We have arrived at part 3 of this magnificent story about our war with the neighbors. I need to set the stage so folks reading this can visualize everything that happened.
    My family moved to this country location because we were a family of five, my dad was now making good money and they wanted a bigger yard that we could play in. My parents bought a ranch style house that sat on an acre and a quarter. The quarter acre part of the yard was behind our neighbor’s house. So it formed an “L” shape. Our neighbor had, if I remember correctly, half an acre of land. When we moved in, the quarter acre was plowed dirt and used as a garden. We maintained our own quarter acre garden in that spot and our neighbor had a garden that was almost the same size that butted against our garden. Their garden was directly behind their house. There was a large and old tree that divided our yards. It was right between the two gardens and they had pointed it out to us that the tree was on the lot line.
    This is 1973ish when we moved into that house and it’s usually recommended that you get your lot surveyed when you buy a house, but my parents just moved from a city residence where we had a small rectangular plot that was identical to everyone down the street. Nobody hired a surveyor. They just trusted the lines, which in the city had chain-link fences on them. In the country, there was so much room. Oh, there was room to spread out. No fences were really necessary.
    Behind our house was nothing but undeveloped land. Our road was a dirt road that connected between two black-top roads. Hardly a car traveled down that road. It was great for kids to ride bikes, sled in the winter, hike behind the house, and so on.
    All right, back to the war…
    Our neighbor had snowmobiles, which was no big deal. Except the older boys got bored in the winter because they rode those things from sunup to sundown on the weekends and vacation days. Then they took the snowmobiles out on weeknights until dark, every night. Now that there was a war going on, they just had to taunt their neighbor, who they had suddenly taken a dislike for. They had a habit of driving their snowmobiles back and forth across our yard, doing circles and just causing a lot of noise. My parents just ignored them, for the most part. Dad was not happy about it though. He was worried that one of his kids would get run over by these ruffians. Not me so much, but my baby sister, who was 6 years younger than me or my brother who was 3 years younger.
    Anyway, Spring came and my parents made an investment. They decided to put up a rail fence. The materials arrived by Mack truck and my dad went to the hardware store and rented a post hole digger and a skinning knife for the rails. That’s a long blade with two handles on the end that you use to take the bark off the rails. Rails with bark on them were cheaper than the stripped ones and my dad was tight with his dollar. Besides, he had a whole family of free laborers.
    I have to back up a bit, because I forgot to mention the surveyor. You see, my parents did their research. I’m not sure how they knew about all of this, but they hired a man to come out and survey the lot. He put little flags at the corners of our lot and it was pretty much as we expected. Except one tiny little problem. That old tree, was not on the lot line. In fact, that tree was in the middle of our property. A good chunk of the neighbor’s garden was actually our land. This survey happened on the week before a holiday. The guy that surveyed our land lived in a house on the black-top road around the corner from us. I didn’t know that at the time, but I rode the school bus with their daughter who was in sixth grade while I was in seventh. Just keep that in mind.
    Apparently the neighbors were gone for the long holiday weekend when the materials arrived. In fact, I think they went to Florida for the long weekend or maybe a week and missed the surveyor’s result and our little working party. That was kind of gratuitous, because it meant that we could at least get part of the fence up before they got back.
    Dad drilled holes in the fence posts with a large augur bit that he bought, then used a chisel to make it oval shaped. Then he used his hatchet to make the ends of the rails into something with flat sides so they would fit the holes. I spent a lot of time skinning the bark off rails, though I remember switching off with my brother.
    Then the difficult task of putting the poles in the ground began. Dad wanted to start at the corner that divided our gardens because he wanted to send a message that he wasn’t messing around. He dug the corner post first. It was the most difficult because it had holes drilled into it for two different directions which were staggered.
    My dad measured six inches in from the flag on both directions. He told us that to make sure the fence was legally ours, it would have to be centered six inches inside of the lot line. So he made sure of that and gave it a little extra. Otherwise, the neighbors would own half of the fence automatically and have the legal right to rip it out. Which I’m sure they would have done.
    Dad dug for some time with the hole digger before hitting a rock. He used a steel rod and a shovel to remove any large rocks that he ran into. He knew he had to bury them a certain distance down, so he kept measuring and removing rocks. Then he hit a large rock. Larger than the hole he dug, so he used the shovel to dig the hole bigger to remove the rock. It took him hours to get that rock out. It turned out that the rock was a large flattened but smooth and round rock. The property line marker that people in the 1800’s and early 1900’s used to use. That was verification that the surveyor had done his job right.
    After the first fence post went in, the next one went in fast. Then we did the line between our gardens and some of the fence down the side of the yards between our house and the neighbor’s house. That was all we could do before it was getting dark and it was the last day of vacation before we had to go back to school.
    We ate dinner and heard the neighbor’s vehicle pull up in the driveway. Everyone dropped their fork and went to the back picture window in the dining room. Oh, this was a sight to behold. It took a few minutes for them to discover that an alien had put some sort of monolith on what they assumed was their property. But, sure enough, the youngest boy ran out the back of their house and stopped in front of the corner of the fence. He just stood there staring at the fence. My mom and dad laughed so hard.
    The next day, I was on the bus and the youngest kid told me that his dad told him that the surveyor made a mistake. I shrugged it off. Good luck. Maybe they could hire a lawyer or something. When I got home, I relayed that message. That’s when my mom told me that I could relay to him that the surveyor was Mr. X. Whoever that was (too many years since we lived there to remember their names). The next day, I waited until I was on the bus. I made sure to sit near the kid so I could relay mom’s message to him, but I waited until the surveyor’s daughter had entered the bus and sat down. Then I told him who had surveyed our property and that his parents could sue him if they so felt inclined. I said it loud enough for the girl to hear me. I distinctly remember seeing her glance at me. Maybe she heard it, maybe not. But I’m sure the neighbor didn’t bring a lawsuit against anyone about the property line. I suspect they may have gone to the effort of getting the records from the county and discovered they had been wrong all along or maybe they knew and were angry that the people who bought the acre and a quarter next to them found out. Who can say?
    Needless to say, we finished that fence. It wrapped around the entire lot except for the front between the road and our yard. My parents ran out of fencing and vowed to finish it the next year when they had the money. If needed.
    Now, the neighbor kids, who thought they were cute, drove their snowmobiles into the front yard the next winter. They couldn’t easily get to the back yard and dad probably would have trapped them in the back if they had tried (cement blocks anyone?). The side between our house and the fence was pretty narrow.
    Dad managed to get a block from an old scrapped piano. Not sure where he found it but one of his friends at work had “donated” it to him. It was a large chunk of wood with the posts sticking up that is normally attached to the inside of the piano. The piano wires would attach to each post. Well, dad threw that thing in the ditch hoping the catch the tracks of a snowmobile. I think the snow ended up covering it and he had to haul it to the dump in the spring with no entertaining broken snowmobile in the front yard. The neighbor kids probably never knew about that little trap. That was too bad.
    They only spun through our front yard a few times. Probably gave up because no person shaking their fist would come out of our house and yell at them. My dad didn’t yell at kids to get off his lawn, he was much more devious.