Neighbors and Nature, Oh Deer

My parent’s house had a small shallow brook in the backyard. When I was young, I loved everything about it; playing alongside it, which, who are we kidding, often led to playing in it, and finding and watching all the little brook creatures. I still feel equal parts remorse and bewilderment about the salamander I snuck into my bedroom that escaped. I was so afraid every time we cleaned. I figured my options were either feeling sad and guilty if I found its little dried-out body, or I’d be in trouble if Mom found it. Lose-lose. But it never turned up. We didn’t have any other pets that might have treated him as a snack, so that doesn’t explain it, and there was a lengthy list of other things of mine discovered when my parents had the ducts professionally cleaned, but no salamander body. I remain mystified.

How much brook we had was directly proportional to how much rain we had. I, personally, was quite excited by all the water I had to play in when Hurricane Agnes blew through, but most property owners were dismayed by how much flooding and property damage they had, and the town decided to bury the stream in a pipe to prevent it from happening again. Total childhood tragedy. I wonder what it says about me that the house I live in now is next to a big, beautiful creek.

Across the creek from me is the Cornell Plantations, comprised of acres and acres of forest, natural areas, and gardens. Actually, to be clear, The Plantations isn’t just across the creek. It encompasses a tiny sliver of land a few feet past the water on my side of the creek too, which I guess, technically, makes Cornell University my next-door neighbor.

One dreary fall day my whole house shook, and I heard a tremendous crash. A huge limb had fallen out of the neighbor’s tree onto my yard. Only it wasn’t really the neighbor’s tree, it was on that little slice of Cornell land. I wanted someone to cut up and remove the limb, but more importantly, I thought an arborist should look at the tree. It had previously been dropping smaller tree bits pretty consistently. I was always picking up sticks and now that bigger things were falling out of it, it seemed like a safety concern.

I was in a tough position because my neighbor, rightfully, didn’t want to take ownership or bear any financial burden, but he also didn’t want me to contact Cornell about it. He was afraid I would remind them that they owned the land, and they would want to develop it. Specifically, he was concerned they would build a nuclear reactor there. Mind you, I’m talking about 5 or 8 feet of land, depending on how high the water is. I didn’t get much traction arguing the unlikelihood of that, but I did shamelessly appeal to his emotions by saying something along the lines of “I see your grandkids love to play in your backyard. I’d hate to see anything happen to them…” Yes, I’m horrible, but it worked; I was greenlighted to call the university. After asking them what they might be able to do about the tree, I was surprised by their answer, which was they own so much land in and around Ithaca they couldn’t begin to keep track of it, so they needed to research ownership of that particular piece of property. They also indicated they have different grounds maintenance departments, depending on whether it’s for land on campus or off. I was somehow unable to convince them over the phone that my backyard was not on campus, so they indicated they’d have to send several different people out to investigate.

The first person represented off-campus grounds. He called me at work and asked if I could come home to meet him and point out the tree to him. I said I’d head over, but if he wanted to get started without me, it was the tree with dead branches all around it. Sometimes I accidentally say what I’m thinking out loud. I regrouped and had a nice conversation with the gentleman once we met at the foot of the tree. I felt like my case was made for me as he looked up and said “I feel like we should move somewhere else. It doesn’t look safe to stand here.” He agreed he was probably the person to do the work, if there was a way to prove it was their land, but I was still going to need a visit from the other departments to make sure they were in agreement.

Representative #2 was from the on-campus division. He specifically came out to look for any signs of “an academic presence” which would make the project his. As tempting as it was to meet with him and tell him I saw a group of young people with books go into my shed for an hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I just stayed at the office that day and let him walk around my yard solo.

My third and final visitor (I felt like Scrooge) was from some sort of real estate/asset management department. Her job was to determine if they did or did not own the land. She wasn’t having much luck with the university records. Here’s where my past summer job at a civil engineering and surveying firm came in handy. I went down to town hall, pulled the tax map for my neighborhood, and made a copy for 25 cents. That proved Cornell owned the land. They came out and cut the tree down.

The following year, I was outside doing spring cleanup in my yard. I couldn’t help but notice that the far section of my yard had a serious funk. It smelled bad. Very bad. Like death. I looked down the bank towards the creek and discovered a large buck had died there. Dread washed over me. What was I going to do about that? I had a friend who’d had a deer problem at his house, so he’d recently installed a fence. He and his family had gone away on vacation and while they were gone, a deer jumped over the fence into their yard, where it became trapped and died. They returned home to that unpleasant surprise and contacted the town about what to do with it. They told him if he could get it to the curb, they would take it away. I had laughed heartily when he described the horrors of dragging a dead deer across his lawn with its antlers constantly getting stuck along the way, but now that I was imagining myself doing it, it wasn’t a bit funny. And how was I going to lug it up the steep creek bank? Ugh. And then I remembered! That was Cornell land and I’d just proven it.

I called them up and to their huge credit, they came right over to deal with it. But instead of digging a hole and burying the deer, they left it where it lay and placed a huge mound of dirt and lye on top of it. I didn’t have a problem with that, but what was jarring was the deer’s antlers, which stuck straight up out of the pile. Depending on your mood, it was funny, gross, or pitiful. Eventually, the man who mowed my lawn spotted them and asked if he could have them. When I first hired him, he’d given me a very reasonable weekly quote. After a week or two he made an unexpected stop at my house. He said he’d been thinking about it, and he’d asked for too much and wanted to lower his fee to $20 a week, so giving him antlers I didn’t want from a dead thing in the backyard seemed like the very least I could do. It’s good to be neighborly.