The Hudson Road Chronicles

The first thing you should know about the deer skull is that it looks fantastic on a Jeep. The second thing is that it was never going to look fantastic anywhere else, and that this was settled quickly.

It started innocently. The leaves are turning, a good number of them are already letting go, and for the first time since the keys changed hands we left the house on purpose to go see what we actually own. Thirty acres is a lot of land to have never seen the back half of.

Here is what fall does for a first-year landowner: it takes down the green walls. Things that were impenetrable jungle in August turn out to be clearings, tree lines, and paths. Sightlines appear. In a couple of spots we got the distinct feeling of being introduced to things the property had been keeping from us (see also: the Bonus Building).

Out on one of those newly visible paths, we found a deer skull with the antlers still attached, weathered white and in very respectable shape. Tony immediately suggested it become a decoration for the farmhouse. Nola’s ruling was swift, and, as the record shows, complete:

There was no appeal process. For the sake of transparency, it was not close.

So it went on the Jeep instead, where it sits between the grille and the winch like it came with the trim package. And honestly? It works. The Jeep was already wearing a Hi-Lift jack on the hood, red recovery shackles, and a winch rated for 12,000 pounds. The skull just finishes the sentence: this vehicle lives somewhere with consequences.

The part where the Jeep pays for it

The Jeep’s time in the sun lasted until the next path.

As it turns out, newly revealed paths come in two sizes: paths a Jeep can use, and paths a Jeep believes it can use. We have now met both, courtesy of Tony, who was driving when the tree attacked. The tree, for the record, did not move.

The mirror came out of the encounter worse than it went in. It is now dangling from the door like it’s hoping for a ride home. A replacement is on order. Next time a new path shows up, someone will walk it first. That someone has not been selected, though Tony has been informally disqualified.

Meanwhile, the grown-up part

On the land development side, we’re collecting bids from contractors to trench water and electric out to the new build sites, and to extend the driveway out there too. For anyone new to this: the build sites are a good distance from the house and the road, so everything the new homes need (power, water, a way to drive there) has to travel. Trenching means digging a long, narrow ditch, laying the lines in it, and burying them deep enough that winter doesn’t get a vote.

It’s all pretty straightforward, with one exception: the rock.

Nobody can give us a confirmed price, because there might be rock down there. And nobody will know whether there’s rock, or how much, until someone starts digging. But the digging can’t start until we pick a bid, and we can’t pick a bid without a confirmed price.

Congratulations, we have invented Schrödinger’s Rock. It both exists and doesn’t exist, and it will remain in that state until somebody opens the trench.

This matters more than it sounds. Dirt is cheap and fast to dig. Rock is slow, needs heavier equipment, and costs more per foot, and the whole problem is that nobody can say how many feet. In a household where the natural response to uncertainty is to build a spreadsheet, it is humbling to discover a variable you cannot spreadsheet because no one has seen it.

The usual ways around this, as far as I can tell, are to price the job as if it’s all dirt with an agreed add-on if rock shows up, to set an allowance for it up front, or to probe the route ahead of time to get a better idea what’s down there. Which way we go is still being worked out. And if you ever find yourself digging on your own land, call 811 first so the utilities you do know about don’t become a surprise too.

So that’s where things stand: a skull on the Jeep, a mirror on order, and a rock that may or may not be somewhere beneath us. The leaves will keep falling, which means more paths, which means more opportunities. Stand by for updates.