Toward the Revolution

If the private state of my mind had any influence on things, it could be said that actually the assessors severely understated the value of my property, because in my mind its value goes far beyond any measurement in terms of dollars and cents. In fact, hardly a day goes by that I don't look at my house and land and marvel at how fortunate I am to have them. Sometimes I even think that it's a wonder that somebody, seeing this marvel, hasn't come along and tried to take it away from me by force.

I know that if I were suddenly one day to dig up diamonds in my creek, word of it wouldn't even have to get out. Instead the find would be instantly sensed by the nostrils of the greedy, which are more sensitive than those of a dog, and suddenly my days in this life would fall into seriously short supply. So maybe, I think in those unhinged moments, in the case of my property I am only protected by the fact that anyone passing by on the road above my house would get a perception not of a shockingly rare and priceless piece of property but instead only of a group of trees no more remarkable than any others that can be seen by the thousands and millions all over this county and over much of the Eastern Seaboard, while they would see, nestled among those trees and nearly the same color, only a shed-like structure that could be a house, with a brown tin roof and with its back to the road.

Because of all this regard I have often wondered – not to my mental benefit – what catastrophe could separate me from this property. Among the ones that easily come to mind, I have most often feared losing it through something going wrong with paying the taxes. And one of those “somethings” has to do with the taxes becoming too high to be paid by someone like me with limited means, and that is a threat to many others as well, in this county.

So we who came in on this road early with not many dollars and having accumulated not that many more in the years since, tend to get uneasy whenever we get new neighbors of two kinds: those who build bigger and more imposing houses than anything we have, and those who build nothing and are rarely seen because they choose to stay in the cities and have just bought the land as an investment or as the site just maybe of a home for when they retire or when they otherwise see fit to remove themselves to the country. In both these cases big money is paid for the houses that are built and for the land, prices far beyond anything we paid years ago, and that accounts for how high our adjoining land has come to be appraised.

A short distance down the road, our creek goes over a picturesque waterfall about 12 feet high. There, at the same time that I started building, a guy built himself a little cabin and did a very poor job of it. Years later another man bought his shack and replaced it with a veritable little palace, complete with a fancy overlook for the waterfall, though I had never thought it was a good site for building anything, because it is in a gorge where the sun doesn't hit at all in the winter. Yet he was able to sell that in his turn, for over 400 K. But, after putting out all that money, the new owners themselves have left their chateau standing empty, and meanwhile the price they paid is reflected in the value our land is supposed to have and consequently in the taxes that we must pay.

I've been wondering if this is the main way that land is redistributed in this country, from the less well off into the hands of the more well-off, who, unconsciously or not, can take the attitude that if you can't afford to live somewhere, then you shouldn't be there, and never mind that you were there first and have been there for a long time. I have the impression that you can see this kind of thing happening all over the country, and maybe it has taken place throughout history, an insidious kind of rapine that is only reversed by events as messy as revolutions.