An obsession with land acquisition is an easy fixation to catch when you live in an area filled with beautiful vistas such as the southwestern mountains of Virginia. I forget that the enjoyment of what I am seeing is what is important, and I start imagining myself owning what I am seeing. I convince myself that I have to own the land in order to enjoy the land.
Before Land Came Boats
Before the beautiful scenery of southwestern Virginia there were boats—large live-aboard pleasure boats. Over many years I became fixated on many large boats, most of which I could not afford, but that didn’t matter. I spent a lot of time thinking about them anyway. These were boats that caught my eye along the coast of New Jersey, along the mid coast of Maine, and in Maryland and Virginia on Chesapeake Bay. Sometimes they were pure products of my imagination, that is, they were boats I conceived of, designed and even drew on paper. I saw myself living on these real and imagined boats, doing maintenance on them, and driving them on calm and challenging seas.
The fact is that over many years, I did own a very small number of relatively large pleasure boats, and I now have scores of memories to show for it—many of them happy, but a few of them the raw material for nightmares. For example, in the summer of 1991, I once took our 43-foot live-aboard trawler with a round, roll-prone hull past the Cape Charles Lighthouse out in the ocean into 10-foot waves knowing that small boat advisories had been issued by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Out into the Ocean
On a planned circuit of the Delmarva (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) Peninsula, we had gotten tired of being tied up day after day in a marina in the town of Cape Charles while waiting for the weather to clear. Fortunately, after about a half hour of crashing through the waves in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel complex we reached much calmer seas further off shore, and we were able to reach our next port of call by ocean of Wachapreague, Virginia, without incident.
My new preoccupation with land ownership has a practical side, and it also comes with a further complication. In January my wife and I traveled to Evansville in southern Indiana to get an unusual breed of dog, a girl puppy just 11 weeks old at the time, whom we named Cassie Rose. Cassie Rose is a Portuguese Water Dog or PWD, and true to her breed, she loves water. She loves to swim. Hence my obsession with land has not just been with land per se but with land with water on it such as a creek or stream.
No Personal Watering Hole
I should point out that we already live on a piece of land that is not exactly tiny, not anyway in comparison with what is common in metropolitan areas. And we have beautiful mountain views in two directions. What we don’t have is unlimited land for Cassie Rose to work off her youthful energy, and we don’t have water. We don’t have anything that we can consider Cassie Rose’s very own swimming hole.
What are we going to do about this deficit in our lives? With great difficulty we’ve decided to do absolutely nothing about it. We’ve decided that now is not the time to be adding to our indebtedness or to be sacrificing our limited liquid assets. Cassie Rose is just going to have to make due with running around on other people’s land and jumping into other people’s streams, creeks or ponds.
Hence we’ll be walking away from the creek-front property less than 10 miles from our home that became our obsession for awhile. Creek-front property, I should add, that we also started to worry might be in a flood hazard zone.
Meanwhile I’ll be working at the restoration of the steadiness of mind and better balance of mental faculties that was mine before this latest land obsession took hold of me. Good luck to me.
Write to the author at stephen. saft@gmail.com.
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