suddenly I’d found the right office and phone number, made an offer, heard it accepted, and signed the papers, dividing up the property with my younger son and his wife: They’d own the linked sugarwoods (maple trees), and I gave them a 30-year agricultural lease on the field around my homestead-to-be. And I’d own the “house” lot.

But there wasn’t a house yet.

My older friend D*, with his expertise in structures, confirmed that the collapsing mobile home on the land had no cellar, had rotted floors, couldn’t be salvaged. Plus we’d found a buried fuel-oil tank under the structure.

“You’ll have to hire Dale C,” my friend pronounced. “He’s the only one around certified to deal with potential hazardous waste, like that oil tank and the soil around it may be.”