The cold that woke me that January morning was not the gradual kind. It was not the slow chill of a furnace cycling down overnight or a window left cracked. It kicked the door in. One moment I was asleep, the next I was sitting upright in the dark with forty-two degrees registering on the trailer thermometer and the particular silence that replaces the hum of a working heater.
I pulled on my boots and my coat and stepped outside, and my breath turned to steam and I looked at my electric meter and saw the tag. Big and red, zip-tied to the conduit with the efficiency of someone who had done this before and expected no argument. Violation of winter aesthetic compliance. Fine: nine hundred dollars. Remove non-conforming dwelling within fourteen days.
Wind chill at negative eighteen. The meter pulled. The tag flapping in the dark like something that found the situation amusing.
My name is Cole Mercer. I am thirty-six years old, a licensed electrician, and the third generation of my family to own a forty-three acre parcel of scrub pine and frozen high-country dirt just outside Bozeman. My grandfather, Ray Mercer, bought the land in 1959 when it was sagebrush and sky and nothing else for a quarter mile in any direction. My father grew up on it. I grew up on it. I am currently building a house on it the slow way, which means cash, which means wiring it myself, which means I live in a fifth-wheel trailer parked on my own property while the house goes up room by room at the pace my bank account allows. This arrangement is not glamorous. It is also nobody else’s business.
The subdivision that now surrounds three sides of my property was not there when my grandfather ran cattle on this ground. The stone monument sign at the gated entrance, the architectural review committee, the heated driveways and the three-car garages and the windows glowing like magazine covers every winter night, all of that came later, most of it within the past decade. The HOA had expanded its boundary influence a few years back through what my attorney would later describe as some creative legal gymnastics, annexing adjacent parcels and bringing them under community oversight. That was their phrase. Community oversight. My grandfather’s parcel came along for the ride whether we wanted it to or not, which we did not, and which no one had asked us about.
