When the register of deeds came back on the line, she said, Mrs. Brunner, whoever drew that companys map does not know where your fence actually is, because the survey on this 1956 page moves your property line a full two hundred feet north of where they think it sits.
The wind man spread his map on Verns kitchen table and called me the hole in the middle, told me theyd run the transmission line along my fence either way and my ground would not be worth a nickel to anybody but them.
He did not know what Vern dog-eared in the abstract of title.
The 1956 page my husband marked and never explained held a corrected survey and a recorded strip that means the land the wind company drew their transmission corridor across is not the edge of my field, it is inside it, two hundred feet of ground that is legally mine and that their whole route depends on crossing.
Vern kept that abstract in the gun cabinet and dog-eared the 1956 page for a reason. When I laid the companys map beside it, his line and their line did not match, not by a little, and the register of deeds confirmed it: their corridor ran straight through land the county records show as mine.
A transmission line cannot cross ground you do not have the rights to, and the neighbors leases do not cover my two hundred feet. I was not the hole in the middle. I was holding the strip their project could not go around, and Vern recorded the proof seventy years ago.
I took the abstract to a lawyer in Hays, who checked it against the county records and smiled, and said the company would be rerouting or renegotiating, and either way they would be doing it on my terms now, not theirs.
When the wind man came back for his map and his yes, I did not argue. I handed him the 1956 survey and the register of deeds confirmation and I said, you left me the map to look at, so I looked. Your line runs two hundred feet inside my field. You can move your corridor, or you can talk to my lawyer about paying me properly, but you will not be running anything along a fence that is not where you think it is.
He folded his map up a good deal slower than he unfolded it. The Schmidt boys still lease my ground, and the wheat still comes in gold every July.
Nobodys going to fight a wind farm over one old ladys wheat, he told me. This one old lady did not have to fight. Vern did it for her in 1956, with a corrected survey and a dog-eared page, and I stood at the edge of that gold field this July and told him so out loud.