I was surprised by many things when I moved to the country, one of the biggest surprises was that I found people in rural life to be the most tolerant people I had ever been around. It wasn’t that they agreed with the politics of everybody else, or approved of the different lifestyles of the people fleeing the cities for a different kind of life here. The area in which I live is rock-ribbed conservative and Republican. People here are religious and traditional, they don’t like government much and wish it would get out of their hair, they are not big on change.

But you can do whatever you want to do on your own land, and it is nobody’s business but yours.

There is this bedrock ideology here that I came to appreciate and respect – a great respect for property, for boundaries. Some of my gay friends have told me they felt much more comfortable moving up to the country in the 80’s and 90’s than they ever felt in Brooklyn or Queens. No one ever bothered them.

So we were surprised to learn that a neighbor had been taking his four-wheeler onto the farm’s beautiful path into the woods and racing back and forth at high speeds. We saw the tracks when we came to check on the farm, but we didn’t know who they belonged to. We’ve since found out. This neighbor not only came onto our property every morning, he told some of our other neighbors that he had permission to dig out a new trail at the edge of the path so he could connect to another property. He was quite huffy and indignant at the idea he couldn’t ride there any more.

This was pretty shocking to me. You don’t go on another person’s land without permission, not to hunt, walk, fish and certainly not to ride a four-wheeler and cut new trails. We are especially concerned because a new family is moving into the farm and they have three children who will doubtless be exploring the paths (they are already deeply into the story of Alexander the ghost). So Maria and I went up to the farm to post a “No Trespassing” sign, our first and stretch a nylon rope across the path.

It felt good to be protecting our property. I will look for this neighbor and ask him what he meant by coming onto our land and racing his four-wheeler through our woods without permission. This is a rural value I have embraced. I respect other people’s property, I insist they respect mine.