I had some land down in the South of Trinidad that, for a while, was a big part of my life. It caused me to stretch myself in new ways, and it almost always spread me thin with dealing with people nearby because some of those people were intent on expanding their own horizons with my land.
The fact is that they already had, for I had come by it through inheritance – an inheritance, strangely, that I did not want. My father was focused on the people in very adversarial ways, which wasn’t my style – people know this now, but they did not know that then. So, whenever I was around, there was some distrust, but I minded my business, dealt with people honestly even when they didn’t deal with me honestly, and accepted that they were smarter than me so that they would teach me. That worked out well, but it was a strain. Every time someone spoke with me, they seemed to want something, or were angling at something, or were trying to get me on their side against someone else.
That was tiresome.
To make matters worse, family members that had land adjoining were more focused on being adversarial with people down in that area which gave me even more headaches. People would come to me for advice once they got to know me – who to talk to, etc, and I guided them as best I could knowing full well that the people they would be dealing with wouldn’t understand them and wouldn’t want to. I would not say that I understood them myself, but I did understand that I didn’t understand them that well and that it was important to do so. People, after all, are pretty much the same everywhere I had found in my travels.
People need food, shelter, and a place to raise their children safely – and maybe leave something behind for their children.
All of that was troublesome to me. I had gotten good at dealing with people, but my true joy was going out beyond where civilization was on my land, just me, my 4×4, and the ground beneath my feet. I would escape there, sometimes moving things around, sometimes planting things, sometimes just sitting on the tailgate with my feet dangling. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was something I could work with.
I made my own trails, then with license from family members to simply tell them what I saw if I saw encroachment, and with that I drove over much land, making paths where maybe there were paths before but overgrown. The people who saw me out there from a distance thought highly of my vehicles, which I did maintain well, but they didn’t realize it wasn’t the vehicles but the driver. The price for getting stuck was a shovel or a long walk to someone with a tractor – a price which I avoided all but 3 times in a decade.
When I got tired of people, I would just drop the pickup in range and go off into the bush. If I got really dirty, I’d go bathe in one of the ponds. People would comment that I came out of the bush cleaner than when I went in, and there were those that did not wish me well that wanted to follow me but could not. I was unpredictable, and those that had vehicles that were 4×4 did not follow my trails, because I pushed the vehicle to do things that they didn’t.
In the later years, after the government ran a highway through the land and screwed up the drainage, I continued this course but found that the highway had screwed up the drainage and parts of the land had become impassable. I would drive to those boundaries, where almost no one could follow, and sit there on the tailgate, looking around and accepting the truth of the matter.
I was there too late. There was much I could have done had I had the land a decade sooner, or two decades sooner. These were not things of industry and commerce, really, but simply making the place nicer. I hadn’t even been told about the land until the turn of the millennium, though it was owned by the family since 1973. Well, at least mortgaged. No one thought to tell me.
It wasn’t something I was angry or sad about. The realization that I could not do the things I wanted to because I was there too late was not something new. In the emergency room, we saw people too late. In the workshop, we saw equipment too late. So many things I saw too late, so many things that had I just been there a little sooner I could have done more.
Sometimes, things are just too late – and we move on. If we don’t, and we linger on what was already too late, we’ll likely be too late for something else. It’s triage. You do what you can and you move on.
